Does Anyone Have A Job To Spare?
I’m still unsure about what I want to do with my life. I figured I’d get that question out of the way before people ask me about my future aspirations again.
Although I don’t have a solid idea of what I want to do yet, I’ve had the sudden urge to jump at the unrealistic career opportunities. You know, the jobs I don’t think I’m super qualified for or quite possibly ones I’ve never imagined myself in.
For now, I’ve completely discarded the idea of grad school—my commitment issues aren’t ready to go steady for seven years just yet—but I still want to do something. Then I realized, wait a minute! I have a writing portfolio and some sort of experience in the writing world. So why not give it a try?
I don’t know if it’s something I necessarily want to do for the rest of my life but it’s certainly something I want to continue doing right now. So, even though it’s a pain in the tuchus, I’ve gone on a job applying spree.
Usually, I hate the tedium of applying for jobs with a passion but I’ve come back to the realization that applying for writing jobs generally involves a writing test of some sort—and those are super fun. That must seem like an obvious statement but let’s now remember that I’ve only ever gotten paid to write once and it was a total fluke I even ended up there. If you didn’t know that, here’s a link to that blog post.
Anywho, one of the positions I applied for had a very interesting set of questions and, instead of taking them seriously (like a normal person), I decided to answer them my way. I mean, they said they wanted to get to know me so that doesn’t mean business professional does it?
Basically, this is what happens if you allowed me to apply for a job with interesting prompts. Actually stolen from a job I have not heard back from yet surprise, surprise.
What’s your personal story?
How does one describe their entire life’s story in a way that employers will either take pity on or be enraptured by? Though, I suppose I should first decide whether or not I wish to use pity as my weapon of choice like I did on my college applications.
If I were, I’d be tempted to begin with how I beat the odds of teen pregnancy—and the other statistics not in my favor—after being born to a single teen mother myself. Then again, I could jump to my brief stint in high school. Where I decided to graduate at sixteen and subsequently moved across the country for no reason aside from Florida was too hot to be suffered any longer.
Or I could change my direction, switching tools from pity to intrigue, and highlight the work I put into crafting an honors thesis based entirely on the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves at Oregon State University. I might even consider talking about when I went to volunteer in a remote village in Nepal but, then again, maybe not.
To be frank, I’m not sure what my own life’s story would be defined by. Let’s try something else then. If I were to die tomorrow, what would people say at my funeral?
They might recount my passionate involvement and soap-box moments with organizations centered around unity, viewpoint diversity, and mental health advocacy. Or maybe they’d pull quotes from my blog and discuss what my friend’s grandmother refers to as my “struggles at living life.”
I hope my mom is laughing. Mostly, I hope she’s still laughing about the time we spoke in terrible Jersey accents for three hours straight. Our sides bursting from my impromptu speech about, “Jerry pissing in the punch bowl.”
I haven’t died yet, so I can only guess what they’d say, but this is what I hope they would say. Suppose you were to really twist my arm, possibly convince me that a job is dependent upon my ability to tell my own story. In that case, I’d say that my story begins with a powerful woman that’s every-so-often punctuated by achievements that I can say to the world that they all, ultimately, belong to the same woman the story began with.
Or maybe I would treat this entire prompt like a college icebreaker: My name is Chloé; I’m originally from California, but I’ve moved over 20 times in my life already; I’m 21, and I just graduated with my HBS in Psychology, and my favorite thing to do on the weekend is read.
Describe something very boring and mundane in a funny and interesting way.
Looking for a job is like trying to order coffee.
Before you even get to the ordering part, you have to figure out where you want to go. You sort through your mental list of coffee shops, striking off ones that gave you food poisoning or possibly require a tetanus shot to enter as you go.
So you’re sitting in front of your laptop, trying to filter through your remaining options. You have the one with a functioning website but jobs that require far more experience than you can offer; another with a wide variety of jobs but minimal filtering ability; or that other 3rd party website with too many pop-up ads and vague job listings that are one step removed from craigslist but not close enough to be offering a healthy chicken in place of a 401k.
The thought of the knock-off craigslist is unappealing and, though you don’t have the experience, the inability to filter properly is a bigger turn-off than you once thought.
While you’re standing in line, ogling the absurd prices, you’re now confronted with the impossible at the place with the functioning website. Deciding what to order. Selecting a favorite from your rotation of delectable coffee orders is like picking a favorite child. Impossible when forced to choose and surprisingly easy when no one’s asking.
