This is how I imagine the conversation going. I tell you you are no longer allowed to complain. And then, in agonizing detail, I explain to you point-by-point how all of your problems are self-inflicted. I imagine that you are rendered mute and immobile for some reason because otherwise I wouldn't be able to get through the whole list I have prepared. Or perhaps time itself is warped in some way because in my mind we are in a public place and the world around us stands still as I speak. Just so you understand how much I have thought about this.
- For reasons that are unclear to me you went to college for two years to attain a useless major that you decided to abandon in favor of going to college for another four years to attain a possibly more useless major (so useless that even the internet is vague in describing what it is exactly). As a result of these decisions you have a fair amount of debt you must now repay. You complain about your debt even though it's much less than what most people are working on repaying.
- You cannot attain a job having to do with your major. You complain about this even though you seem to be aware that your major was 'not as practical as other majors' you could have chosen.
- You have a lot of bills to pay every month because you choose to live alone in a one bedroom apartment. You complain about this despite the fact that you are aware a one bedroom apartment is nearly as expensive as a two bedroom apartment.
- As a result of your decision to live alone and your inability to get a well-paying job in spite of your college degree you have to work around sixty hours a week at two menial jobs in order to make enough money to pay for your rent and such. You complain about this profusely rather than doing anything to change the situation you're in.
- You often have to get up early in the morning. This is a direct result of your having to work but you complain about it regardless.
- You do not seem to like your boss. You complain to me about this person even though I do not know them and likely the only reason you dislike them is because they're your boss.
- Your work schedule is worthy of complaint and having to work 'doubles' (as in, a shift at one job and then a shift at another even though this may only account for ten hours of work in a day) is something you bring up every time they happen. You complain about this though if you did things differently you wouldn't have to work as much.
- You rarely get whole days off never mind multiple whole days in a row. This, again, is a direct result of the fact that you work two jobs and you still feel the need to complain about it whenever possible.
- You are often tired. You complain about this constantly though it is an obvious result of how much you work.
- Any physical ailment no matter how minor is worth complaining about at least twenty times a day for a week. You once complained about a tiny superficial cut to one of your fingers for no less than a week and insisted on giving me the play-by-play action for how it happened originally and how the healing had progressed in the meantime each time I saw you during this period.
- Any physical ailment worth complaining about is worth bringing up again long after it happened. You complain about injuries to your person long after they occur even though it should be obvious that a healed injury is not worthy of sympathy.
- You once complained to me that someone else we know does not like you. It turns out that this is because you never have anything new to talk about since the vast majority of your choice topics of conversation revolve around creating a giant pity-party for yourself.
I am willing to give you the benefit of a doubt. It is theoretically possible that you were somehow unaware that other people's live suck too and that often other people's lives suck through no fault of their own. However, now that you know this I am going to have to require that you no longer complain around me because it does not stir any kind of empathy in me- just irritation.
Showing posts with label job. Show all posts
Showing posts with label job. Show all posts
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Monday, October 10, 2011
Situational Irony
I had a lot of conveniently empty time in which to think the other morning while I was battling nausea and a runny nose at work. I had some initial thoughts earlier in the morning that revolved mostly around the fact that this was the fourth morning in the last five that I had thrown up and of course not actually eaten anything for breakfast before heading off to work. Once made sense to me because I started a new job Monday morning and extreme nervousness had previously had this effect on me. Four out of five, though? That seemed excessive. It seemed like my body was trying to communicate something that my logical mind had not yet figured out. And it had something to do with my new job, obviously. Taking the job had seemed wholly rational at the time and I doubt I'd make a different decision even if I could rewind up until that point three weeks ago.
Some of the things I thought about had nothing to do at all with the situation at hand but rather trying to get into the right mindset in order to even consider it. I settled on a mostly logical and partly math-driven decision making process. I started by doing some calculations of what my earnings were with and without this job. I calculated how much it was costing me to get there each day. I calculated the amount of time I spent traveling between my job and apartment and between that job and my other job. I calculated the hours I had spent actually in my apartment in the last five days. I calculated the number of hours I had genuinely enjoyed in that same time period. I calculated the approximate cost of getting my license and acquiring a car and sketched out a conservative timeline for that process to take place in. I ran into one of the same sort of logic spirals I had used as a counter-argument for why I hadn't bothered to get a second job when I first started living in this city. In order to have a second job I would need a car (true of this situation with the new job because of its location) and in order to afford to have a car I would need a second job.
Considering the slippery nature of the logic spiral and some of the less intrinsically calculable facets of this situation (including my happiness, the value of my non-work time, the fact that Linda would be much better at this job than I was, the fact that the very nature of the job riddled me with anxiety, the detrimental effects of having to get up early every morning would have on my mood and health, and the fact that I will soon be moving) I concluded I should make sure that this was within the bounds of reason before becoming fully committed to the conclusion I fairly inevitably came to. Actually, that's not true at all. I was pretty committed to the conclusion by the time I came to it. I just wanted to make sure that I was not acting irrationally while being blinded by my logical constructs. I was also fairly certain of this. I just thought I should check on the finer points.
