A Week in my Unemployed Life: Part Two

and hopefully there is no part three, but there probably will be, so like and subscribe

You can read Part 0 and Part 1 here before reading this, but it’s optional. Also — I have included a voice over where I read things in the tone I wrote them in and with some different voices. if u like audio, feel free to listen and give me feedback bc i have not recorded anything before!

Tuesday: Try-out day. No, this is not for varsity volleyball at my high school.

I am a 24-year-old with five years of professional work experience, a Bachelors degree from a reputable university, and glowing recommendations.

I am also being “tried out” in office for this woman, who might do me the immense favor of hiring me to be her assistant everyday from 9-6 for $4,000 per month, no benefits. Even though 80% of the job is deleting her spam emails and preparing Evites, she needs to try out multiple top contenders in her office to see if they are equipped to click on the trashcan icon of the Mail desktop app and bring her mail to her kitchen island from the mailbox. so glad I got my degree for this!

***

I might make a separate post on this topic: but the problem with the job market is not simply that there are no jobs.

When there really is a job, applicants are now required to jump through so many fucking hoops. The most entry level ass shit requires you to:

1. Make an account on the company’s unique job hiring website, even though there’s literally an option to just take resumes through Indeed and LinkedIn, where they have already posted the job opening.

2. Re-write the summaries of all your jobs, even though your resume already has them.

3. Potentially answer a bunch of BS questions like “Why are you suited for this job?” that they will also inevitably ask you in the interview.

4. Take some sort of exam to show your proficiency in Microsoft Suite and typing speed — literally what the fuck is this thing with the typing speed? How old are the people asking for this? Is there really anyone alive today under the age of 55 who doesn’t type at an acceptably adept rate? There’s a conspiratorial part of me that thinks HR execs and recruiters actually know this, but still make you do the typing test not to test your typing speed, but to test your willingness to do absolute meaningless bullshit for a dime. That’s the real test, and that’s what all of this is doing.

5. Have a Zoom interview with some “talent acquisition” person or the person hiring you directly.

6. Have a “second round” interview with some other jerk off who doesn’t seem to have any direct relation to the role for which you’re applying.

7. Complete some task to show that you are able to do what they are hiring you for — whether it’s writing email blasts, copy for ads, editing TikTok videos, color correcting commercials, creating a lesson plan for students, whatever. Oh and of course, you will not get paid for completing this task. Also, you will have to do this task even if you have a resume and recommendations which confirm your ability to either do these tasks, or quickly learn how to do them on the job, although the latter is often not an option anymore.

8. And now — apparently — spend a day or two being tried out in the office.

9. Get a rejection email three months after they said they’d get back to you.

10. Go back to Indeed and LinkedIn.

After making an account on the job’s unique website, typing out everything that’s already in the resume they asked for, replying to a bunch of short answer questions, completing two interview rounds, completing a “test” task — you’ve never gotten paid for any of this work, and are still unemployed. I think this should be illegal.

These separate job application portal websites are the biggest bullshit ever. They were all made by tech assholes who “have made an exciting new employee intake web digital platform which maximizes efficiency of the job onboarding talent acquisition and application process of the KPI B2B brand client customer-service-based companies for online SEO marketing with AI assistance,” blah blah blah.

You know the type of sentence I’m talking about, the one that would probably make someone in Medieval Europe die of the bubonic plague on the spot.

Separate job application portals which require a password are literally the virus of our time, and the tech charlatans and HR freaks who peddle them are the plague-spreading rats of our epoch.

This meme is basically how work feels now. we have the technology and infrastructure to simply work 20 hours per week and never invent a new online platform again, and yet life sounds like this:

***

Tryout day No. 1.

This woman, Joann, is a producer of commercials and celebrity wedding videos. Her husband is a major Hollywood interior designer. I am trying out to be her assistant, in her home’s back house’s (one of the many) office.

When I arrive, she asks if I can come in the next day too. I say yes.

Unsurprisingly, as I find out through the course of my two-day trial period, Joann is a deranged white woman. And I can say that, because, well…from one to another. Of course, I will not be able to achieve her level of deranged white woman-ness in my lifetime, not even close. I do deeply aspire to it, but I just don’t think I’ll get quite there, unfortunately.

