Adventures in Job-Hunting

[I wrote this two weeks ago, five days after my shoulder replacement surgery.]

As the title character remarked so often in Terry Sothern’s Candy, fuckashitpiss. Stand back, world. Johnny’s in the mood for a rant.

In the words of Herman’s Hermits (covering some obscure American girl group), Woke up this morning feeling fine — at 04.10 because I customarily sleep on my side, but if I try to do so since my surgery last Wednesday, my shoulder hollers, “Forgetting something, brighteyes?” loud enough to wake me. I tried to fall back asleep. Fat chance. I thought about my impending job interviews. I dared to imagine that by day’s end, I would have re-entered the ranks of the employed, but my phone interview with a guy in the Valley who’s trying to find people to recommend to the City of Los Angeles for a design job in their planning department left me gnashing my teeth, as he advised me that for every design job I’ve held over the past 19 years, I need to list not only all the projects I’ve worked on, but also the software programs involved. 

I designed this. The person they hire couldn't have.

I know very well what this means: that the person doing the actual hiring is a bean-counter, a quantifier, who probably wouldn’t know good design if he or she T-boned it on the side of a bus on the way home from work. He or she will make his choice of whom to hire not on the basis of the quality of the work, but on how many times the candidate can be seen to have used this, that, or the other, uh, application. It’s like hiring someone without a palette to judge a cooking competition. 

Fucking bean-counting idiots. Fucking taste-challenged dickwagons who no doubt pin things to their goddamned bulletin boards at an angle because they imagine it looks really cool and — stand back! — creative that way. Don’t trouble to look at my Website and see for yourself that I have a rare knack for this stuff. Instead, analyze my resume, see that it mentions Adobe fucking inCopy insufficiently frequently, and hire some mousy little twerp more than whom I have more design ability under one of my goddamned toenails, which I keep short. And then go fuck yourself sideways.

Do I seem a little bitter?

Interview 2 was in West LA, in a new high-rise next door to the one in which, many years ago, the celebrated physician E.R.V. Andersen, MD, advised my parents that he wouldn’t treat me any more because he found my long hair distasteful. Through the kindness of Friend No. 1, who’d helped me get my trousers buttoned up back home who drove me (for fun galore, trying buttoning a pair of tight-fitting trousers one-handed some time!), I arrived early, only to realize that my bladder wanted emptying. 

After peeing, I customarily undo my trousers and give Little Elvis a vigorous shake at the end. (The King was known to call his Little Elvis. If it was good enough for him, why not for me too?) Do no shaking and your little friend retains enough urine to stain your crotch when tucked back in. Had I undone my trousers, though, I’d have been unable to do them back up. “Do you suppose I’ve got all day?” my bladder wondered sneeringly. 

I peed. I shook Little Elvis with vigor, all the while knowing that I’d never be able to shake him vigorously enough; it’s a problem of angles, you see. Eventually, I hit on the idea of wrapping him in lots of paper towels. (Thank God they didn’t have only one of those infernal hot-air blowers!) One of the towels seemed to be trying to escape down my left pant leg, but no humiliating dark spots appeared. Whew!

But then the guy by whom I was supposed to be interviewed, Mr. Hairgel, took me back into an office that was do dismal you’d have sworn the lighting was fluorescent, though it wasn’t, and revealed that it wasn’t a design job for which I was being interviewed, but either one cold-calling prospective Search Engine Optimization clients, or writing…content for their fucking Websites. (Determined to get a job, I’ve been replying for writing, as well, as design, jobs.) In other words, the hackwork to end all hackwork. I told him I had no interest whatever in cold calling, and he said he’d review my fucking qualifications (expletive mine) with a colleague in the company’s fucking (expletive) Draper, Utah, office and call me if said colleague were interested. In all, the interview, the drive down to which took 35 fucking minutes, had lasted around 180 seconds. 

Thinking, “Fuckashitpiss,” I hobbled back down to Wilshire Blvd, where I caught an eastbound bus. (It’s illegal to drive in California while wearing a sling, although not, apparently, to have but one arm), The bus soon filled with shrill, horny University High School students, many of whom seemed to imagine that there was a sign on my sling urging, “Jostle me!”

Fit to be fucking tied, my dears.