The conclusion I had come to, though, was that I should stop working at my new job and Linda (who has for the past few months been a coworker of mine at my book-shuffling job) should do it instead because it was, in fact, the kind of job she was looking for when she'd settled on the place I work and she'd be much better at it. The downsides were few in that I thought that it might fluster my boss at the book-shuffling job and I might not get to work with Linda anymore. The only real obstacles to this conclusion were how to explain this to Linda without making her feel guilty about it (this was foremost in my mind despite it theoretically being lesser than the second obstacle) and also how I should go about explaining to my new boss that I didn't really think I wanted to be employed by him anymore. Previously when leaving jobs I always had genuine reasons for doing so such as my mother requiring back surgery and needing assistance (though that wasn't the whole truth of why I really left Amato's) and moving to another city. I was also in no way desirous to give a 'two weeks notice' as it were but neither did I want to actually quit. I considered whether the phrase 'I don't think this is working out' would be too much of a cop out or if it adequately encompassed my calculations regarding the situation without explaining them all explicitly.
Despite my inability to consult about this problem with another rational human being beforehand I was immensely relieved when my new boss made just the kind of leading statement I had in no way been expecting. He said: "You know, the hardest part about my job is when I have to do things like this." And I knew exactly what he meant by that. I was a little put out that I didn't get to break up with him first but the statement he followed with invited what would probably be a response he wasn't expecting. He followed with: "But I just don't think you're going to work out here." I agreed with him before he'd even finished what he was going to say. I think my firm agreement confused him because he started to launch into what felt like a prepared explanation of his motivations until I interrupted him again by agreeing with his assessment and after another half a phrase he seemed to realize that I'd actually been agreeing with him and no explanation was required. After that the sort of things you have to say in that situation were said. I told him to have a nice afternoon and left. We parted by mutual agreement.
I knew when I got to my book-shuffling job a short time later that the first thing Sue and Linda were going to ask me about was the other job. So I headed them off with saying something phrased roughly like this: "Well, he and I regrettably came to the same conclusion from different angles today. My logic had much more to do with the fact that it was not economically better for me to work there and physical illness due to the job itself and his logic seemed to have far more to do with the fact that I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a mind reader." I shrugged. I was going to stop working there anyway so what did it matter that he felt I should, too?
Linda asked me a short time later if it would be alright with me if she contacted the guy at the garage and saw about getting that job. I assured her that it would be fine. I spent all morning trying to manipulate things so Linda would work at the garage and I wouldn't and in spite of the fact that none of my machinations were even so much as set in motion they came to pass. Classic situational irony.
Some of the things I thought about had nothing to do at all with the situation at hand but rather trying to get into the right mindset in order to even consider it. I settled on a mostly logical and partly math-driven decision making process. I started by doing some calculations of what my earnings were with and without this job. I calculated how much it was costing me to get there each day. I calculated the amount of time I spent traveling between my job and apartment and between that job and my other job. I calculated the hours I had spent actually in my apartment in the last five days. I calculated the number of hours I had genuinely enjoyed in that same time period. I calculated the approximate cost of getting my license and acquiring a car and sketched out a conservative timeline for that process to take place in. I ran into one of the same sort of logic spirals I had used as a counter-argument for why I hadn't bothered to get a second job when I first started living in this city. In order to have a second job I would need a car (true of this situation with the new job because of its location) and in order to afford to have a car I would need a second job.
Considering the slippery nature of the logic spiral and some of the less intrinsically calculable facets of this situation (including my happiness, the value of my non-work time, the fact that Linda would be much better at this job than I was, the fact that the very nature of the job riddled me with anxiety, the detrimental effects of having to get up early every morning would have on my mood and health, and the fact that I will soon be moving) I concluded I should make sure that this was within the bounds of reason before becoming fully committed to the conclusion I fairly inevitably came to. Actually, that's not true at all. I was pretty committed to the conclusion by the time I came to it. I just wanted to make sure that I was not acting irrationally while being blinded by my logical constructs. I was also fairly certain of this. I just thought I should check on the finer points.
The conclusion I had come to, though, was that I should stop working at my new job and Linda (who has for the past few months been a coworker of mine at my book-shuffling job) should do it instead because it was, in fact, the kind of job she was looking for when she'd settled on the place I work and she'd be much better at it. The downsides were few in that I thought that it might fluster my boss at the book-shuffling job and I might not get to work with Linda anymore. The only real obstacles to this conclusion were how to explain this to Linda without making her feel guilty about it (this was foremost in my mind despite it theoretically being lesser than the second obstacle) and also how I should go about explaining to my new boss that I didn't really think I wanted to be employed by him anymore. Previously when leaving jobs I always had genuine reasons for doing so such as my mother requiring back surgery and needing assistance (though that wasn't the whole truth of why I really left Amato's) and moving to another city. I was also in no way desirous to give a 'two weeks notice' as it were but neither did I want to actually quit. I considered whether the phrase 'I don't think this is working out' would be too much of a cop out or if it adequately encompassed my calculations regarding the situation without explaining them all explicitly.
Despite my inability to consult about this problem with another rational human being beforehand I was immensely relieved when my new boss made just the kind of leading statement I had in no way been expecting. He said: "You know, the hardest part about my job is when I have to do things like this." And I knew exactly what he meant by that. I was a little put out that I didn't get to break up with him first but the statement he followed with invited what would probably be a response he wasn't expecting. He followed with: "But I just don't think you're going to work out here." I agreed with him before he'd even finished what he was going to say. I think my firm agreement confused him because he started to launch into what felt like a prepared explanation of his motivations until I interrupted him again by agreeing with his assessment and after another half a phrase he seemed to realize that I'd actually been agreeing with him and no explanation was required. After that the sort of things you have to say in that situation were said. I told him to have a nice afternoon and left. We parted by mutual agreement.