What kind of deranged white woman are we talking here? Creme de la creme, baby!

She lives in a ten-million dollar house within a gated community in a neighborhood that’s not even remotely reachable via any LA bus routes.

Here are the major assistant tasks I do on my first day, under the training of her current assistant (Malia), who has decided to quit after four months:

A. Check Joann’s email and delete all the spam. Honestly she gets pretty good spam emails. I forward some of the sales to myself. Then I delete that in her sent mailbox (see, tech savviness)

B. On a tour of the estate (I don’t want to offend any LA real estate agents by calling this simply a property) the current assistant brings me into a room in one of the many back houses and garages.

“This is where they keep their files and archive for any scientology stuff,” Malia says.

There is a pause. We both know what the pause is about.

Hopefully — stupidly — I ask: “Oh, are they researching it? Or are they in the church?”

“They’re all members of the Church of Scientology,” Malia replies flatly.

“They’re all” is Joann, her husband, and her five adult children and their partners who have taken over various back houses and wings of Joann’s estate despite being all being over 30. I guess I can’t really judge as a 24-year-old living at home.

C. During my second hour there, Joann hands me a paper filled with chicken scratch notes. With a smirk that could put the devil to shame, she says, “Here, you can handle reading my convoluted handwriting and turning it into a cute itinerary for my trip to London next week, right?” I decode her handwriting with ease. Then I am like, damn this bitch can spend money! Her itinerary literally includes a section entitled:

“Harrod’s — shopping — 5:30”

All of the restaurants come up on Google, and they all have four next to them (except it’s London so make that a pound sign). I print out her show tickets, and they all cost over $200.

I think back to my time in Europe last year, when I worked as an English teaching fellow for 700 euro per month. My trips to Sarajevo and Granada were itinerized based on free things to do, museums which had a student discount, and the most local/authentic/affordable restaurants, which I often found on the fly by following my nose, and left time open to simply wander, find adventure, or let it find me.

D. Joann is hosting a party in February, so I have to make a perfect Evite to her specifications, and make sure to mark guest settings as “private” so that the regular rich people she’s invited can’t see the names and emails of the B-list celebs she’s inviting.

E. The one cool, creative thing I get to do for her is prepare an email blast to her subscribers about her most recent work, for which I make a GIF. I also get to make a video for her TikTok, which I script and direct and edit, which was fun! And she really liked the video and asked to post it on socials. So hopefully that gets me somewhere, something.

F. At the end of the day, I go down the winding, steep, narrow path from the house to the street-level mailbox. Malia and I deliver the mail to everyone’s rooms. I keep hearing that to break into Hollywood, you gotta start in a mailroom, so maybe this counts?

F. She lives behind a security-guarded gate, so I have to periodically check her email to see if there’s some new person coming over to do her hair, nails, wipe her asshole for her, whatever, and then add them to the gate’s website for that day so the security guard doesn’t accidentally shoot at some innocent person who’s committed the crime of driving within the vicinity of this neighborhood in anything other than a Bentley, Range Rover, or Tesla, without making up for the eyesore of their Toyota or Honda by doing some white woman’s hair, nails, or wiping her asshole for her.

***

Now here is where things get bleak. Are you ready?

I was under the impression that Joann was done hiring people, because she said that to me, and that she was just trying me out in the office and one other top contender the following week (so right now).

But I keep seeing job applications come in, because I guess she forgot to close her posting on ZipRecruiter.

Malia says, “Oh, we don’t need those anymore!”

Because I thought they were done interviewing, I figure Malia means that they literally don’t need the applications anymore, the hiring process is done, and I can delete the new resumes.

Delete. Delete. A new one comes in. Delete.

Then it dawns on me: Malia said “we don’t need those anymore” in a cutesy tone. Literally, Joann was still interviewing new people.

Malia was trying to politely say she hopes I get the job over those people, so we hopefully “don’t need them,” but actually we still do.

So — if you ever applied somewhere and never heard back, it’s possible that someone already being tried out for the job or whatever had access to the boss’s email address and deleted your application sight unseen due to some office politics-y miscommunication.

Against my normal cutthroat instincts, I try to undelete as many as possible. It seems like bad karma to not.

