The Entry-Level Catch-22

The following was written by Tim Falkenberg, a friend of mine from Wheaton. He asked me if I would be willing to post this on my blog, since it fits thematically with some of what I've been writing the past few months. Another quintessential post-grad experience:

Currently I work two very different types of jobs: I intern for several companies, which is unpaid, and I do some part-time assistant work for one of those same companies, which is paid. Both of these jobs have their good and bad parts, but there’s a very interesting, and at times depressing, difference between the two in terms of what I do.

My intern work consists mostly of doing script coverage, which means I read film scripts that have been submitted to the company and write something in between a book report and a review of the script. Depending on the company, this is used for a couple of different things, but in the office where I also do assistant work it’s part of what my boss uses to give clients feedback as to what’s working and what isn’t. And that’s pretty gratifying. I’ve heard my boss on the phone before basically reading some of my comments to a client.

There are some truly awful scripts out there, but by and large coverage is pretty enjoyable for someone who likes to read, write, and discuss storytelling (like me). It’s intellectually stimulating work on a subject I enjoy that has tangible effects on projects in development (I’ve gotten to read a couple scripts that were revised after my first pass on them), and it directly relates to my college major to boot. Script coverage is grunt work, sure, but there’s far worse grunt work to be had out there.

As an assistant, on the other hand, my primary duties frequently involving such complex tasks as sorting things and sticking stickers. Now to be totally fair, I’m about the third person down the assistant ladder in a fairly small office, so my job is mostly facilitating the work of other assistants. All the same, probably 70% of the work I’ve been paid for is for using skills I’d mastered by the end of elementary school. I’m not sure 10-year-old me would have been able to do the whole job, but he certainly would have been plenty capable of filing documents and sticking stamps on envelopes. Heck, 10-year-old me wasn’t bad at answering the phone.

So when I write on my resume, “Implemented new filing system,” that sounds pretty good. But it’s also pretty depressing because I know what I really did was make numbered folders and put documents with corresponding numbers in them. I start wondering what use my college education is when companies seem more willing to pay me to print and stick mailing labels than to employ the creative and analytical capacities honed through my higher education.

I remind myself, of course, that any potential for upwards mobility requires a good education. It’s not even that I hate the assistant work, or that I think myself above it. I work in the entertainment industry; if you’re not willing to start at the bottom, there’s a good chance you’ll go broke and bomb out even if you are relatively talented. But when I think about what is required of me to hold a paying job versus what it takes to do a decent job on an unpaid internship, it does feel pretty backwards.

Such is the life of a post-grad.

(You can find Tim's blog here: http://timandhisthoughts.wordpress.com)

The Post-Graduate Weekend

Saturday is my least favorite day of the week. This is mainly due to my intense bitterness that I have to wake up at 6:30 am and drive to work in the dark while the rest of the world remains cozied up in their beds, the day a blank slate of opportunity stretching lazily before them. I imagine them sleeping in late, eating breakfast in their pajamas, and enjoying steaming mugs of tea while I drive an over-sized van frantically around downtown Grand Rapids, dropping off human tissue samples and getting lost in labyrinth-like apartment buildings.

Ok, so I'm not the only person who works on Saturdays, but sometimes it feels that way, and such an early start time certainly cuts short plans for late Friday night shenanigans. Not that I often have such plans, but if I did it would be nice to be able to execute them.

Saturdays at FedEx are rough for another reason, though, besides just missing out on lazy weekend mornings at home. The routine and routes for Saturday deliveries are totally different, so instead of heading out to the suburban Walker where I normally go, I've been assigned the downtown area. I don't claim to understand why the managers gave me—one of the newest employees—this route. Maybe they thought that it would be easier because the stops are closer together. Or maybe they figured I sort of already knew the area because it borders on Walker. Or maybe they just didn't care one way or the other. Whatever the rational, I don't like it.