I knew when I got to my book-shuffling job a short time later that the first thing Sue and Linda were going to ask me about was the other job. So I headed them off with saying something phrased roughly like this: "Well, he and I regrettably came to the same conclusion from different angles today. My logic had much more to do with the fact that it was not economically better for me to work there and physical illness due to the job itself and his logic seemed to have far more to do with the fact that I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a mind reader." I shrugged. I was going to stop working there anyway so what did it matter that he felt I should, too?
Linda asked me a short time later if it would be alright with me if she contacted the guy at the garage and saw about getting that job. I assured her that it would be fine. I spent all morning trying to manipulate things so Linda would work at the garage and I wouldn't and in spite of the fact that none of my machinations were even so much as set in motion they came to pass. Classic situational irony.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Job Applications? Why bother?
I haven't decided if I am just inordinately lucky or if I have some kind of super-power but I realized when I was telling someone about my new job that not only have five out of my six jobs been great jobs but I've only ever even applied to one of them.
Jobs had:
Movie Theater
Music Theater
Amato's
Data Entry for the University of Maine
Book Store
Automotive
Job: Movie Theater
Acquired: Because my mother was working there when they needed to hire someone new and nepotism is something hicks in small towns do.
Pay: 50-75 cents above the State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Cleaning, selling tickets, doing concessions, changing the marquee, cash-up, inventory, answering the phone, talking to people.
Perks: Free movies, free popcorn, free fountain soda, cheap candy, ability to read while getting paid if otherwise not busy, Christmas bonus, time off if/when I needed it.
Downfalls: Customers who did not understand that it was a one-screen, customers who wanted to pay with plastic, customers who wanted to buy tickets in advance, the fact that the theater was sloped and not tiered and any soda spilled ran down hill, seven day weeks in the summer.
Job: Music Theater
Acquired: Because my friend was their regular light-person and he knew I could do lights (I used to for productions at our highschool where I learned by doing).
Pay: A dollar above state-mandated minimum wage at the time.
Duties: Lighting
Perks: Free dinner, free fountain soda, free shows, attractive actors to look at, ability to play Pyramid solataire (because it fit on the counter under the light board better than other versions) while working.
Downfalls: Lighting system occasionally overheated and flipped the breakers which made me have to quickly throw on the spot-lights, turn down the master some, and run and flip the breakers back on, I was not an official employee, I only worked when the regular person was off, and they tended to cancel shows without any warning even to me.
Job: Amato's
Acquired: I knew the manager and she agreed to hire me on the spot.
Pay: A dollar twenty-five above state mandated minimum wage starting out and was given a fifteen cent raise after three months.
Duties: Making food, prepping food, prepping vegetables, washing dishes, washing counters, prepping dough, taking things out of the freezer, lifting heavy things, sweeping, mopping, cash-up.
Perks: None. I didn't even get a discount.
Downfalls: Cameras, not allowed to eat food for free, no discount on anything, worked by myself primarily, did not get breaks because of the previous, was not allowed to sit down, was required to serve customers until nine but it took nearly an hour to close up and corporate got mad if I stayed after I was scheduled, co-workers, hot oven, cooking in a fast-paced situation, the grease that permeated everything, the cement floor, and customers.
Job: Data Entry for the University of Maine Acquired: The scientist my father had worked with on a fishing research project needed someone to turn physical logbooks into spreadsheets.
Pay: There was 1,200 dollars budgeted to pay someone to do the data entry.
Duties: Turn logbooks into spreadsheets.
Perks: Work from my own bedroom, task took a total of eight hours.
Downfalls: I couldn't keep doing it.
Job: Book Store
Acquired: By application.
Pay: State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Checking in books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, putting away books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, checking inventory in assigned book and magazine sections, straightening book and magazine sections, writing blog posts, making up displays and windows, helping customers find books, recommending books, checking people out, doing back-stock, some vacuuming and dusting, doing cash-up, and watching the customers.
Perks: Reading free books, discounts on store items, and talking to people who like books.
Downfalls: Dealing with customers who have no concept of reality, living with sometimes annoying coworkers, trying to figure out where to draw the line... for everything.
Job: Automotive
Acquired: Was informed of the job by a regular customer in the bookstore, told what it would involve, and was warned that the owner was very crude. I went in knowing I was capable of meeting the job requirements and confident that crude was something easy enough to deal with after living with a commercial fisherman for nineteen years.
Pay: One dollar and fifty cents above the state-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Opening mail, using Quickbooks and spreadsheets, answering the phone, doing billing, filing, updating the website, updating the company Facebook, smiling at people.
Perks: Nice pay, relatively easy work, would make a good future work reference, have permission to read when not otherwise occupied.
Downfalls: There are no buses that go past there and I may have to actually get my license. I have yet to work here but I suspect that 'dealing with customers' is probably going to be the biggest downfall.
Those five jobs that I didn't apply for but got anyway compared to the fifteen other jobs I applied to before I was hired at the bookstore and the several other applications I sent places since then that I never even got a call back on... Well, it makes me think that filing out applications might not be worth it.
Jobs had:
Movie Theater
Music Theater
Amato's
Data Entry for the University of Maine
Book Store
Automotive
Job: Movie Theater
Acquired: Because my mother was working there when they needed to hire someone new and nepotism is something hicks in small towns do.
Pay: 50-75 cents above the State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Cleaning, selling tickets, doing concessions, changing the marquee, cash-up, inventory, answering the phone, talking to people.
