The Mysteries of Employment: 69 Reasons to Hire Me

          I suck at getting jobs. I mean, I am really, just… amazingly terrible at employment. Once hired, I’m great - I work hard, I don’t steal, I try like hell to get along with everyone, but the process of procuring a job is like trying to stay sober at a wedding: damn near impossible.

FREEEEEEEBBBBBIIIIIRRRRRDDDDDDD!!!!

I’ve currently been out of work for a few months now after the treeplanting season ended. That’s right! Treeplanting: my calling for a decade. A job where my flagrant disdain for authority and tendency to chain smoke, swear like a sailor and get high school drunk every few days is not only condoned but embraced and celebrated! What other job would require you to organize a Canada Day party complete with Viking ship, potato guns, and a fully functioning casino? What other job would see the purchase of two flats of beer and a carton of cigarettes as necessary provisions to get you through the work week? What other job would the interview consist of your future crewboss ensuring that as long as you promise not to quit, you’re hired.  Treeplanting, you disease-ridden, booze-soaked, leather-skinned, junkie of a mistress, I love you so.

That being said, I just couldn’t face it anymore. The last few treeplanting seasons have seen some of my closest friends pick up and move on with their lives, and not to say the new crop of planters aren’t swell and all, but the heart just went out of the whole enterprise. Gone were the cowboy days of recklessness, cheap beer, nicotine stained company vehicles and brown liquor – now there are designer drugs, safety committees, designated smoking areas and girls and boys showers. It just wasn’t worth the agony anymore.

So here I am, living in the city - wearing heels again, putting makeup on and trying like hell to remember to apply deodorant every day. I’m trying to start a new chapter, if you will, away from the manual labour and forgotten social mores – I need structure, and an apartment that I spend more than a week at a time in, and maybe a fucking dog! Yeah! I need a real life.

So, first thing is fucking first. Job.

Fuck.

Remember I was saying how I’m terrible at jobs? Yeah, well, that wasn’t me being charmingly self-deprecating, that was stone cold fact.

Worst job interviews I’ve ever had:

#3) I won’t mention the actual organizations I was being interviewed by, but I will say that this one was a very very snazzy hotel and I was seeking out a position as what they called a ‘Gold Concierge’, which essentially meant that I did whatever the richest guests asked of me. In my mind it would have entailed lots of disposing of bodies of unlucky escorts and scoring them copious amounts of blow, but in reality it was probably more along the lines of walking their toy poodles and scoring them tickets to Jersey Boys. Regardless, I really needed a job and was somewhat qualified, meaning I had wholeheartedly lied on my resume to make it seem that way. So they call me back and request a phone interview, which I agreed to and they set a date and time, which I immediately forgot.

I should mention that this was in 2004 – and the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators were going at it in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and Ottawa had just lost in game seven after Patrick Lalime, my one true love, played some of the worst hockey anyone had ever seen, and was subsequently traded, breaking my heart forever. The night this happened I was appropriately wasted in honour of my dear departed Sens, and may or may not have tried to drunkenly kick a smug Leafs fan in chest but just ended up tearing my jeans and giving myself a charley horse. I was so drunk/sad I wanted to pass out and never wake up, but unfortunately, bright and early at 8 a.m – ring a ding-ding: it’s your future calling. I blearily answered the phone and winced as the woman’s professional, clipped tone suspiciously asked what probably sounded like a pirate hooker if ‘Ms. Fletcher’ was there. Oh shit. I instantly realized what was happening and tried to pull my still drunk self together. She asked the usual vapid interview questions and I answered as best I could without sounding like I’d recently been lobotomized until we got to the age-old question: ‘Describe your greatest weakness’.