Then, I see a new, live email correspondence. Joann is emailing back-and-forth with a new woman to interview, while I am only three hours into trying out in the office. Even after asking two to three people to come in for multiple days of work, she is still talking to brand new people.

And I thought I was good at running a rotation!

She must know I can see these emails. As I am literally in her office, committing a total of 11 hours per day to her, she is showing me email notifications of her considering someone else, and not even the other top contestant that she said would be here the week after me. She’s literally still fucking interviewing people! Completely new people! And letting me know! While I prepare her stupid ass itinerary and fuck ass evite.

I look at her other emails with other applicants. One asks if the job provides benefits, Joann clarifies that it does not.

This new woman, Diana, says she can come over that day for an interview.

Diana says she’s coming from Downey. Downey is Southeast, and quite far in terms of traffic from where Joann lives.

If Diana leaves work there at 5, she can get to this house at around 6:30, she says via email. Joann asks Diana if she plans to move closer, as she thought Diana lived closer based on something in her application.

I feel like I am in the belly of the beast. This is the hiring process. You live too far, you want benefits, you apply to a nearly defunct job opening, your resume gets deleted instantly.

It’s clear Joann wants someone who lives closer so that she doesn’t have to deal with an assistant being 30 minutes late due to LA rush hour traffic, like Malia sometimes is.

Let me make this very clear: you have to be absolutely deranged to want to hire an assistant for $4,000 per month with no benefits and then also expect them to live near your gated neighborhood, the type of neighborhood where people have personal assistants. For legal reasons, I won’t say where Joann lives, just that it maybe rhymes with Shmeverly Shmills.

HOW THE FUCK IS SOMEONE SUPPOSED TO LIVE A 20-MINUTE DRIVE AWAY FROM YOUR SHMEVERLY SHMILLS GATED ASS HOUSE COMMUNITY AND ALSO WORK FOR $4,000 PER MONTH?

If you want an assistant who lives in Smeverly Smills, you need to pay them enough to live there.

Why this woman is giving any lip to someone for living in Downey, and then barely paying what In N Out offers, is truly so beyond the pale of basic sanity and human decency that I’m not sure there’s even a psychological intervention in existence which could correct such an unspeakable error of perception, sense of reality, logic.

***

Day 2.

Malia tells me about the job periodically throughout the day.

I find out that sometimes it takes an hour and a half for her to get to work here, and that the second she gets home all she has the energy or time to do is make dinner, shower, fall asleep.

I find out that she is 28 and has two Masters degrees, both of which she got online through a fairly reputable university. She’s also working this benefit-less job for $4,000.

When I ask her what she wants to do next, all she says is, “Something that makes a lot of money.”

***

As I leave Joann’s office, she says, “Oh, and ask Malia to write you a check for $400 for the two days.”

I do not jump with joy, although I want to.

“Thank you so much, I really appreciated the opportunity to work with you the last few days,” I say politely, then slowly shut the sliding crystal-glass door of her private office.

On the way home, I talk on the phone to an old mentor of mine. He advises me to ask for hourly pay, “because if they pay you a salary, they’re going to try to squeeze every bit of time and energy out of you for that $1,000 per week.”

I say that I care more about having some time to myself during the week, so I’d rather ask to come in from 10-6, not 9-6, or even 10:30-6:30 so I could beat traffic. If I become indispensable after six months, I’ll ask if I can work from home one day per week.

Here is where I can hear the angry shrill of a million boomers: “All these lazy fucking Gen Z work somewhere for three months then ask if they can work from home half the week or come in at noon, fucking spoiled brats.”

Here are some affirmations, say them with me, especially if you’re over 55:

1. It is not spoiled to want free time during the week. Time is our most precious resource.

2. It is not normal to spend 8 to 9 AM in a commute, 9 to 6 PM sitting hunched over a computer screen doing meaningless work, then 6 to 7 PM commuting again, then having two hours to just eat dinner, shower, and watch TV before passing out.

3. I am a Human Being. YOU TOO, are a Human Being. Human Beings were not put on this earth to drive for two hours on the freeway, write emails, eat mediocre food in isolation, and watch Netflix five days in a row between the ages of 22-65 with two weeks of time off.

4. A work life balance of 50-50 is normal to want. 50-50 is a balance, not 75-25.

I am grateful that my generation is not only waking up to the fact that a lot of the expectations around work are not normal — but normalizing demanding something better. It is not that Gen-Z doesn’t want to work, it’s that we want to work in a way which is humane and makes sense.