Perks: Free movies, free popcorn, free fountain soda, cheap candy, ability to read while getting paid if otherwise not busy, Christmas bonus, time off if/when I needed it.
Downfalls: Customers who did not understand that it was a one-screen, customers who wanted to pay with plastic, customers who wanted to buy tickets in advance, the fact that the theater was sloped and not tiered and any soda spilled ran down hill, seven day weeks in the summer.
Job: Music Theater
Acquired: Because my friend was their regular light-person and he knew I could do lights (I used to for productions at our highschool where I learned by doing).
Pay: A dollar above state-mandated minimum wage at the time.
Duties: Lighting
Perks: Free dinner, free fountain soda, free shows, attractive actors to look at, ability to play Pyramid solataire (because it fit on the counter under the light board better than other versions) while working.
Downfalls: Lighting system occasionally overheated and flipped the breakers which made me have to quickly throw on the spot-lights, turn down the master some, and run and flip the breakers back on, I was not an official employee, I only worked when the regular person was off, and they tended to cancel shows without any warning even to me.
Job: Amato's
Acquired: I knew the manager and she agreed to hire me on the spot.
Pay: A dollar twenty-five above state mandated minimum wage starting out and was given a fifteen cent raise after three months.
Duties: Making food, prepping food, prepping vegetables, washing dishes, washing counters, prepping dough, taking things out of the freezer, lifting heavy things, sweeping, mopping, cash-up.
Perks: None. I didn't even get a discount.
Downfalls: Cameras, not allowed to eat food for free, no discount on anything, worked by myself primarily, did not get breaks because of the previous, was not allowed to sit down, was required to serve customers until nine but it took nearly an hour to close up and corporate got mad if I stayed after I was scheduled, co-workers, hot oven, cooking in a fast-paced situation, the grease that permeated everything, the cement floor, and customers.
Job: Data Entry for the University of Maine Acquired: The scientist my father had worked with on a fishing research project needed someone to turn physical logbooks into spreadsheets.
Pay: There was 1,200 dollars budgeted to pay someone to do the data entry.
Duties: Turn logbooks into spreadsheets.
Perks: Work from my own bedroom, task took a total of eight hours.
Downfalls: I couldn't keep doing it.
Job: Book Store
Acquired: By application.
Pay: State-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Checking in books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, putting away books, magazines, newspapers and gift items, checking inventory in assigned book and magazine sections, straightening book and magazine sections, writing blog posts, making up displays and windows, helping customers find books, recommending books, checking people out, doing back-stock, some vacuuming and dusting, doing cash-up, and watching the customers.
Perks: Reading free books, discounts on store items, and talking to people who like books.
Downfalls: Dealing with customers who have no concept of reality, living with sometimes annoying coworkers, trying to figure out where to draw the line... for everything.
Job: Automotive
Acquired: Was informed of the job by a regular customer in the bookstore, told what it would involve, and was warned that the owner was very crude. I went in knowing I was capable of meeting the job requirements and confident that crude was something easy enough to deal with after living with a commercial fisherman for nineteen years.
Pay: One dollar and fifty cents above the state-mandated minimum wage.
Duties: Opening mail, using Quickbooks and spreadsheets, answering the phone, doing billing, filing, updating the website, updating the company Facebook, smiling at people.
Perks: Nice pay, relatively easy work, would make a good future work reference, have permission to read when not otherwise occupied.
Downfalls: There are no buses that go past there and I may have to actually get my license. I have yet to work here but I suspect that 'dealing with customers' is probably going to be the biggest downfall.
Those five jobs that I didn't apply for but got anyway compared to the fifteen other jobs I applied to before I was hired at the bookstore and the several other applications I sent places since then that I never even got a call back on... Well, it makes me think that filing out applications might not be worth it.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Are You Stuck in your job?
Are You Stuck in your job?
-or-
Face Value
While I was at work yesterday, busily straightening things (I often busily straighten things because it gives me an excuse to stand around and not actually do anything), a woman came in and asked if I worked there. The fact that I actually work there is, if I am not standing behind the counter, not immediately obvious to customers as there is not really a dress code and we don't wear name tags though a good hint in the winter at least is the fact that I am not wearing a coat. I said that I did and the woman said something that took her a little while to say but that the automatic filter my brain uses translated as having no meaning whatsoever. She handed me a piece of paper, smiled, and left.
I waited until she had gone to look at the paper she'd handed me. Even though it was simply black on white I assumed it was some kind of flier trying to sell me something. My eyes immediately went to the center of the flier where people always put a picture of the product or the most important text. What I read in the center made me back up and dismiss immediately throwing the paper away or handing it off to my boss. "You are invited to a Business Overview Open House".* Back up. Back up. What in the world is a "Business Overview Open House"? My first thought was that it was some kind of job fair. But the wording didn't really jive with that concept. No. The wording seemed to imply that it was a presentation about one specific business.
I decided to start reading the paper from the top. The first words that greeted me were: "Are You Stuck in your job?" Oh. Right. It had become immediately obvious to me what kind of "Business Overview Open House" this was going to be. The flier was so classic an example of one of those kind of businesses that I have to wonder that it's still worth the time of the people running them to make them work. If I had started reading at the top of the page the first words would have immediately made me realize that the rest of it was a waste of my time. And yet- enough people must believe it in order for it to be worth the money to rent a conference hall, drive all around town handing out fliers, register a domain name for a website, and bullshit at a bunch of people for an hour.
