employablog

Even prenatally we hear it. Though the shushing lub-dub of our mother’s pulse, dampened by fluid,

time is money.

Then we get our first job, at the ripe age of 14, we learn it first-hand. Literally watching a clock and equating it with minimum wage nickels and dimes. As a cashier at a suburban movie theater, time really was money. Through the window I had a perfect view of a digital clock tower atop a bank. Each minute was worth just over eight-and-a-half cents.

Once that mindset gels, it’s easy to plug anything in this time-money equation. This led me to drop-off service. In Brooklyn, it was cheap, and if you valued your time at anything more than $1, you were actually making imaginary money by doing laundry drop-off service. And that equation also lends itself well to checking up on credit card bills, aberrant phone charges and so on. If it’s worth a decent hourly wage, then the molasses minutes of hold music are worth it.

This is how I met TLG - Just For Me representative Judy Akansas, Judy Deepthroat, or Judy DeepSouth. Monikers aside, her first name was Judy, and the hamster running in her brain was plumb tuckered out.

Many moons ago, my credit card company, JP Chase sent me a check.  A tiny $9.someunevenamountofchange check. It came with no explanation, and looked … suspiciously, like a refund check.

Fasting forward (and breaking the fast, atoning and so forth) to today, TLG-Just For Me billed my for $59.95. Lord knows  who or what they are, how they found me, and why I owe them cashmoney. Anyhoo, the statement also had an 800 number. I nancy drewed that shit, and that brings us back to Judy McInbred. Eventually my words reached her (moneyback moneyback moneyback, how did you find me) reached her, ad I left happy, with all my faculties intact.

But just for kicks I did a search on TLG Just For Me to see what it is. I still have no idea, but I did find a ton of sites regarding the current lawsuits against them and JP Chase for credit card scams.

Que interessante, or French Toastes.

The moral is, I made $9.someunevenamountofchange in about 20 minutes. I still feel a little underpaid, but it won’t go in the regrets column in my permanent record, buried in a capsule ‘neeth the Geenpoint oil spill

I don’t know how it happened, but all my friends have business cards. At first I thought it was a fluke. I saw Adam drop a B-card (I’m so out of the loop — is that cool to say, or is it like saying ‘frisco’?).

He did it casually. He did it like it was something he’d done before.

“Dude, you have a business card? You just give it to people?”

Of course he does. He makes a living doing freelance. That is what he told me. It made sense.

Well. Adam is freelance, of course he’d need a business card, but then each and every one of my roommates had a little cardboard card with their name, some little letterhead thing and some designor font that made it cool. Kelly, Tanveer, Josh, they all had them. Even Kelly’s little sister! They were in irregular shapes, they had backgrounds … they …

I was immediately jealous.

Then I thought of my own business card. What would it say?

“Writer” “Cultural comedian” “Observational humorist” “Part time dissector”

Are these skills marketable?

Furthermore, I won’t have a job for four years, and I already know what that job is going to be.

A professional.

Today was a weird day. Everyone drifted into work full of mental fog, the kind of mental fog that settles in between your ears when you’ve too little, stuck inside during 48 straight hours of torrential rains. Call it a mass vitamin D deficiency, everyone in the office today was off, me heartily included.

But over the course of small talk it gets attributed to Monday or the weather. I won’t rant about giving Monday a break, I did that last week, and the weather seems a safe bet, grey skies = grey insides, no?

But there was something else at work today as well.

I went in and out of meetings today, I had myself together, and felt good. But the last meeting shook me a little. Not for fear, but for sadness and the bizarre timbre it cast.

My worker buddy who oriented me, and did a lot to help me settle comfortably into my new job got fired.  Everything was handled with padded walls and kid gloves, which really, is the only way to handle these sorts of things.

I feel fine about the whole thing, with a slight cast of being a leathery, salty veteran, but I also feel strange and sad. The office politics are fine, and my bosses are fine as well. But getting fired is akin to dying to a select group of people. It’s too bad, perhaps you went on to a better place, but apparently it was for the greater good.

I’m not cynical, or even upset, it’s just strange.

Coincidentally, on The Office, Roy got fired last week. But he tried to punch Jim.

So I think it has to be chalked up to coincidence.

I was a little nervous this weekend as I prepared to do my taxes. I made a cup of tea and found my calculator (previous use: Tetris, 12th grade calculus). I found a pencil, purchased a pencil sharpener, and I would have taken the phone off the hook, except I don’t have a phone with a hook. I settled for ‘Silent’: These were the steps I could recall from watching my parents do their taxes until sometime in the mid 90s when I guess they hired an accountant. The whole thing seemed like quite an operation.

