I Have Something for You, Craigslist Spammers!

As everyone who could have accidentally stumbled to this page already knows, Craigslist job postings are filled from the bottom of the hooves to the top of the horns with spammers and evil fucking assholes. Since I live in Portland, OR, the spammers run even more freely along the Craigslist plains because the entire state of Oregon is currently either unemployed or underemployed. And even though I promise myself, over and over, that I will simply never ever apply to companies that fail to reveal their names anymore - sometimes, I still get pulled in.

A few weeks ago, I applied to one such job posting. I spent maybe forty-five minutes on the cover letter - enough so that I definitely wasted my time. And several hours later I received an e-mail letting me know that I would definitely be interviewed and given a royal crown and all the Ben & Jerry's I want - but would I mind getting my credit report?

Needless to say, I was pissed off.

While my artistic skills are often limited at best, I have designed a poster that fake credit report Craigslist job spammers can use in their future fake evil Nazi postings:

Sincerely,

One Such Stupid Dumbass

DeathCorp Retirement

Data entry is the act of remaining completely still while the blood of your soul boils out of your eyes:

A little while back, I spent several months working in a long-term temporary data entry position for an absolutely massive retirement corporation (henceforth known as DeathCorp) with properties all over the U.S. and Canada. The idea behind DeathCorp is that at the age of 75, you move into a tiny apartment in a giant building, much like a college student. In exchange for sacrificing having your own kitchen, you receive three mediocre cafeteria meals a day. You also participate in all sorts of social events such as potlucks and bingo and regularly experience the pleasure of watching your neighbors wheeled away by hospital and funeral home personnel. The cost of living in this fairy tale is something like 2500 dollars a month for a studio.

The sales staff of DeathCorp kept all of their leads on millions of pieces of paper, which eventually became archaic and impractical. Thus, DeathCorp hired a bunch of people with strong typing skills (read: ten fingers) to transfer these paper leads into an online sales database. The temporary team consisted of twenty people sitting in a room without ventilation at communal tables littered with computers. Here's an actual picture of the DeathCorp TempRoom:

The quality of our performance was evaluated on quotas. To maintain our quotas, we had to enter 50 sales leads per day, which was really a stupid idea, because these sales leads ranged from one line to five plus pages. As a result, tension arose when certain people got short sales leads in a lucky batch, and others were slammed with several 4 page leads.

Most people in the room understood that for eleven dollars an hour at a temp job, one did not try to do much more than the quota, especially because staring at a screen for eight hours a day yielded a blinding migraine no matter what. But of course, when one is 20 years old, this does not matter, and so several 20-ish girls in the office regularly entered 30 more leads than necessary. We would hear them bragging to Afternoon Supervisor Gia: "Oh, I did 75 today, how great!"

Most of our other coworkers were also pretty scary, and this will definitely take more than one blog post, so I'm going to focus on two for now: Joy and Sharon.

Joy

One of our coworkers, Joy, a woman in her forties who once actually combined neon yellow balloon pants with a crocheted maroon sweater and teal shoes, arrived every morning with a gallon-sized bottle of Mountain Dew and a pencil case that must have contained 100+ writing implements of all shapes and sizes: sharpies, colored pencils, graphing pens. Everyone else's desk contained maybe two writing implements: a highlighter for marking leads before entering them, and a pen to mark completed leads.

Not Joy's.

Every morning, Joy spent a minimum of fifteen minutes arranging her writing implements on the desk in front of her, threw on muzak so loud that I could hear it through the dulcet tones of Slayer on my own headphones, and then bashed the keys on her keyboard as if it had wronged her in some significant way. When we took off our headphones to take a break from our screens, we would hear mostly unified clicking, the muffled sounds of a soprano saxophone crying in pain, and one keyboard going, "BAM! RAT RAT TAT! POW! BOOM!"

And then: "Sluuuurrrrrpppp."

Sharon

Sharon was our morning supervisor. She was overly chipper with a quickly-fading smile, and regularly behaved in ways that were truly confounding. The most confounding incident with Sharon happened when I took a day off and arrived back at work the following day to discover that the people who were working in my DeathCorp Property Group peppered my desk with what appeared to be the longest leads possible. All of them were over four pages - and a four page lead took maybe 30 minutes to enter.