I want to be clear too that I am more than happy to “pay my dues” so to speak and work some random, entry-level assistant job where I mostly delete emails and deliver mail. I am not above that by any means. At the same time, because this is my blog, I get to ponder here: the work day leaves me wondering what this job has to do with what I want to do, which is hard to figure out as a young person.

My friends in their 30s all have chaotic trajectories; I know that you never know what one thing will lead to or where your career will take you. People now work jobs that have nothing to do with their degree, and move between industries all the time with the right resume pitch and networking.

So even though deleting emails and preparing itineraries might not directly relate to me becoming a comedy writer, an author, or both, I understand it’s all part of the process and something is better than nothing. It’s just hard to see how right now.

Nevertheless, as I lurch slowly forward on the 405, blasting my car’s heat and BRAT, I wonder if there is something else I should be doing, some other path I should try to take. It feels like maybe there are other paths, but they’re covered by so much shrubbery that I won’t be able to see them until I’m already up at the top of the mountain.

***
I get an email from the HR Department of the City of Santa Monica. I had applied for a Staff Assistant position there in December. Before the initial interview, I have to take an exam first, which of course tests: my typing speed, my knowledge of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and reading comprehension.

The section on Word is incredibly glitchy and I probably fail 2/3 of it. If I click on something, a button, or even click around, the program sometimes considers that an answer submission and gives me a big red INCORRECT pop-up on the screen before moving me to the next question.

I slay the Excel section, because it’s less glitchy, and because I find all the answers on Youtube. Shout out to everyone who posts those random 80 second clips on Youtube on how to remove borders or convert a section to currency on Excel.

Some people are going to be pissed I cheated. Here is what I would say:

1. it actually shows resourcefulness.

2. it’s fucking unhinged to expect everyone to know every single function on excel. it’s extremely outdated and unhinged to test people’s knowledge of programs which have been around for over 20 years, and therefore have tons of resources online for how to do things on them.

3. jobs should not test skills and knowledge info when the answers for them are literally hyper searchable. i think i already kinda said that. sorry.

4. life is not an exam, you can always google everything. i understand some things you do need to learn, i am not suggesting we slash math from high schools because ChatGPT can do the quadratic formula for you now. you guys know what im talking about.

Also, the reading comprehension section is so bleak it leaves me wondering if I should join or start a bisexual agrosex commune. here is a sample of one of the questions:

(if you’re listening to the audio, I am going to read this in the accent of one of my Brooklyn/Bronx grandma’s most dour friends)

For once, I am speechless. There are truly too many and also not enough jokes to make here about how deplorably stupid, bizarrely dystopian, and disturbingly wicked it is to make someone complete a quiz with questions like this. Here we are, with the technology to mass produce food, heating, cooling, so much art and history and expertise, the opportunity to shift the system of property ownership and food production and move to a 25-hour work week, and yet — we’re spending time making rules and tests and quizzes about jamming hole punchers.

It leaves me wishing someone would jam my hole puncher!

**** On Thursday, I go back to my part-time tutoring job, where I tutor Math and ESL at a public school and a private Jewish school.

Sex/dating drama, which becomes related to work, because everything is related to work now:

I have a 70-year-old lesbian friend named Giselle who calls herself my “Lezma” [lesbian mom] and I love her. She sent me this email about my test with the City of Santa Monica gov:

We have dinner at the end of my week. It is fabulous. One small conflict does comes up.

2 months ago, Giselle hosted a lesbian tree trimming party. No, that’s not a euphemism. This was a real party for her Christmas tree.

At the party, an EXTREMELY HOT, 67-year-old butch friend of Giselle named Tania hits on me. People were staring, and judging Tania for hitting on me, a 24-year-old.

I had told Tania that I struggle with shortness of breath. Her response was to give me a long, tough forearm and hand massage in front of a 40-person soiree.

We met up the next week and took a hike, then she took me to a Persian restaurant. When I offered to split the bill, she waved my hand away.

Back at her house, I ask if she can teach me her massage technique (she’s a licensed respiratory and massage therapist) so that I can massage her back. She does. We’re sitting on her couch. Then she shows me a massage technique on my shins. I was clearly enjoying it, so she instructs me:

“Lay down,” she gestures to the floor.