Of course, my parents never had the benefit of tax software with deduction maximizers, so I had that going for me. I plopped my laptop on top of all the papers and fired up the software. It asked me a series of questions and the deduction total kept climbing. “Awesome,” I thought. “Doing taxes is fun!” About an hour later I was nearly done. As I was only fully employed for around 25% of 2006, the federal government apparently considers me basically impoverished and I am going to be getting back a lot of what was withheld from each paycheck over the past few months. What success!

I felt confident, I felt grown up. I had done it.

“There are only a few more steps to ensure you’ve maximized your deductions!”

“OK!” I was in a great mood.

“Good news!” the next box said. “The Telephone Excise Tax Refund (TETR) is a one-time payment available on your 2006 federal income tax return. It is designed to refund previously collected long distance telephone taxes. Almost everyone is eligible!”

Everyone except those who have never had a home phone. “No,” I answered, and clicked my ringtone back to Final Countdown.

“Were you affected by Hurricane Katrina?”

Wow, buzz kill, tax software. “No.”

“Did you become a widow/er this year?”

There’s a box I hope I never have to check. I was beginning to understand why people don’t usually think of taxes as awesome. The thought crossed my mind that a real deduction maximizer would be a pretty tough character: “Not a widower, eh? BLAHM! You are now! Oh, and I signed you up for AT&T. In Biloxi.”

“No.”

At noon today came a note from the director: “Guys, please stop all work on Project Stingray effective immediately.”

Yes, we have codenames for some of our projects. No, I don’t get to assign them. Yes, I know assigning them would be awesome.

Projects get codenames when they relate to highly sensitive mergers and acquisitions. In fact, they’re so secret that Stingray isn’t even the real codename.* These sorts of assignments are different than the work I’ve done before in which the projects have a clear plan about what work will be performed in what amount of time. They are shorter, faster and more intense, and they have the potential to end at any time. Maybe this is what being on reality TV feels like?

“I’m fired,” and it feels good.

*Note that in the event that I did get to assign the real codenames, I would choose something better than stingray, but I wanted this particular example to be more reflective of what the actual codenames are like. If it were up to me, there is a strong possibility this project would be dubbed Project Team Discovery Channel.**

**Obviously, that’s just an example, since I couldn’t actually tell you what I would name the project, if I ever was able to do so.

Last Sunday it was nearly 70 degrees. People ran around wearing tee shirts in January, and ladies wore head-turning outfits. And it was not right.

On Monday every desk had a two-page green memo paperweighted by a new mug.

“Presents!” I shouted, sticking my apple sticker on my mug and going to the coffee machine.  The mugs replaced the waxy paper coffee cups, and are part of the greening of our office.  The memos were on our new recycling initiative, and my heart warmed, this time not from the greenhouse gases.

I mean, I’m from Minnesota, our biggest attractions center around lakes.  The North Shore, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, these are treasures.  But now they compete, and lose, to Minnesota’s other big tourist attraction, a mall that you can see from outer space.  So, any environmental step is good in my book.  But this step had weak footing.

First, it’s January and my office still has heat issues, namely, there is too much.  Which we combat with AC.  Yeah, it’s not right.

And moreover, we got our memos to recycle, on … paper.  Email, I mean, this is the 20th .. wait, even, the 21st century these days.  Or perhaps it was our first test, to see how we held up to the new recycling initiative and the thought police were already on us with their green cardstock memos.

Nonetheless, a few days later we asked the Russian office cleaner why she threw the recycling in with the trash.

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said, “the building doesn’t recycle.  You’re floor just says that they do, but no one pays me to take out the trash twice.”

Very Interesting.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said, “I don’t want to have trouble.”

Last June, we graduated from our East Coast schools. Employee One had a job lined up in Boston, while Employee Too had a med school requirement to finish in Minnesota before a triumphant return to Brooklyn to seek employment to fund independence with minimal compromise.

Employablog exists because we both thought these experiences were remarkable. But we found that while remarkable, they are far from unique for anyone looking for or starting a job, and welcome input and buzz, and cookies.

We both started this adventure about a month ago. We plan to reflect this in our first few posts and bring everyone up to speed without missing the choicest September morsels.

Tonight’s post was a special dual-author post. This format definitely captures the spirit of employablog — our stories have meaning in dialogue with each other. That said, most of the time our posts will be made individually, with the potential for some more dual-author posts in the future. Similarly, once things are up and running we may gather some guest-author posts.

We hope you enjoy employablog enough to tell your friends, co-workers, and boss all about us. And let us know how you like it. Hey, hire us even.