While I generally wouldn't care, I did work on quotas and not meeting my quotas placed me at risk of not being left completely alone, so I was nervous. I approached Sharon and let her know that I was concerned. She said, "Yeah, I understand, but enter those anyway, it's okay."

How the fuck is it okay? I thought. However, I don't seek conflict at work, so I turned and went back to my desk.

Five minutes later, I noticed that someone was hovering behind me. I turned around. Sharon was standing behind my chair with a piece of paper. She smiled, and without a word, she extended the piece of paper to me.

I took the piece of paper. The piece of paper said something like, "Dear V - I understand that you're concerned about meeting your quotas, but I assure you that you're doing a good job."

In case you didn't quite catch what happened:

1. I was gone on a pre-arranged absence for one day.

2. I returned to find that there were only a few leads left for the sales group that my coworkers were working on, and that every lead I had was very long.

3. I was nervous that I wouldn't make my quota.

4. I approached my supervisor to tell her as such.

5. She dismissed me.

6. Over the next five minutes, she TYPED a response to my VERBAL inquiry, PRINTED it, and then handed it to me. Where I was sitting. Ten feet away from her.

....

To be continued on Monday: Melanie, and the Queen Bee.

-V

Retail, and Name Tags are Stupid

I am currently aware of more than one person with a bachelor's, and even master's, degree braving the world of retail. Dress-code-and-name-tag retail. Time-card and 30-minute-lunch-break retail.

There you were, sitting in VM40I - Seminar in Advanced Literary Thought - and for what? So that two years later, you could ask someone else with a bachelor's or master's degree whether they'd like to try those slacks in an 8. Either that, or you sit nervously waiting for an interview for that "ADMIN SUPERSTAR!!!" position, which everyone knows is monkey bullshit, because "admin superstar" is an oxymoron.

Half of the time, these job postings don't even have company names. What the hell? "A well-established company is seeking..." - Why does this continue to remain so damn subversive? Don't companies know that if job seekers can't read about them before they apply, the cover letters are going to be nothing but bullshit? You could be a "Well-established energy efficiency company" - but unless you tell me who you are and where I can read about you, I always translate a lack of a company name to mean, "Child pornography ring looking for eerie receptionist. Company name will not be revealed. Receptionist must send out letters without looking at them. Lie detector tests will be administered weekly."

Anyway, retail. Unless I open my own business (My most consistent idea is Suds'n'Scotch - A bar/laundromat with an excellent scotch selection, but I realize that this is impractical, because most people who do laundry in a laundromat probably don't go out of their way to buy scotch. But I like scotch. There'll be PBR too.) I'm not ever going to return to retail.

I've been there before. For about a year in college, I worked at GreetingHell, an overpriced greeting card/useless knick-knacks company. Specifically, I remember rearranging piles of tiny greeting cards on a rotating whatever-the-hell-it's-called and being coated in glitter everywhere I went. We actually had a greeting card that cost $14, which is usually what I can afford to spend for people's birthday presents. And when our normal boss got promoted, she was replaced by the most insecure woman on the face of the planet - who once threatened to report myself and my friend B. to corporate when, after a major snowstorm and an extended wait for the subway in the middle of Boston, we arrived to work six minutes late.

What's funny is that she said nothing when we actually walked into the store, covered in snow. What she did was passive-aggressively post a NOTE near the time-cards letting us know that if another unexpected snowstorm hit Boston, the subway ran late, and we walked in six minutes after the start of our shift, her store would explode and she would report us to corporate. Strangely, when the next major snowstorm hit a month later and I arrived five minutes late, she didn't. Hmm.

Major corporations like to impose unnecessary rules over their employees to justify more lunch meetings at CorporateBase, so the GreetingHell Employee Handbook instructed employees how to greet customers. We were forced to say, over and over, to everyone that walked into the store: "Welcome to GreetingHell, how can I help you?"

Naturally, 99% of the time, the customer declined the offer to be shown around a store that was the size of an average living room. Occasionally, the customer failed to reply altogether and responded with a dirty look, or mumbled "Hello," and looked startled, as if it was the craziest event of all time that someone greeted him or her in a store. And once, a woman ignored me so well the first time I asked, that I thought she didn't hear me and I asked again. She turned to me and shouted at the top of her lungs, "If I wanted your damn help, I would have asked for your help!!"

The idea behind corporate retail is that you come in, fresh-faced and full of personality and ideas, which are subsequently completely suppressed until you are the ghost of what you used to be, echoing "Welcome to GreetingHell," in your brain even when you fall asleep at night. This is probably carefully designed by corporate psychologists.