First, I'd like to try to imagine taking all of this at face value without knowing what I already know. You with me? Alright. Let's go. "Are You Stuck in your job?" Yes. The economy is dead. I applied to sixteen places before getting a single interview and I have to thank my nervous inability to shut up for getting me the job I have because my boss hires people because she likes talking to them. No really. I asked her about it. The job is simple enough that anyone literate can do it. Ideally my boss likes to hire people who like to read but it's not a requirement, you just have to be able to have a pleasant conversation with her.
"Do You Feel Like You're Worth More Than You're Getting Paid?" Abso-freaking-lutely. I work for minimum wage and if I ever want a raise I have to petition the company that owns the company I work for and hope they're feeling like I am an amazingly hard worker who deserves it even though they have no idea who I am. There are two pay levels where I work. Me and the manager. And the only way to become manager is to achieve seniority among the peons and then pray that my boss has a heart attack.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Really? Never really happened to me before. I could go for that. Seems like everyone else always has all the luck. "Visit: pplsucesschannel.com"** I am uncertain about why the webadress is printed here under the previous statement instead of at the bottom with the contact information but whatever, that does not concern me greatly. They have a website, they must be a legit business.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Oh my, the large font and the fact that this one statement takes up a quarter of the page makes me feel as though this is very important even though what a "Business Overview Open House" is is not clear.
"This Thursday, February 3rd, 2011" Okay, this Thursday. Alright. I am fired up to go to this and I will not forget because it's happening this week. "Located at the" Semi-classy Chain Hotel, 357 One of the Main Roads in Your Town, for some reason the postal code for your state and then the zipcode as though the last two are important for you to know to locate this place.
"Registration: 7:15 PM Presentation: 7:30-8:30 (Free to all guests)". Oh? I have to register. Meh. Going to assume the presentation is following the registration and not twelve hours later and oh- Hey. Look at that. It's free to all guests. And I was invited so I must be a guest.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Thirty-nine years? Wow. That's twice as old as I am. That must mean this company is legitimate. I am motivated and I'd certainly like to be my own boss and taking control of my future sounds great. I can't wait to go to this thing.
Flier Lady, Manager Contact information including phone number with areacode for my state. Oh. And there's contact information if I have questions, yet another sign of legitimacy.
Now, let's go back and re-read without all of the assumed optimism and a keener eye for howling errors than the imaginary person reading it before. Should I start with the obvious errors? There's a lot of unnecessary capitalization at the beginnings of words. I assume this is done for emphasis but if you want to make it look less awful you definitely need to follow-through with it. You shouldn't half-ass an unnecessarily capital-rich sentence or you'll end up with: "Are You Stuck in your job?" It just looks funny apart from being grammatically uncomfortable. As my friend assured me some conventions of grammar don't matter that much as long as you're consistent.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Not only am I uncertain why this is in parenthesis but that comma (located smack-dab in the middle between those two non-independent phrases) does not belong there. Words like "if" and "might" don't really belong in exclamatory sentences so that exclamation point probably doesn't belong either. Also, seriously, why is the web address right below the parenthetical statement instead of with the rest of the contact information? I don't get it.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Again with the awkward capitalization and failure to punctuate appropriately. The date and location seems okay at first but the lack of a qualifier (am or pm) for the time of the presentation itself is puzzling. "(Free to all guests)". Again, really, parentheses? They're so out of place I almost forgot to add them when I typed the quote and again punctuation is a thing which most people enjoy.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Oh god. Run-on sentences. Exclamation points. Inconsistency. Spelling errors. Oh god. Oh god, I just know that the grammar nazis of the internet are getting that uncontrolled twitch in their eye as they read this.
Now, if I can manage to stop cringing every time I look at the paper I can check the legitimacy of this flier. I'm going to ignore the website and get to that in a moment. Let's get to that paragraph at the bottom again. Meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a thirty-nine plus year old industry? Who are these people? Customers? No. More likely they're people who at least supposedly have been doing the job that's being pitched to you as your future job. Whether these people actually have or not is debatable and the only thing that's really important is that these are testimonials. Testimonials are used to make you think that it's possible and even easy to make money at this job. They will use certain key words and phrases to convince you of what your optimism wants to hear without actually lying or saying anything definitive at all. And that thirty-nine plus year old industry? Notice that they don't say that either the business you would be working for is over thirty-nine years old or what the "industry" itself actually is.
Now the name of the "Manager" and the phone number listed after it. I looked up the name in whitepages.com for my city. No hits. So I took a chance and checked for the entire state. We're in luck. The name is unique enough that I got only one hit. The town listed for the person is near-by where I live, maybe a forty-five minute drive tops. The age listed matches Flier Lady. And the listing says she's married. Flier Lady was wearing a wedding ring. (No, I wasn't checking out Flier Lady to notice this I just have some extreme difficulty with eye-contact with people I don't know. I can tell you a lot more about the hands of our regular customers and what they buy than anything else about them because that's what I look at.) Now, I know that area code is for this state but the regional code is for a cellphone and not a town. So I use the reverse lookup on whitepages to see about this cellphone. The owner lives in the same town as the listing for Flier Lady so I'm not going to bother punching in my own phone number (and paying them two bucks) just so they'll text me the cellphone owners name. So, what kind of manager of a supposedly thirty-nine year old business runs around handing out fliers to people like me, eh?