You don’t have to tell me twice!

I lie down on my back on her soft carpet, and she gives me a full body massage. Well — almost full body. Basically everything but. There’s a lot of eye contact and heavy breathing and arching of the back involved.

I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about Tania. She has this spackled, hardened skin texture that I want to lick so I can feel the texture of it. You might think I’m insane cause she’s 67. I don’t care. I love that her skin has that soft, slightly crepey texture. She’s in crazy good shape — her arm muscles are husky, her calves could kill a man, she has the forearm and grip strength of a farm oxen.

Giselle is not happy about any of this. Apparently, Giselle and Tania got dinner together and when Tania told Giselle that we had hung out, Giselle “pounced” on Tania.

“YOU’RE TOO FUCKING OLD FOR HER WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH HER ARE YOU CRAZY?!”

I told Giselle that even though she is my Lezma, I do not want her to be overprotective. The whole point of queerness is to do things differently, and so I don’t want a dad with a shotgun that’s just a lesbian version. Giselle understands and explains that it had more to do so with her friendship with Tania, since Tania can be kind of gross and dude-y sometimes. But I’m kinda gross and dude-y, I tell Lezma. She says that yes, I am.

“You’re my wild child,” she adds.

***

I don’t hook up or try to hook up with Augustin this week, because he’s in a weird funk and kind of depressed, even though he has a full-time, highly-paid contract at Paramount and has his name on all kinds of TV shows and is writing a movie with a titan of comedy (that I can’t name) right now.

He’s allowed to be sad, still, I guess.

But because he is depressed, most of our texts are me just checking in on him and then occasionally sending him a two-minute voice recording of me jacking off and climaxing (for free I do this! i am the kindest, bestest lover of all!).

***

On Sunday, I take my friend Sasha for ice cream for her birthday. I have a feeling my credit card is going to get declined, because I’ve spent $3,400 of the $3,500 limit and I’m not sure if the $160 I paid off on it this month has gone through.

Before trying to pay with my credit card, I joke to Sasha: “lol imagine im offering to pay and then the card gets declined.”

It gets declined. She immediately waves me away and offers to pay, but I insist and use my debit card.

(Also, though, now my checking account is doing a lot better thanks to my amazing paid subscribers, thank you all SO MUCH!)

I yearn to live a life where getting me and a friend ice cream for $17 is nothing. Instead, I loop it into a tight weekly budget. I ask Sasha how her birthday week was.

“I just feel like I’m emotionally abused by everyone at work,” she answers.

Sasha works half the day as a business admin person for some guy, and then the other half the day as a babysitter/assistant for the guy’s wife. She started off just with the latter in college, but once she was graduating with a Business degree, she told the mom she would have to quit, to find a real business job.

The mom, unable to live without Sasha, made her husband find a role for her in his company. So that’s one way to get a job now!

**Today, the mom’s middle daughter throws shoes at Sasha. Say that five times fast!

Sasha always wants to let the girl calm down in her room when this happens, but the mom tells Sasha to “deal with it.” Sasha enters into the line of fire, a six-year-old throwing mom’s high heels at her shouting “I HATE YOU” while the mom sips on a glass of white wine over the kitchen island. Where’s Sasha’s Purple Heart?

In between babysitting sessions, the mom laments to Sasha how much she hates her life, half-serious jokes about how she hates her children, her husband, her neighborhood, which has spread a rumor among the mommies that she is cheating on her husband.

Sasha’s comment about emotional abuse takes me back to last year, when I was fully employed and semi well-paid on a post-undergraduate fellowship in Serbia, where I taught English, created new curricula, and planned events and field trips for students.

It was fun, and eye-opening to learn so much about the world, particularly the Balkans.

I also had some of the most nasty, cruel bosses I have ever had. In Belgrade, I quickly found the English and multilingual stand-up comedy scene and began performing on weekends. Due to the lack of English-speaking comedians, there was so little competition that I quickly began making around 5,600 Serbian Dinar ($50 American dollars) for performing and co-producing shows. It was incredible.

One night, before I was about to give my longest performance ever — a full 20 minutes, I saw my boss walk in. He hid his face and ran to the back of the theater, despite the front and middle rows being available.

