MISADVENTURES IN UNEMPLOYMENT : My 4 Job Interviews This Week

a math teach position, an english tutor role, being a publicist & assistant for a multimillionaire producer-designer couple

The job market is the ultimate Daddy, the economy the nonpareil Domme. They fuck us all, hard and deep.

I am on my knees, wrists bound, begging, head to the ground — not to some leather-wearing woman with a tongue that could lift a car or a man with a cock that could launch a thousand ships, but rather to the recruiters, the HR staff, the job search sites.

I got laid off from a job with the Los Angeles Unified School District 2 weeks ago. My bank account has been overdrafted four times in the last two months.

Back to Indeed and LinkedIn. I see an “Urgently Hiring” position for a Math Teacher at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish high school for girls, which offers $60-70/hour for about 12 hours per week.

I figure that could be about $700 per week after taxes, and my other tutoring jobs make me $350 per week. Altogether, I could then make around $1,000 per week, which is my current financial goal, in addition to saving $2,500 this year.

I also see a posting for an English teacher/tutor role at a Korean tutoring academy in Koreatown. I apply because they pay $35 per hour and I like teaching English.

Then, on a whim, I submit an application for a “Personal Assistant” role for a producer who is married to a prominent interior designer. It’s on ZipRecruiter and already has “over 100 applicants” but I have committed to applying to five jobs per day since last September. Shockingly, I get a message from the producer and we schedule a phone interview, which leads to an in-person interview.

I schedule a phone call with an amazing woman who read my last Substack post and offered me a tutoring role in her company, and offered to pay me to write copy and post social media content for their social media.

Below is a summary of my past week and a half, told through jobs interviews.

Also, through my sex life and social life and living situation.

1. Teaching Pre-Calculus at an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish High School for Girls

My interview for this teaching job goes well. I am a terrific interviewer. The trick is to first strike a balance between being conversational while also bragging about your skills and experience. Even though you’re begging, you don’t want to seem like you are. Except, of course you are. If you’re me, your bank account is already nearly overdrawn again.

After you’ve buttered up the interviewer, you need to flip the power dynamic and ask what they have to offer, putting them in a position of begging and convincing.

The principal asks me to teach a model lesson the following week.

I grew up Orthodox and know the deal, so the principal very quickly runs through the dress code for me as a formality: “Knees and ankles are covered, also elbows and collarbones. No more than one pair of earrings and no facial piercings or tattoos on display. We dress in neutral colors that aren’t attention-seeking, so no red or hot pink or yellow.”

Awkwardly, I try to dim the lighting on the Zoom call to dampen the bright red of my shirt. We confirm a time for the model lesson.

***

I ask for the model lesson’s topic via email. The principal responds, “something on rational and irrational numbers.” I roll my eyes so hard, the motion from my ocular muscles could energize the power grid for all of Los Angeles for a week.

I follow up to ask, “What about rational and irrational numbers? Do you have a recent worksheet from the class?”

She responds three days later: “Sorry! There was a mix-up with their math teacher. We actually need a lesson on percentages and decimals. Their last school was very behind and now they need to catch up on this topic.”

WHAT ABOUT PERCENTAGES AND DECIMALS? I email back to ask what specific types of problems they’re doing, if she means converting between decimals and percentages, or does she want word problems, or what?

No answer.

An hour before leaving, I prepare a lesson on the basics of percentages and decimals. I plan on explaining when to move the decimal when converting, how to write 0.3 versus 0.03 as a percentage or fraction. I figure if they’re “behind,” they need to go over basic rules.

When I show up at 2 PM — class starts at 2:15 PM — the math teacher takes one look at my lesson and says:

“Oh no no no, didn’t the principal tell you? It’s supposed to be on operations of decimals and percentages, so how to subtract, add, divide, and multiply with them.

I mean it should be easy to just explain how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide decimals and percentages, right? You can just prepare something now.” It’s now seven minutes until class begins.

Of course, I am a semi-well-educated adult, so on the fly I could explain how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide sets of decimals and percentages. I know personally how to do that. The thing is, making an actual lesson plan (and not just any lesson plan, the one which will determine if I’ll gain employment after I’ve been laid off) is very different.

I like to start with an easy problem, then a medium problem, then have students work in pairs then alone on harder problems so they can truly apply concepts. I like to find helpful phrasings, graphics, illustrations, or videos which make complex concepts not only easier, but applicable to daily life. I like to find sample word problems which can be tricky, but illuminating. I am a good teacher, a good educator. I cannot prepare a legitimately good lesson on four different types of operations in under ten minutes.

“I can print out a worksheet for you!” this teacher offers with a tone of ignorant magnanimity and glee. In moments like these, I understand the frat boy urge to punch a wall.

Oh, thank you so much, for offering to print out a worksheet with sample problems that I’ve been asking for literally over a week ago — now that it’s t-minus 6 minutes until a model lesson that determines my employment.

No big deal! No one got their shit together in time to tell you basic information you asked for twice, and apparently there are worksheets, but only ones I can see with less than five minutes until the bell goes off. This woman has this big breezy smile on her face like it’s so cute and fun to do all of this at the last second. Like they didn’t waste my time and energy at all by giving me no information or communicating at all.