Now I'll check out their website. First I try a little trick I know to evaluate potential scams. You type in the business or address you think is suspect along with keywords like "scam" or "phony" or "rip-off" or "ponzi scheme" and Google it. No hits from the Better Business Bureau or even Yahoo!Answers. That's only marginally comforting. It just means that if this is a scam or scheme it's not very widespread. I type just their url into google (and no I'm not feeling lucky, thank you). I get a handful of hits. One of them is a domain name registry company. The registry informs me that this domain name was purchased on the sixth of January of this year. The website is not yet a month old. I'm feeling like there should be some alarm bells going off in most people's heads. I check the website itself. I don't get a WoT (which is Web of Trust, a Firefox add-on that will prevent you from going to pages full of nasty viruses and warn you when you are being inexplicably redirected and it has ratings for websites based on trustworthiness) warning which is also marginally comforting. The website is exactly one page and contains a thirty-minute video and two paragraphs of information.
As for the content of this website. Well, I tried watching the video, I really did. I watched a solid two minutes of it before I was ready to smash my face against my keyboard. If you want to know what the video was like- well I'll put it this way: Have you ever seen a thirty-minute infomercial in the wee hours of the morning? It was like that except instead of acne cream or rotisseries this was trying to sell you a... uhm... "business opportunity". The infomercial originally aired on January first of this year on the Fox Business Network. Bolded for reasons I'm sure you can discern.
The following is the text content of the website: "Publicly traded Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. gives individuals the opportunity to make a living while making a difference. Our sales force, comprised of Independent Associates across the United States and Canada, are involved with our company because it provides them unlimited income potential and the ability to set their own hours. They work as often or as little as they like. The service they share with others is something everyone needs and is affordable.
Their members benefit greatly from the legal service and identity theft shield plans. They receive access to professional legal counsel for things such as buying a house or a car; creating a will; handling a problem with an insurance company; dealing with identity theft; and much more where legal review should be routine, but rarely is. These events can be among the most important events in a person's life, yet there is a tendency for them to take place without proper legal review. For Pre-Paid Legal members, access to legal counsel is only a toll-free phone call away."
I only found one obvious grammatically uncomfortable sentence in this one (the last sentence of the first paragraph) but it's riddled with key phrases that make you think that not only can you make a lot of money by doing hardly anything but that you're actually helping people. Phrase intended to induce comfort and imply legitimacy: "Publicly traded company". Phrases intended to imply you can make tons without doing anything: "make a living" "unlimited income potential" "set their own hours" "work as often or as little as they like" ("They" referring to the sales force which the company wants you to be a part of.) The entire last paragraph is intended to make you think that the service you are selling would be helping people.
The website is copyrighted by a company called "Pre-paid Legal Services, Inc". For a fun trip, type that into Google or straight into your url bar and check out their website. Be sure to check out the page where they explain that they'll pay you $100 for each $26 referral you make to them and how that works. It made me actually literally laugh out loud. It was that funny.
So, allow me to summarize. There's this company, Pre-paid Legal Services, and they want to pay you $100 every time you sell someone a $26 dollar referral. I can't imagine that that twenty-six dollars isn't monthly. And if, by some miracle, that's not twenty-six dollars every month from each person they are going to send these people so much crap mail that if they ever need legal services they'll hire them and get money from that. And if the people don't hire them they could still make money from sending them junk mail or selling their mailing list to other companies who send junk mail. More than likely it's at least the first two if not all three.
Sure, you can make 100,000 dollars a year if you can sell just three "referrals" three hundred and thirty-four days a year (which, even if you worked five days a week every single week of the year at a regular job is seventy-four more work days, or two and a half months of extra work days). But do you know 1,000 people? Or how to go about convincing 1,000 people every year to buy this service? Most likely you can sell the service to your friends and family and co-workers (if you're smart enough to keep your day job) and that's a few hundred dollars for you while your friends and family shell out hundreds more to this company and receive a bunch of junk mail and start to wish they didn't know you before they finally sell their soul to the devil or cancel their credit cards in order to stop paying out on their subscription. And you'll still be stuck at your day job (or trying to find a new one) at the end of it all.
To conclude the question I ask you is not "Are You Stuck in your job?" but "Do you really think opportunities like this are better for you than the company who made them up?" And with that, I'm going to go get paid minimum wage to read and shuffle some books around because I have to go to that job I'm stuck in.
*Please note that I have intentionally kept the fidelity of any quotes used (spelling and grammar mistakes included) unless I otherwise mention that I've added emphasis or intentionally altered information to protect the identity of myvictim subject.
**Please note that there is actually a typographical error in the website name as it is listed on the flier. It should be pplsuccesschannel.com with two Cs in success.
-or-
Face Value
While I was at work yesterday, busily straightening things (I often busily straighten things because it gives me an excuse to stand around and not actually do anything), a woman came in and asked if I worked there. The fact that I actually work there is, if I am not standing behind the counter, not immediately obvious to customers as there is not really a dress code and we don't wear name tags though a good hint in the winter at least is the fact that I am not wearing a coat. I said that I did and the woman said something that took her a little while to say but that the automatic filter my brain uses translated as having no meaning whatsoever. She handed me a piece of paper, smiled, and left.
I waited until she had gone to look at the paper she'd handed me. Even though it was simply black on white I assumed it was some kind of flier trying to sell me something. My eyes immediately went to the center of the flier where people always put a picture of the product or the most important text. What I read in the center made me back up and dismiss immediately throwing the paper away or handing it off to my boss. "You are invited to a Business Overview Open House".* Back up. Back up. What in the world is a "Business Overview Open House"? My first thought was that it was some kind of job fair. But the wording didn't really jive with that concept. No. The wording seemed to imply that it was a presentation about one specific business.