At this point at the job, I had an awkward relationship with this boss, to say the least. It was clear he had learned his English from The Office, and wanted a Pam Beasly. While he may have understood the literal language of the office, things like tone, humor, and cultural subtext cannot be taught. He didn’t seem to understand that no one wants to be Pam, and Americans do not delight in this show. It’s so satisfying because it mocks and depicts all the indignities and horrors of modern offices.

Nevertheless, he continued to make crude, weird, stupid jokes to me. Anytime I tried to get work done, he would try to pick some ridiculous fight with me about American politics (one time he insisted that he should be allowed to say the n word), or mansplain something about Europe to me, or tell me some horrible story about him and his friends playing with roadkill that he thought was very charming but I found disturbing, mostly because I knew he was getting paid much more than the average Serb by this American nonprofit, and was using this outsized salary to fuck around the office all day a la Michael Scott, and huffed and rolled his eyes anytime I tried to ask a question about work or something I was doing for students.

Anyway, when I saw him walk into this stand-up show, I thought maybe he came on his own, not knowing I would be there. I run to the producer to ask if it would be okay for me to ask him to leave, since I am about to make a ton of jokes about my eurotrash sex life and still have to see this guy for the next six months.

“You leaving is really more for you than me,” I plan to tell him.

The producer, Dime (dee-meh), tells me: “Well, it’ll be hard to ask him to go, because he’s in a party of seven that booked together.”

Basically, all seven of my bosses/supervisors/PTA parents came to the show and ran to the back of the venue. They were there to catch me off guard/mock me. I know some people might read their arrival as a cute, fun, supportive surprise. Not with these people. It was more like the dynamic of a bunch of mean bullies showing up to the nerdy kid’s spelling bee, aria showcase, or whatever. They were there to show that they knew where I was, and they could come whether I liked it or not, and to later make fun of me.

I did not perform. Instead, I went to one of the stand-up’s apartment after, where she offered me pizza and a joint.

My bosses blew up at me in the office for not performing for them. When I explained that they didn’t give me any warning and that I also joke about my personal life in a way that would make an office environment uncomfortable, they huffed and rolled their eyes.

“Bosses! We’re not your bosses! We’re friends, we just work together!”

Offended that I said I did not want my 50-something male bosses to hear jokes about my sex life, they called me into a meeting the following week where they said that every time I go out of town, I need to tell them where I am going, “for safety.” And I need to wait 24 hours for permission to go. Even if it was a weekend trip happening outside of work hours.

I understood what this meant. They were saying: “Oh, ok, you won’t be our cool funny American girl, then we’ll really be your bosses!”

They continued to follow and find my performances online. They accused me of coming to Belgrade to “promote myself” rather than work for the school. I had to hold back from laughing at the accusation that I came from my hometown of Los Angeles to Belgrade to promote my comedy career. For the next five months of my contract, I performed nowhere, and developed an unconscious anxiety around any personal creative expression in the public eye.

Most work is pretty terrible. I know some people have lovely supervisors, great co-workers, and meaningful, enjoyable tasks. I think this is usually quite rare, though. Most of what I hear from my friends in their 20s and 30s includes delusional executives who go on bougie retreats to “strategy plan” then come back to the office and micromanage everyone into what to do, after throwing out months of work and planning, or major losses of autonomy, bizarre power dynamics, toxic office politics, workplace bullying, bosses who have no lives and or take out all their issues from home at work, and so on and so forth. This really isn’t normal at all, but it seems to be, and if you complain about it, a lot of people just tell you you’re being a spoiled baby.

I think about the amazing friends i have and the love and the community and the family. if i could get paid in wonderful friendships, kindness, i would have a yacht.

Let’s hope I slayed this test from the City of Santa Monica, and or get some sort of negotiable offer from this deranged ass woman.

xoxo,
femcel

I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who has subscribed and commented on my posts, and even put in a paid subscription. Every like, comment, DM, and other kind affirmation of my writing, humor, and worldview, plus your own unique input and thoughts, really means the world to me. I know it’s a cliche, but you cannot imagine the boost it is to wake up to kind, interesting, thoughtful, funny, and or supportive feedback.

Thanks so much, and as always, stay tuned <3