First of all, there are too many little streets too close together for any of my maps to be entirely reliable or helpful. I can't tell you the number of times I've squinted at my map and matched a street to the wrong tiny-print name. Or how many times I've confidently chosen a route to my next stop only to discover that it involves turning the wrong way down a one-way street. Delivering downtown also means delivering to a number of hospitals and tall apartment buildings. The hospitals aren't so bad, provided someone thought to tell you which of the ten doors to go in so that you don't have to drive around the block five times looking for one that says “receiving”, only to discover that the loading dock is closed on the weekends and the man in the mailroom (when you finally finding it after wandering through the cafeteria) is grumpy because he once signed for a package that got lost and then was blamed for it. The apartment buildings on the other hand: those I hate. Every building seems to have a different rule about what to do with packages. Do I give to security? Do I leave it by the PO box and pray the neighbors don't have sticky fingers? Do I wait for someone to buzz me in so I can wander the halls looking for #401? Because of course, no one is ever home to actually sign for the thing.

And then there is that one stop that always has about 28 boxes which need to be delivered to the third floor of an office building. I'm just glad the building is mostly empty so there is no one there to see me struggling to keep the boxes from falling off my hand-cart as I attempt to hold the door open with one hand and push the cart through with the other.

On top of all this, remember that I am driving a truck. And I am still not comfortable with it, even when the back-up camera is actually working.

Ok, but I'm done complaining now, at least about that. I'm sure I'll get used to my new route eventually. The real reason I started writing this blog entry was to complain about something else, something related to why today was a particularly annoying Saturday. My thesis: Corporations are soul-sucking, impersonal, and I wish I could be self-employed my entire life. Perhaps I'm being a bit dramatic, but I really don't think humans were meant to work for a disembodied corporate power.

Don't get me wrong, FedEx is a very nice place to work, all things considered, and I'm grateful to be employed and earning a paycheck. But it's also a very big company, with rules and procedures created by people in offices hundreds or thousands of miles away. At FedEx, the most important thing about me is my employee number—which I use far more frequently than my name. Several times a month, we have to sign off on papers from “corporate” stating that we have read and agree with various procedures. We are exhorted to avoid late deliveries, not for the obvious reason that we want to please our customers, but boost our station's numbers, to avoid getting on the corporate bad list. Everything seems to be about appeasing this mysterious and omniscient “corporate” power. Screw up just a little bit on the mandated regulations and risk getting fired. Or worse, get your boss or your boss's boss fired, which I've heard legitimately happens.

It was the same at Barnes and Noble, although as the lowest of the staffing low, I was threatened less often with corporate power as with managerial power. “I really can't have you just standing there chatting with each other,” a head cashier snapped at me and a coworker once, after we took advantage of the first break in the line of the day to have a thirty-second conversation. “The manger is up in her office, and if she's sees you on the camera, she's going to send you home.”

I was struck by how often the rationale for doing something a certain way was because “corporate regulated it” or “the boss will see you” or “it's procedure.” Granted, I'm sure at one point all these things had great reasons behind them, but the original reasons are never what is emphasized. When a couple of my friends stopped by to say hi to me on their way through the mall, I wasn't told to keep the greeting short because it looks unprofessional or because it distracts me from my job. I was instead reminded that I was on camera and a manger could be watching me. Nothing like a little threat from Big Brother.

This afternoon after I finished all my deliveries and returned to the station, I was beckoned into the office by my FedEx manager because, apparently, I have fallen below satisfactory level in terms of my punctuality. What this means is that I am sitting on a 95.7% timeliness rating when the appropriate level should be above 96%. Because I haven't worked at FedEx for very long, if I am ever late for work I run the risk of totally screwing my percentage. In the past three+ months, I have only been late twice. Once was because I was asked to come in an hour early and wasn't totally sure what my punch-in time should be, so I was two minutes late. The other time was more legitimate—I didn't hear my alarm and over-slept, but still managed to get to the station in time to punch in only one minute late. One minute. That means that my cumulative tardiness is a total of three minutes. And yet this afternoon I had to sign into my FedEx account and click on this little box that says I understand I have been warned about my failure to be punctual while my manager looked over my shoulder eating his pizza.

“Wow. All this for a couple of minutes,” I said.

“A late is a late,” he replied without sympathy.