I decided to start reading the paper from the top. The first words that greeted me were: "Are You Stuck in your job?" Oh. Right. It had become immediately obvious to me what kind of "Business Overview Open House" this was going to be. The flier was so classic an example of one of those kind of businesses that I have to wonder that it's still worth the time of the people running them to make them work. If I had started reading at the top of the page the first words would have immediately made me realize that the rest of it was a waste of my time. And yet- enough people must believe it in order for it to be worth the money to rent a conference hall, drive all around town handing out fliers, register a domain name for a website, and bullshit at a bunch of people for an hour.
First, I'd like to try to imagine taking all of this at face value without knowing what I already know. You with me? Alright. Let's go. "Are You Stuck in your job?" Yes. The economy is dead. I applied to sixteen places before getting a single interview and I have to thank my nervous inability to shut up for getting me the job I have because my boss hires people because she likes talking to them. No really. I asked her about it. The job is simple enough that anyone literate can do it. Ideally my boss likes to hire people who like to read but it's not a requirement, you just have to be able to have a pleasant conversation with her.
"Do You Feel Like You're Worth More Than You're Getting Paid?" Abso-freaking-lutely. I work for minimum wage and if I ever want a raise I have to petition the company that owns the company I work for and hope they're feeling like I am an amazingly hard worker who deserves it even though they have no idea who I am. There are two pay levels where I work. Me and the manager. And the only way to become manager is to achieve seniority among the peons and then pray that my boss has a heart attack.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Really? Never really happened to me before. I could go for that. Seems like everyone else always has all the luck. "Visit: pplsucesschannel.com"** I am uncertain about why the webadress is printed here under the previous statement instead of at the bottom with the contact information but whatever, that does not concern me greatly. They have a website, they must be a legit business.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Oh my, the large font and the fact that this one statement takes up a quarter of the page makes me feel as though this is very important even though what a "Business Overview Open House" is is not clear.
"This Thursday, February 3rd, 2011" Okay, this Thursday. Alright. I am fired up to go to this and I will not forget because it's happening this week. "Located at the" Semi-classy Chain Hotel, 357 One of the Main Roads in Your Town, for some reason the postal code for your state and then the zipcode as though the last two are important for you to know to locate this place.
"Registration: 7:15 PM Presentation: 7:30-8:30 (Free to all guests)". Oh? I have to register. Meh. Going to assume the presentation is following the registration and not twelve hours later and oh- Hey. Look at that. It's free to all guests. And I was invited so I must be a guest.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Thirty-nine years? Wow. That's twice as old as I am. That must mean this company is legitimate. I am motivated and I'd certainly like to be my own boss and taking control of my future sounds great. I can't wait to go to this thing.
Flier Lady, Manager Contact information including phone number with areacode for my state. Oh. And there's contact information if I have questions, yet another sign of legitimacy.
Now, let's go back and re-read without all of the assumed optimism and a keener eye for howling errors than the imaginary person reading it before. Should I start with the obvious errors? There's a lot of unnecessary capitalization at the beginnings of words. I assume this is done for emphasis but if you want to make it look less awful you definitely need to follow-through with it. You shouldn't half-ass an unnecessarily capital-rich sentence or you'll end up with: "Are You Stuck in your job?" It just looks funny apart from being grammatically uncomfortable. As my friend assured me some conventions of grammar don't matter that much as long as you're consistent.
"(If you answered YES to either of these questions, then you just might be in the right place at the right time!)" Not only am I uncertain why this is in parenthesis but that comma (located smack-dab in the middle between those two non-independent phrases) does not belong there. Words like "if" and "might" don't really belong in exclamatory sentences so that exclamation point probably doesn't belong either. Also, seriously, why is the web address right below the parenthetical statement instead of with the rest of the contact information? I don't get it.
"You are invited to a Business Overview Open House". Again with the awkward capitalization and failure to punctuate appropriately. The date and location seems okay at first but the lack of a qualifier (am or pm) for the time of the presentation itself is puzzling. "(Free to all guests)". Again, really, parentheses? They're so out of place I almost forgot to add them when I typed the quote and again punctuation is a thing which most people enjoy.
"Come and hear more and meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a 39 plus year old industry whose time has come! If you are a motivated, people person and interested in being your own boss part time or full time, then this 1 hour could be the most important hour you take to here the possibilities and take control of your future!" Oh god. Run-on sentences. Exclamation points. Inconsistency. Spelling errors. Oh god. Oh god, I just know that the grammar nazis of the internet are getting that uncontrolled twitch in their eye as they read this.
Now, if I can manage to stop cringing every time I look at the paper I can check the legitimacy of this flier. I'm going to ignore the website and get to that in a moment. Let's get to that paragraph at the bottom again. Meet some people who are enjoying the benefits of a thirty-nine plus year old industry? Who are these people? Customers? No. More likely they're people who at least supposedly have been doing the job that's being pitched to you as your future job. Whether these people actually have or not is debatable and the only thing that's really important is that these are testimonials. Testimonials are used to make you think that it's possible and even easy to make money at this job. They will use certain key words and phrases to convince you of what your optimism wants to hear without actually lying or saying anything definitive at all. And that thirty-nine plus year old industry? Notice that they don't say that either the business you would be working for is over thirty-nine years old or what the "industry" itself actually is.