I know some people are going to tell me: “You’re overreacting, you’re being melodramatic, beggars can’t be choosers,” and “So what the model lesson instructions were chaotic and the other teachers have no organizational or planning skills? Once you teach there, you can have as much time as you want to prepare in advance for your lessons. Your classroom is your own.”

I’ve had enough jobs to know that, oftentimes, no matter how self-directed a position is, you’re somehow always affected by your co-workers and supervisors. I know I’m gonna somehow get yanked into that chaotic, dysfunctional, disorganized mess.

Weirdly, as a young adult, I have encountered a lot of this — a lot of older adults who relish in the chaos and love to run around their workplace shouting “aah it’s such a crazy mess here! things here are just so crazy! hahaha!” but then do nothing about it. Usually the chaos, distractions, disruptions, and poor planning is completely their doing and their fault. Is it just that after a certain age give less of a shit? Or are they so bored that living in a constant state of chaos is the only way they can get a thrill or some dopamine?

***

Also, I want to give a little context on this ultra-religious school. I taught for a year at a very similar middle school. I had to quit because the girls are not allowed to go to college, so their parents just tell them “It doesn’t matter if you fail a few classes, just as long as you’re happy and nice.” They might be happy, but they are not nice.

They’re basically bred to be illiterate, innumerate wives who pop out baby after baby. There is no regard for education, and no respect for teachers or academic subjects. The girls and administration treat the school like a glorified summer camp.

Parents complained constantly about classes being too hard or teachers being too mean to students or “not being nice.” I could write a whole separate essay on my experience teaching at this school, so I’ll just leave it at what I’ve written.

I was worried this high school might just be more of the same, even if they’re now teenagers.

***

Before I begin teaching, the principal has to prod a few students to stop knitting. Knitting! There’s no phones, no mobile video game devices. Just yarn and two wooden sticks, students talking to one another. None of these girls will go to college or take on a real career, so I guess knitting is a pretty good skill to have. Also, honestly, it’s refreshing from the phones I’m used to seeing in classrooms.

I begin the lesson with addition: 47.02 + 19.48. Then, a harder problem with different decimal spacing: 193.10 + 2.29. I ask a student to come up to the board to do each problem, after asking them to try it on their own.

Then the principal leaves the room. She’s been called elsewhere.

Instantly, 17/25 of the girls start talking. I remember this from when I taught at their middle school. It’s not just a few chatty or talkative students.

The culture is: this school is glorified babysitting, these girls only need to be basically literate and numerate enough to fill out a doctor’s office form for the 8-12 children they’re all expected to have.

The expectations for behavior are terrible, or maybe just non-existent is more accurate. They all come from homes with ten siblings where inside voices aren’t a thing, and respectful behavior is out of the question. There’s no regard for secular knowledge or teachers who aren’t other ultra-Orthodox women or rabbis. (Again, I was raised Orthodox Jewish, so I know this stuff and can say it too, thank you very much! And I am grateful that I was raised normally religious and not in this sect.)

Exasperated. I cannot hear myself even. I see the looks of frustration and struggling to hear from the five students who actually care.

“Honestly, you guys can talk, this is a model lesson so I really don’t care, but I ask that you please just whisper or pass notes,” I say. At this point, I am certain I will not take this job, so I reiterate: “You really don’t have to pay attention at all, but please do not all talk at full volume. I can’t hear myself. Be considerate of the students who are trying to listen.”

***

Sadly but predictably, the only time a hush falls over the room is when I begin a problem by stating:

“Pretend you need to bake a challah, schnitzel, and a cake for Shabbat.”

All eyes are on the board.

“You’re out of flour, so you need to ask your neighbor for some, but don’t know how much to ask for. The recipes need 3/4 cup of flour, 1/5 cup, 1/2 cup, and then 1/8 cup. How much do you need to ask your neighbor for?”

No one knows what to do. I teach to a relatively quiet room.

When I begin on a word problem about how to add a 20% tip to a $87.20 bill, half of the class goes back to chatting like it’s a day in the park.

***

I email the principal after, thanking her for the opportunity, but say that I am no longer interested. If the administration and teachers were amazing with a tough student body, or if the students were great but had bad teachers and admin, I could deal. But this school has incompetent faculty, and on top of it, students who treat school like a party with parents who admit to not caring if they fail out of everything.

As I vent about the experience to my friend Daniel, he validates that every step of the way showcased “like a million red flags.”

When I told him that before I even began teaching, I basically knew I’d turn down the offer, he said, “At that point you should have just started teaching queer gender theory.”

I cackled.

“So, who here knows what a spectrum is?” Daniel mimics in a teacher voice.

“G-d, why don’t I ever think of these things in the moment?” I ask, rolling up to northbound rush hour traffic on Laurel Canyon.