Now I have hated this question every single time I’ve been asked it, and I’ve never been able to come up with an answer that sounded legit. I understand how it’s supposed to be some sort of test to see if you can twist a weakness into sounding like a strength, like ‘I hate being late so I’m always 15 minutes early’ or ‘My blowjobs are sometimes too good’, but I have never, ever been able to come up with something I could say without looking and sounding like I was desperately making shit up. So this time around, my exhausted brain tapped out, and let the liquor answer instead:

“My greatest weakness has to be beards, cocaine, and guys who let their fingers do the talking, if you know what I mean…”

Ahem.

The silence that reverberated from the other end of the phone was deafening. I could feel wafts of cold air coming out of the receiver, and I realized how fucking stupid I had to be to think that this woman would find that answer at all funny. I tried to backpedal with some panicky laughter and a ‘I’m joking of course!’ but there was no way I was pulling out of that tailspin. She muttered something about 'deviants' and promptly hung up.

Honesty is not the best policy. 

#2) This particular interview was for an organization that made various ‘handmade’ cosmetics, such as soaps and lipgloss and shit. The job I had applied to wasn’t for actually making anything, just standing in the patchouli scented madness of their store and trying to trick people into buying an eleven-dollar bar of soap made of oatmeal and sand. I was, again, desperate for work and was ecstatic to get the call. I showed up at the interview, sober as a judge and freshly showered and everything and open the door and there are nine freshly showered, nervous looking women staring back at me.

A group interview.

I hadn’t heard of these monstrosities before and was instantly excited – were they going to get us to complete challenges or fight to the death until there was a sole surviving victor, like the Hunger Games? ‘Cause I’m not gonna lie to you, that’s kinda what my whole life has been leading up to. Unfortunately, no weapons appeared, but they did get us to sit around in a semi-circle like it was fucking story time and asked us to say our names and one thing that described ourselves. Because I arrived a little late I was first in line and because I’m a cynical, sarcastic, dead-inside husk of a person and detest these kind of namby-pamby, jovial, bullshit exercises, I answered that my name was Maddy and I was ‘kind of hungry’. Everyone laughed, but the interviewers wouldn’t let me get away that easily, ‘no, no, Maddy, what is one word that describes the real you, on the inside?’ My knuckles whitened and my eyes narrowed but I kept my voice upbeat: ‘ummm…’ Say something positive dammit! You need to eat this month! ‘…positive. I am positive’ –that I’m gonna slap someone before this interview is over. They blessedly moved on and I got to learn that my fellow tributes were ‘perky’, ‘silly’, ‘bubbly’, ‘zany’, ‘happy’, and honestly I stopped listening in fear of losing control of my fists. It’s not that these girls were bad people; it’s just the amount of bullshit in that room was reaching a critical mass and I seemed to be the only person affected by it. I took a deep breath and soldiered on.

The next few questions were along the same vein, ‘what’s your favourite colour’, ‘favourite movie’, ‘favourite band’. I lied for each one hoping to make myself seem like someone who these imbeciles would actually hire as opposed to the person I actually was. That is, until we got to the ‘when is your birthday’ question. I answered and they immediately followed up with ‘so what does that make you?’. I frowned and answered ‘twenty-two?’ and everyone laughed again. I was confused for a minute before I actually realized what they were asking. One of the interviewers explained anyways, ‘no, silly! What’s your star sign!’.

Colours and movies and bubbly and zany are one thing, I can understand if you’re trying to get to know people and aren’t imaginative enough to realize that my whole persona doesn’t hinge on the fact that I don’t mind turquoise and saw The Dark Knight in the theatre eleven times. But when you start making business decisions based on ancient bullshit about what the constellations were up to a thousand years before I was born that doesn’t even match up now, well… That’s too bitter of a pill for me to swallow. I awkwardly sat in silence for a few seconds before grabbing my purse and tearing the door open and slamming it behind me, leaving the remaining nine tributes in stunned silence. The odds were never in my favour.