Now the name of the "Manager" and the phone number listed after it. I looked up the name in whitepages.com for my city. No hits. So I took a chance and checked for the entire state. We're in luck. The name is unique enough that I got only one hit. The town listed for the person is near-by where I live, maybe a forty-five minute drive tops. The age listed matches Flier Lady. And the listing says she's married. Flier Lady was wearing a wedding ring. (No, I wasn't checking out Flier Lady to notice this I just have some extreme difficulty with eye-contact with people I don't know. I can tell you a lot more about the hands of our regular customers and what they buy than anything else about them because that's what I look at.) Now, I know that area code is for this state but the regional code is for a cellphone and not a town. So I use the reverse lookup on whitepages to see about this cellphone. The owner lives in the same town as the listing for Flier Lady so I'm not going to bother punching in my own phone number (and paying them two bucks) just so they'll text me the cellphone owners name. So, what kind of manager of a supposedly thirty-nine year old business runs around handing out fliers to people like me, eh?
Now I'll check out their website. First I try a little trick I know to evaluate potential scams. You type in the business or address you think is suspect along with keywords like "scam" or "phony" or "rip-off" or "ponzi scheme" and Google it. No hits from the Better Business Bureau or even Yahoo!Answers. That's only marginally comforting. It just means that if this is a scam or scheme it's not very widespread. I type just their url into google (and no I'm not feeling lucky, thank you). I get a handful of hits. One of them is a domain name registry company. The registry informs me that this domain name was purchased on the sixth of January of this year. The website is not yet a month old. I'm feeling like there should be some alarm bells going off in most people's heads. I check the website itself. I don't get a WoT (which is Web of Trust, a Firefox add-on that will prevent you from going to pages full of nasty viruses and warn you when you are being inexplicably redirected and it has ratings for websites based on trustworthiness) warning which is also marginally comforting. The website is exactly one page and contains a thirty-minute video and two paragraphs of information.
As for the content of this website. Well, I tried watching the video, I really did. I watched a solid two minutes of it before I was ready to smash my face against my keyboard. If you want to know what the video was like- well I'll put it this way: Have you ever seen a thirty-minute infomercial in the wee hours of the morning? It was like that except instead of acne cream or rotisseries this was trying to sell you a... uhm... "business opportunity". The infomercial originally aired on January first of this year on the Fox Business Network. Bolded for reasons I'm sure you can discern.
The following is the text content of the website: "Publicly traded Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. gives individuals the opportunity to make a living while making a difference. Our sales force, comprised of Independent Associates across the United States and Canada, are involved with our company because it provides them unlimited income potential and the ability to set their own hours. They work as often or as little as they like. The service they share with others is something everyone needs and is affordable.
Their members benefit greatly from the legal service and identity theft shield plans. They receive access to professional legal counsel for things such as buying a house or a car; creating a will; handling a problem with an insurance company; dealing with identity theft; and much more where legal review should be routine, but rarely is. These events can be among the most important events in a person's life, yet there is a tendency for them to take place without proper legal review. For Pre-Paid Legal members, access to legal counsel is only a toll-free phone call away."
I only found one obvious grammatically uncomfortable sentence in this one (the last sentence of the first paragraph) but it's riddled with key phrases that make you think that not only can you make a lot of money by doing hardly anything but that you're actually helping people. Phrase intended to induce comfort and imply legitimacy: "Publicly traded company". Phrases intended to imply you can make tons without doing anything: "make a living" "unlimited income potential" "set their own hours" "work as often or as little as they like" ("They" referring to the sales force which the company wants you to be a part of.) The entire last paragraph is intended to make you think that the service you are selling would be helping people.
The website is copyrighted by a company called "Pre-paid Legal Services, Inc". For a fun trip, type that into Google or straight into your url bar and check out their website. Be sure to check out the page where they explain that they'll pay you $100 for each $26 referral you make to them and how that works. It made me actually literally laugh out loud. It was that funny.
So, allow me to summarize. There's this company, Pre-paid Legal Services, and they want to pay you $100 every time you sell someone a $26 dollar referral. I can't imagine that that twenty-six dollars isn't monthly. And if, by some miracle, that's not twenty-six dollars every month from each person they are going to send these people so much crap mail that if they ever need legal services they'll hire them and get money from that. And if the people don't hire them they could still make money from sending them junk mail or selling their mailing list to other companies who send junk mail. More than likely it's at least the first two if not all three.
Sure, you can make 100,000 dollars a year if you can sell just three "referrals" three hundred and thirty-four days a year (which, even if you worked five days a week every single week of the year at a regular job is seventy-four more work days, or two and a half months of extra work days). But do you know 1,000 people? Or how to go about convincing 1,000 people every year to buy this service? Most likely you can sell the service to your friends and family and co-workers (if you're smart enough to keep your day job) and that's a few hundred dollars for you while your friends and family shell out hundreds more to this company and receive a bunch of junk mail and start to wish they didn't know you before they finally sell their soul to the devil or cancel their credit cards in order to stop paying out on their subscription. And you'll still be stuck at your day job (or trying to find a new one) at the end of it all.
To conclude the question I ask you is not "Are You Stuck in your job?" but "Do you really think opportunities like this are better for you than the company who made them up?" And with that, I'm going to go get paid minimum wage to read and shuffle some books around because I have to go to that job I'm stuck in.
*Please note that I have intentionally kept the fidelity of any quotes used (spelling and grammar mistakes included) unless I otherwise mention that I've added emphasis or intentionally altered information to protect the identity of my
**Please note that there is actually a typographical error in the website name as it is listed on the flier. It should be pplsuccesschannel.com with two Cs in success.
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