Perhaps I'm just sore because I was embarrassed by my little lecture. Even though I think the whole thing is ridiculous, I still want to remain on my boss's good side. But everything about it rubs me the wrong way. Checking off the little box, being told an exact and seemingly arbitrary percentage—it was all so impersonal and demeaning.

I'm sure this is the kind of thing that happens at every big business that has a lot of employees to keep track of. Standard procedures are set in place in order to protect workers and customers and profit, but sometimes—because no person or situation is totally alike—the procedures are inadequate and more harmful than helpful. Maybe it's necessary, but I think it's also dehumanizing.

More and more, I'm starting to idealize how wonderful it would be to work for myself, be my own boss. Set my own schedule. This probably isn't a good sign, given how comparatively little experience I've actually had in the workforce and how many years I probably have ahead of me. I'm probably just too used to being able to call my own shots, as I was for my four years of college. Still, I don't think I'm ever going to get comfortable with the whole concept of a punch-in clock or mass-produced employee handbook.

From The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

"I saw my life branching before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

So this is the new year

2013 is rather an awkward number. It is odd, for one thing, and altogether unmemorable, although I did just realize that it is includes the numbers 0, 1, 2, and 3, just in a scrambled order, and that may be something. I pity the kids who graduate from high school this year: “Class of 2013” just doesn't roll well off the tongue.

Today is already the fifth day of the new year and so far the most exciting thing I've done is get stuck on a blocked one-way street downtown in my FedEx truck. Although I suppose working my last day at Barnes and Noble and getting a new job to replace it counts for something too. Otherwise, life is plodding along as per usual. I've always felt that New Year's Day comes at an odd time given the symbolism we ascribe to it. Instead of youth and rebirth we have dead trees, pale skin, and winter closing in on us like a noose. The Christmas season comes to a close and everyone slouches back to work and school, a few pounds heavier and few dollars poorer. The new year doesn't exactly feel like a fresh start. It feels more like buckling down and gutting through the same persistent problems. Same old cold. Same old snow. Same old long stretches with no holidays (except Valentine's Day, but how many people actually like that one?). If we were to celebrate New Year's sometime around the end of March, however—now I could get on board with that. There is nothing like the fresh air of spring to invigorate resolve and inspire change. These mono-clouds and frosty mornings aren't exactly charging me with excitement.

Unfortunately, whoever made the calendar didn't bother to consider this (or maybe weather in the Mediterranean is just always pleasant so it was irrelevant), and we must face this new year as it is, cold and all. On the bright side, the days are finally lengthening again. Each morning the sun will rise a little sooner, and each evening it will set a little later. If symbolism is what I'm looking for—and as a writer, it always is—I suppose this will have to do. It does make me feel a little better, knowing this. Perhaps the darkest days are over, and a new light will begin to shine.

Well, at least my fellow employees think I'm cool

Today, for the first time, I delivered a package to the home of someone that I know. And it just so happened to the be the home of the valedictorian of my high school, a girl I haven't seen in four years who just graduated from an ivy league with a degree in Biochemistry (or something similarly difficult and impressive-sounding).

I was not about to let myself be seen.

When I first turned into the neighborhood, I knew it looked familiar, but I didn't even consider the possibility that I might actually know the person to whom my package was addressed. It seemed too improbable. But them I pulled up to the house, and some bells started ringing in the back of my head. I took a second look at the address label as I walked to the front door. Oh my gosh. It was her. Crap. The last thing I felt like doing was having a conversation in the cold morning air about why I was on this girl's porch with a package in hand wearing an oversized purple jacket that said FedEx.

So I did what any self-respecting individual would do. I set the package on the step, rang the doorbell, and ran.

Am I a coward? Possibly. Do I have too much pride? Probably. Do I regret my decision? No way.

I also delivered three boxes to Anthropologie, the ultra-chic clothing and home décor store that I love but on my current salary cannot afford. Let me tell you, I felt more than a little out of place in my too-short navy pants with reflector pockets and PowerPad holster. I swear I normally look cuter than this, I wanted to tell the clerk who signed for the packages. He gave me a sympathetic look.

If nothing else, this job is certainly a good lesson in humility.