#1) Now this interview was a tough one to get. It was for a high-end organic grocery store that had a smoothie and Panini bar and all that jazz. They sold agave nectar and hemp hearts and those copper bracelets that are supposed to magnetize your bones or something. It paid well and you didn’t have to wear a uniform, just a black shirt and a tiny apron, which I could live with. I also desperately needed a job. So I see they are hiring, and I get a friend of mine to drive me there and she waits in the car as I go hand in a resume. All of sudden, I get ushered to the back of the store where I’m handed a five-page long application. They hand me a pen and let me sit down in the office to fill it out. Horrified, I turn page after page and see questions like ‘define organic’, ‘describe six benefits of whole grains’, and ‘organic vs. GMO – discuss’.

Now, I knew that they would want me to know something about their products, and I did know a fair bit about organic farming, but I didn’t expect to write a fucking exam on the subject before I even got the job. You’re a grocery store, for fuck’s sake, not a lobbyist group! So I’m resigning myself to another job that is out of my reach, when I’m struck by a flash of genius - my friend, waiting in the car, she just got a smartphone! Now this is before the days where everyone over the age of two had a fucking smartphone, and I was still rocking the flip phone with the T9 texting and absolutely no way to surf the internet, but my friend most definitely could…she was probably watching cat videos on Youtube as I sat there. So I quickly texted her all the questions on the application and she googled them and sent me back abbreviated yet perfect answers. I must have looked like the goddamn rainman of organic food. I left the store feeling elated and smart and like there was no way I could lose. I got called in for an interview about five minutes after leaving and I was so smug I could barely contain it.

That changed when I actually got interviewed.

I figured they wouldn’t bother with the technical questions, since I’d already knocked those out of the park on the application, but the young hippy that was interviewing me did start asking about my attitude towards organic.  She asked if I tried to lead an organic lifestyle. I cringed inwardly at the magnitude of the lie I was about to tell: Of course I did, most definitely. She smiled and made a tick on her clipboard.

Now, I have to say that there is a demon inside me. Not your garden variety demon, mind you, not the one that makes you guzzle booze or take pills or get in fights, those aspects of my personality are embraced and make me the charming, rakish, scoundrel that everyone knows and loves. No, this demon, when encountered with people I find to be living or saying or demonstrating a lifestyle or idea or concept that I find to be obtuse, or vacuous, or ignorant, well, my particular demon forces me to tell them this. I have tried biting my tongue. I’ve tried placidly opening a civil dialogue; I’ve tried walking away, to no avail. I always say something. It always devolves into a fight. Every single time.

So when answering if I try to live my life organically, I should have said yes, and left it at that. But no… I quickly added, before the dread-headed manager could begin her next question: ‘when I can afford it’. She looked up from her clipboard, somewhat quizzically. I felt her silence urging me to continue. ‘Because it’s so expensive… compared to regular food.’ She put her pen down and smiled, ‘well, you get what you pay for,’ her voice had developed a slightly condescending tone which immediately got my hackles up, ‘and not only are you paying for a healthier lifestyle, but you’re paying to save the environment.’

This is when the floodgates opened. I felt myself leave my body and watched, floating above the scene, as this demon who was wearing my skin started spouting facts about how there are no studies giving credence to organic food being healthier and that because organic farms are less common and therefore not available everywhere, they have to ship the food farther, thus using more fossil fuels and creating more emissions, not to mention the fact that they use more pesticides and more land than conventional farming…

I returned to my body in time to hear the manager telling me to get the hell out.

I did not get that job.

I really, really, really need a job. And not just because I’m broke as all hell and beginning the sad spiral of not being able to afford to drink the pain away, but because if I don’t get a job, a real job, a job where I don’t wake up every morning screaming: I’ll go planting again. I don’t want to, but I can already feel it calling, and I’ve made certain promises to myself that I have to keep, no matter what.

So if anyone knows of an opening for an attractive, somewhat irrational, bad-tempered, alcoholic, smart ass with five incomplete university degrees, a license to operate a chainsaw, and who once got suspended in high school for ‘instigating revolution’, well, you know where to find me.