I could start with something safe, a job related to my major, or possibly something related to my work experience. Or maybe, disappoint my parents more than my liberal arts degree already does, and pursue something completely unrelated in a highly competitive field.
While you’re diving deep into your innermost aspirations, you’ve discovered that you’re now at the front of the line. Your first loan payment deadline is right around the corner, and your “unhealthy” addiction to Netflix is making your parents question their decision not to have you sign a rental agreement for your childhood bedroom.
A thought is forming in the front of your brain when social anxiety decides to kick it into high gear. With the approach of an important-looking business person behind you and 55 other applicants already waiting for their orders, you’re losing your focus. The business person is tapping their foot impatiently. Mimicking the ticking of a clock or possibly speaking in a unique form of business morse code. Angrily tapping out, “Speed up, you indecisive tween.”
Now you’re unsure if you should be offended by their interpretation of your age or that they nailed you as being indecisive. Instead, you panic and select this month’s special. Unrelated and highly competitive it is, sorry, mom.
The barista mishearing your name more than once is not inspiring much confidence, but the resume has been submitted, so there’s no going back now.
Then you wait. You wait, hoping for a timely response or, at the very least, that they won’t ghost you like that one person you tried to form a study group with in the 12th grade did.
“Cleo!” Close enough.
I take a sip. It’s not even close to what I wanted, but I guzzle it down anyways. It tastes awful. I’m confident the one who called me an indecisive tween got the job. Oh well, I guess I’ll try again tomorrow.
Yes, I am still watching, Netflix.
Argue against a position you believe in.
After several dead-end jobs in tumultuous office spaces, I’ve decided that diversity in the workplace is overrated. Diversity of all kinds in the office only ever comes to one single point, conflict.
When everyone in the workplace arrives from a different background, whether cultural, racial, or religious, nothing ever gets done. How could it, with the constant disagreement about the proper approach to problems or issues of “sensitivity.” Work has become a battleground for the sake of inclusion and diversity.
None of this would be an issue, though, if everyone looked, thought, and walked the same. So, for the sake of unity, I propose the creation of “Wonder Bread Workplaces.”
Think of how much we could accomplish if we never argued because we already agreed on everything. No one would ever be “wrong” because wrong doesn’t exist when everyone agrees on what’s right. You would never again have to worry about the sensitivities of others either because they, like you, find nothing offensive or off-limits. Unless we’re talking about that one thing, we all agreed not to talk about. Then that’s off-limits.
There would no longer be a need to enrich yourself culturally when someone of a different background joins the office because difference is a thing of the past. Nor would you need to investigate what they brought to the company potluck politely. Everyone’s going to bring potato salad anyways, and we all know what’s in potato salad.
In “Wonder Bread Workplaces,” we live and breathe by our motto, “Inclusion for one, and exclusion for all!” Together, we can banish workplace diversity and create a workplace that resembles a blank sheet of white paper, uniform and united.
What does a better world look like to you?
For the longest time, I’ve pondered versions of the world in which catastrophic climate change, dangerous levels of poverty, and horrific inequalities no longer haunted our history books or our present day.
In my head, I’ve employed imaginative solutions like secretly embezzling Bezos’ salary to end world hunger, Gates’ foundation to fight climate change, and tricking everyone into thinking that we like each other. I’ve even tried enlisting my nine-year-old sister to think of solutions, but her idea of becoming a universal dictator to fix the world was not much better than my list of crimes.
I turned to watching the news instead. Over the years, a compilation of distraught parents and helpless victims of the horrors of the world sobbed into aloof cameras and their viewers at home screaming, “I never thought this could happen to me!” Why?
We all exist here on this big blue marble. It would be a statistical impossibility to adamantly state, “This could never happen to me.” Never is a made-up word in the world of chance.
Then it hit me. The same victims sobbing on TV were probably, at one point, viewers of the very same thing. Helpless individuals crying out, begging for change, only for it to fall on deaf ears. People, to who this could never happen, are unable to empathize with the impossible.
The human race is a collective body motivated by self-interest. We’re the inverse three musketeers, one for one and none for all. For the most part, if we’re not directly affected by whatever the issue may be we make minimal efforts to offer support. Many are interested in providing sympathy, which often equates to half-hearted offers of thoughts and prayers and never much else. Unmotivated by the pain of others.
If our issue is self-interest then, my vision for a better world would begin with the universal development of empathy. If we could truly understand each other’s pain and suffering, if we recognized that though we might not go through the same experiences, maybe we could, at the very least, all become complicit. Maybe, just maybe, the one would begin to fight for the all. If the one only understood the all.