No, I haven’t written anything in a long while–not here, not anywhere.
A lot has happened between my last update and now, and any amount of it was well worth writing about, but I’m afraid that I’ll have to just have to give it all a miss this time, and start fresh.
There could hardly be a better point for a fresh start.
I am employed: the first full-time job I’ve had (if we don’t count the summer stint working the graveyard shift at Target) since 2003.
Over the course of two weeks last month, I responded with resumes to eight job postings on Craigslist. (To which, for reasons having to do with my own eccentricity, I had decided to confine my job search.) One turned out to be a fraudulent listing. Six yielded no response. Exactly one resulted in an invitation to schedule an interview.
Happily, the company that contacted me was the one that I’d been most excited, by far, to send my resume to; the nature of the job description and of the business genuinely appealed to me, while most everything else I’d applied for had fallen into the “may be able to tolerate for a while” category. And I’d wondered if I’d hurt my chances by accidentally emailing, owing to an Internet glitch, four copies of my resume at once. I’d followed up with a brief note of apology to assure the recipient that I wasn’t a spammer or just plain obnoxious.
I spent the night before the interview with friends in Burbank, just down the road from where I understood the company to be, rose early in the morning, and left the house with what I expected would be plenty of time to spare. It turned out to be just time enough.
Google had instructed me to take one bus a certain distance before transferring to another. But at the transfer point, I could find no signage showing me where to board the second bus. A passing Metro driver was of no help; I discovered later that I was to have transferred to a bus in the local Burbank–not greater Los Angeles–transit system. But according to the map, I wasn’t such a long walk from where I needed to be, so I proceeded on foot, despite the too-loose dress shoes that were already blistering my heels. I got to the road I thought I was supposed to get to with plenty of time still–and saw that the addresses were several thousands of numbers smaller than what I was looking for. And they didn’t grow very quickly as I made my way north.
Suddenly, what had been a surfeit of time became a deficit. In the beginnings of a mild panic, I took off the uncomfortable shoes and began jogging up the street in my socks. I was in an industrial zone near the Burbank airport, where it seemed that nobody went unless they had business to do–and with the day’s business hours begun, the streets were dead: no cars, no buses, no convenient taxis broke the silence.
My panic was on the verge of becoming somewhat more than mild as I contemplated the possibility of showing up late to my first job interview in years, to the only job interview that eight resumes had netted, to the interview for a job I suspected I really wanted. And then the street addresses skipped several thousands of numbers, and I saw that I might yet arrive on time. Minutes later, I’d reached the 7500 block I was looking for, and I slowed my pace to read the numbers carefully. 7574…7576–but I wanted 7575! Normally in a case like this, I’d look to the other side of the street. But the other side of this street featured only a chain link fence, and beyond that, train tracks.
Perplexed, I circled the short block, looking for back entrances or anything else that might suggest a solution to my problem. The neighborhood I was in wasn’t the ghetto, quite, but it didn’t look like the cheeriest place to work: the bluest of blue-collar industrial zones, weathered old brick buildings housing machine shops and fastener distributors and the like. On my second trip around the block, an unsavory looking character smoking a cheap cigar leaned out of a shady doorway and beckoned me with a whistle. “Job interview?” he asked. “What kind of work?” He hadn’t heard of the company I was looking for, and he wasn’t sure about the address, but he suggested I try the other side of the tracks. There are two San Fernando Roads, he explained. Perhaps I’d find 7575 on the sister road of the one I was on. (I’d seen earlier that a San Fernando Boulevard also ran parallel to the road I was on.) “If it doesn’t work out,” he finished, “come back here. We’re hiring.” With some trepidation, I asked just what it was his company did. Tool sales on commission, it turned out. I thanked him for his help and hoped that it wouldn’t come to that.
So it turned out that I’d been on the wrong side of the tracks in both the literal and figurative senses. The other San Fernando road was also industrial, but in a new and clean and safe-feeling way. After expecting that I’d have time to kill upon arrival, and then wondering whether I’d arrive at all, I walked up to the door I wanted ten minutes before my interview–precisely when I’d wanted to arrive.
I pressed a button and stated my business into an intercom, and the door was opened for me. And I knew that I was, in every sense, in the right place. I’d visited the company’s website, and knew that they sold fine art reproductions of works licensed by several of the biggest Hollywood studios. But it was one thing to have known that, and quite another to walk into a room decorated with reproductions of vintage Disney production cels, Simpsons posters, Star Wars memorabilia, and crates stenciled “ACME.” I thought that I might have to be dragged out of the place.
My interview went well enough, I thought, though I couldn’t say how well. Nor was I given a precise time frame in which I could expect to hear back from the company. But I felt at least that I’d accomplished something, and I left in high spirits, hoping I’d be able to return.
It was then that I saw the bus stop just in front of the business park I’d found at such length and with such effort. The first bus I’d ridden in the morning would have dropped me off right where I’d needed to be, had I simply stayed on board for another ten minutes or so. I hoped I’d get a chance to put this hard-won knowledge to work.
I didn’t have to wait long, as it turned out. Nor did I receive, precisely, either of the answers I thought I might get. The email I received at the end of that very business day told me that though my skills weren’t necessarily what the company sought, I had impressed my interviewers very much with my other attributes, and they were willing to give me a week on the job as a trial run.
Elated, I returned to my Ojai lodgings for the weekend to retrieve more clothes, and I installed myself in my friends’ place in Burbank on Sunday evening, ready to commit myself to being as impressive as possible for the following week.
I just worked my second Monday at Acme Archives; I am still employed, and expect to remain so for a long while to come. I didn’t fail at my trial week, and don’t think I’ll fail at the rest of the 90 days I’ll have to work before becoming a regular salaried employee with benefits.
My job title is “Distribution Manager,” which is by far the most grown-up thing I’ve ever been called. Specifically, I’m ultimately responsible for getting orders out the door, which entails being more or less in charge of the warehouse, pulling inventory, submitting work orders to the production department to create pieces that aren’t in stock, and shipping boxes to customers. But since the company is a small one, everyone does almost everyone else’s job sooner or later, so I find myself also trimming pieces of art as they’re printed, varnishing canvases, jockeying the inventory database, and processing payments. In the long run, my new employers have assured me, if I prove to be capable and ambitious, I can expect to end up doing a whole lot more.
I’ve never been able to articulate what my “dream job” might be, but this gig is so good that it’s starting to give me that vocabulary. I get to work with a small, close-knit team. I get to do lots of different kinds of stuff. I get to work with my hands. I have real opportunity for advancement. And every day I get to handle wonderful, wonderful things: original animation art from a variety of studios as well as the fine-art reproductions we produce and/or distribute. Last week alone I shipped half a dozen original cels from The Little Mermaid, the film that made an animation/Disney junkie of me. I enjoy going into work. I enjoy being at work. I hope the enjoyment continues indefinitely.
In light of all that, perhaps you’ll forgive my long silence as well as my failure to document the other things that have happened to me since my last update. As interesting as some of them might have been, none holds a candle to this.
What a quick couple of weeks it’s been! Less than two, in fact, since I received the response to my resume. Everything is suddenly very different. I’m gainfully employed, and living again in my beloved Los Angeles. I’m surfing a couch in Burbank at present, but expect to have more respectable accommodations within a month or two.
I’ll try very hard to be better about maintaining a semi-regular blogging schedule from here on out, now that I have a semi-regular life.
But you know better than to get your hopes up too high, don’t you?