I recently got a new job after being on the hunt for a little over a year. Damn you, flaccid economy! It was a long process, all told, spanning eighteen interviews, countless reassessments of the happiness/salary/workplace correlation, and two very brief moments in history where I considered jobs I have historically deemed unsavory: retail and clowning. It was a long exhausting process that has, for now, come to an end.
This process is not a foreign one. Having recently entered my 30s, I have watched several friends in various age brackets wade through the troughs of gainful employment. I myself have held far too many jobs in what most HR professionals would surely deem far too short a time span. There are many reasons for my fickle CV —new opportunities, new locations—but mostly the good old realization that I just don’t like what I do. And I am not alone. The majority of people I know legitimately hate their jobs, resent their schedules and mutter curse-laden voodoo spells under their breath whenever their boss’s names are mentioned. They dream of breaking out, telling people off and fucking people over. Resignation becomes a semi-religious term; two-weeks’ notice the epicenter of the canon of the disgruntled.
We who hate our jobs are not a passive bunch by nature, with our manic dreams of freedom and machete-wielding revenge (metaphorical of course, Rambo), but we become passive and pliant on the surface, usually while silently plotting our escape, and usually after our spirits have been broken.
Yo. Wanna Hire Me?
But then, something changes, a little spark of mutiny that says it’s not worth it anymore, that something else must be better, that I am getting the eff out of here and you can’t effing stop me (angry people swear). Maybe this time comes when you have been at a job for a matter of months or years (and more than once in my life, days), and that anger turns to action. Wide nets are cast, monster.com is bookmarked, and the process begins. And what an odd, defeating and misaligned process that is.
Having just been through it, I will tell you why:
First, there is the resume. The whole concept of this simple document irks me in ways I find it difficult to express without a paper shredder. It can be summed up in one word: formatting. Heaven forbid you don’t indent! Or use seven tiers of bullets! Or Times New Roman the shit out of that thing! No one would ever know what you do without these very strict guidelines, so do not buck the trend, whatever you do, dear GOD not that. You shall not get a job ever in your whole life without learning the valuable craft of being able to distill the skills you’ve spent a life honing in seven lines or less. Someday, I am going to submit a resume that looks like this:
Right now I work in a sad brown building. I want to work in your happy building. High five?
Once your prospective employer has read your resume and deemed you worthy of speaking to, the interview process begins. The interview process is in and of itself a skill to master. As a candidate, you must try not to be nervous, attempt confidence without cockiness, look people in the eye, answer questions without stuttering, ask questions without drooling and try to control your bowels. Come on people, that is HARD. You also have to somehow, in a 15-minutes to one-hour meeting in a stale office with one or more strangers, convince them that you are the person that they want to spend 40 hours a week working next to. That seems … what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh yes. EFFING IMPOSSIBLE. It’s a crap shoot, on their end and on yours, since there is no way to determine whether or not you want to hang out with them either. It’s signing up for a committed relationship after the first date. It’s moving to a country having just spoken to a local who describes things in only broken English. It’s committing to buying a smuggled giraffe without even meeting it first. It’s a gamble.
Sometimes, though, that gamble seems like a risk you both parties are willing to take, and that’s when you get the magical phone call that you subconsciously, or in my case, actively and painfully anxiously, wait for. My heart starts beating too fast. My mouth turns dry. One single thought passes through my mind: this could change my life. That is the great part about this process, the pure unbridled hope that comes with a new professional opportunity. What will this lead to? What will I learn? What will I do with all that CASH MONEY? (I wish). Now, yes, of course it is true that sometimes a new job is not a better job. Sometimes a new job is a soul-sucking siege in which you feel a pleasant mix of woefully incompetent and emotionally sodomized each and every day. But once more into the breach, dear friends, because what else can we do?
If you accept their acceptance of you and a deal is struck, the next step is alerting your employer that you have accepted a new job. This can be quite tricky, as throughout the interview process you have probably engaged in some serious covert ops and black magic to escape from the office at semi-regular intervals, or alternatively, developed a seemingly interminable but not serious medical condition which requires many visits to the doctor’s office. Them realizing that you have been lying to their face for month is, sadly, not the end of the awkwardness. There is also the actual saying of the words, which can be more or less painful depending on your current status at work and your current boss’s disposition. Often times, we disgruntled hoards fantasize about screaming “I QUIT! AND YOUR MOTHER’S A WHORE! AND YOU SOMETIMES SMELL LIKE CHEESE!*” or enumerating the exact ways they have shattered your psyche. In my experience, however, it rarely plays out like that. Usually it’s an initial statement followed by odd banter peppered with support and we’ll miss yous and the slow look of realization on their face that this means they suddenly have more work to do. It is a slow and subtle revenge, but sweet.
The future oddness comes mostly from coworkers with various degrees of social aptitude congratulating you on your new venture, all while lamenting their own stagnancy. It’s inevitably a guilt-laden conversation about how you have escaped, and are leaving them behind, and how mad they are that you are leaving because you won’t be making them cookies any more (I bake for popularity).
I am your friend.
And then the last day is rapidly approaching, as mine currently is, and for the first time in three years I am facing down a big unknown, all while trying to inject the last vestiges of meaning into the menial job I have been trying to leave for over one calendar year. It’s a conflicting feeling. I imagine it’s how freed captives must feel, or animals released into the wild, or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman scouting for land in that bad movie in which they had accents and tried to hide their height difference while scouting for plots of land. The discontent here has become comfortable, familiar, steady in its annoyance. And even though I have no real sense of what this new opportunity will bring, and though the process of applying to it and other jobs has been challenging, logic defying, and draining, I do believe it was worth it. I feel like I have achieved something by navigating the job field without blowing the whole thing up. It seems anticlimactic—I am not going out in a blaze of glory, nor with a bang, but that is ok with me. Armed with a large slice of celebratory cake, I will walk out those doors on Friday and allow myself one last bit of hope: that I won’t have to go through this again for a long, long time.
*A tangy cheese, like an emmentaler or an Extreme Nacho Dorito.
***
Eryn Ashley has two first names. She likes to tell people what to do. However, if she wants your opinion, she will beat it out of you.