The next time you walk into a corporate retail store (notice I say "corporate." Working for mom-and-pop shops is not the same, because usually normal people won't try to make you into a character-free robot), look carefully at the face of the employee. Are the eyes glazed over, much like that of a drug addict? Is s/he wearing a smile anyone would ever use in real life?

The reason that the name tag is more clearly visible than the other elements is because name tags are the very worst element of corporate existence, and I have actually wondered whether corporations use name tags as a way to display their ownership of employees. Probably.

First, name tags are awkward. If you're an employee, it's awkward to wear something on your chest, because generally even people that stare at your chest don't like to let you know that that's what they have been doing. If you're a customer, they're awkward because theoretically, you've been raised to approach strangers with phrases such as "Excuse me." Not, "Hey (searches chest) Annie!"

Second, I've found that most people are willing to introduce themselves anyway. I was shopping for dresses a few months ago, and a woman took my dresses, hung them in a dressing room, and then turned to me and said, "If you need anything, I'm Michelle." Crazy, right? She introduced herself, and then I knew her name! No name tag or anything!

Third, only creepy people address total strangers by name. Did you hear that, corporate? I was standing outside at my friend's house a few days ago, and a friend of a friend came up to me and said, "Heya, V!" and since I hadn't seen him before, I said, "Who the hell are you?" I am a very small woman, and he was a very big man, so yes, I find it creepy when large older men who I've never seen call me by name.

Gradually, the combination of repeating "Welcome to X, Can I Help You?" over and over again and catching glimpse of your name tag in the mirror takes your happy-go-lucky character and transforms it into this:

To help you understand the experience of the corporate retail employee, I accompanied this post with a chart that can more easily help you understand:

You'll notice that screaming on the inside is a mere 27%, but this is only because it's difficult to scream when you're choking on glitter. Trying to understand senseless policies is pretty much identical in all major corporate positions, so I've allotted a quarter for it. Tolerating sadomasochistic customers is a mere 10%, but that's only because I'm using very strict standards for sadomasochism. And as you can see, name tags take a whopping 37%, because, as we've all agreed, name tags are evil.

That's the point of all this. I hope someone, at some major corporation, looks at this one day and thinks to him or herself, "You know, she's right. Why are we spending an extra 400 million a year on corporate name tags, when employees much prefer lunch and beer?"

Corporate: employees like food. And beer. Give them food and beer, and cut the budget on the name tags.

Thank you.

V.

Pentacorn, Inc. & FateAlert

I am currently applying to editing and copywriting positions that will showcase my extreme talent. Since I equally love describing things and exhibiting a high degree of ridiculousness, I have provided these examples of products/companies I think would be really awesome if they actually existed: Pentacorn, Inc., and FateAlert.

1. Pentacorn, Inc.

Want more out of your unicorn?

At Pentacorn, Inc., we are using state of the art technology to breed magical five-horned horses according to your specifications. Pentacorns enjoy a longer lifespan than standard unicorns, require minimal grooming, and have a whinny that's especially designed to attract the coveted sparkle fairies that your belladonna so desperately needs during harvest season!

Do you prefer a Pentacorn that eats from the palm of your hand, or a fearless leader that will deliver you to Narnia and back on the tail of a shooting star? Our mad scientists will ensure that your Pentacorn's physical and psychological characteristics are tailored to suit your needs.

So don't wait. Choose Pentacorn, Inc. The future of magical horses.

2. FateAlert

Hate being surprised by the unavoidable minor annoyances of life? Chagrined at the need to walk into another room to see the time? Tackle both issues at once with FateAlert!

FateAlert is a talking alarm clock that will tell you the time and one minor annoyance that will happen in your future in the next 5-7 days every time you ask! Have no annoyances coming up? FateAlert will only announce the time. But if that toothache turns out to be a root canal at the dentist on Thursday, FateAlert will let you know ahead of time. Worried about paying your electric bill? FateAlert will inform you if your future is to sit in the dark!

While your colleagues and acquaintances move through life blissfully ignorant of their upcoming annoyances, you will be in the superior depressing know!

FateAlert. Know the time. Know the future.

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Tell me you don't want your own five-horned unicorn and an alarm clock that predicts the future.

You know that I am incredibly amazing.

Please hire me.

-V