2. Interview to be a Publicist & Assistant to an Producer

After a good phone interview with this woman, Joann, she asks me to come to her home for an in-person interview. Joann is looking for someone to do the personal assistant work for her and her husband, and also increase publicity for her persona as a commercial/wedding video/short film producer and grow her brand. We talk about TikToks I can make for her, social strategies, in-person events, and business partnerships.

She is offering me $4,000 per month for this, and wants me to come in everyday from 9-6. She lives in one of the most secluded, wealthy zip codes of Los Angeles. Her home is worth ten million dollars.

It’s immaculate. I did secretly take pictures, but I won’t post them here. Before I even meet my potential future employer, I meet three staff members: a housekeeper, a gardener, and a private chef.

***

My main issue with this job is that, because I do not live near a wealthy, secluded neighborhood, it will take about an hour to get there by 9 AM and approximately 45-55 minutes to get home. Which means that from 8 AM to 7 PM, I am hers. That really sucks, but I figure I can quickly become indispensable to her and begin asking for 1-2 days WFH, or to come in at noon and leave at 7 or something, and WFH in the morning.

I have chronic bursitis in my right hip so this much driving is out of the question; I resolve to take the bus part of the way, if I get the position. I would have to drive part of the way anyway, because there are no bus lines that come within three miles even of her home.

Oh, did I mention that she lives behind a security gate? She didn’t mention it to me, so I had to deal with explaining to the guard that I’m here for a job interview with someone who didn’t give the gate she knows she lives behind any warning about a broke ass interloper.

I honestly think gated communities should be illegal, and that it should also be illegal to not have bus lines reach your home and go through your streets, but whatever. The revolution will come soon enough.

***

During the interview, a girl-woman-looking person comes into the kitchen and says she’s going out for a walk with Spot, the dog. There are two dogs. Joann asks this girl, who is apparently her 21-year-old daughter, if she can take the other dog too.

“No,” she answers calmly.

She’s wearing sweatpants and an athleisure jacket which I’m sure are both so soft, and clean. She has the same energy and look as the popular girls at a particularly wealthy and clique-y middle school I attended for two years before leaving due to rampant bullying. I did not have the right sweatpants (from Free City or Splendid) or the right jeans (from Seven7 or Free People) or the right dresses. I wore eclectic clothes from buffalo exchange before it got gentrified, LF (a very shoplift-able LA clothing store which went out of business in 2019), and my mom’s closet.

I ask what her daughter is up to, and Joann replies, “Oh well you know she’s figuring it out, she was in cosmetology school and she liked the cosmetology but not the school, so she’s taking a break.”

So, she’s literally a beauty school dropout, I want to say, but I don’t.

A man walks into the museum-like kitchen and the woman yelps.

“Oh, that’s Victor! My husband! This is so nice, you two can meet each other.”

He’s an old white dude. Who isn’t these days? Cool glasses. Not much else to say. He looks like an interior designer. He mentions looking forward to having an assistant, to which I say, “I’m sure there’s much to assist on!” and they both laugh. Somehow office humor in a ten-million dollar home feels less bleak than if I were in a real office.

Later, she emails me and says she enjoyed hearing all my ideas and that my references were glowing!

She wants to “try me out in the office for the day on Tuesday.” What the fuck is this “try out” shit, am I getting on varsity?

I agree though, because I am desperate.

But I think “trying” someone out through an entire day of unpaid labor is the type of shit that should get you guillotined.

“If this bitch has me work FOR FREE for an entire day and doesn’t hire me, I hope a gang robs her house,” I text my groupchat of close friends, and I mean it.

3. Being an English Tutor

I live in the valley in LA and this job is in Koreatown. I’m trying to just work in the valley, because I have chronic bursitis in my right hip and having a commute of more than an hour both ways might literally destroy my young body. Thinking about this makes me depressed, that we’re all killing our bodies and wounding and paining ourselves for jobs that barely cover the cost of the housing and the gas and the car payments needed in order to work said job in the first place. It’s an endless, toxic feedback loop.

I keep looking at workaway dot com and wonder if i should just join a commune or work on a cheese farm and make a little money per month with freelance work i find myself. i imagine my right hip joint finally relaxing, the constant tension in my shoulder blades melting like glaciers in the Anthropocene, being able to throw out my mouthguard like the ashes of a renounced lover because I no longer grind my teeth into a jaw-locking oblivion every night, occasionally waking up to bleeding gums.

Life is so fun!

The Korean Academy offers me the job, but they need someone who can start now. Because I might get hired by this producer, I can’t say yes, which sucks. I say no because it doesn’t seem worth it to go through all the paperwork and onboarding only to quit four days later if I get this assistant/publicist job after the try out day.

***

By now, it’s Thursday. I’ve given a model lesson, had a phone interview and a second round interview in-person, and another interview in Koreatown. I also schedule a call for my fourth job interview, with a woman from Substack who owns a tutoring and college consulting business and wants to hire me.

I am exhausted. I have been fake smiling my ass off.

So now, it’s time to really orgasm. I have been so uptight and repressed all week in my buttoned-up shirts, long skirts, polite laughs, customer service voice — that I am ready to be fucked. Like really, really, really truly and honestly fucked.

Not fucked by the job market, not by some unfair matrix of commutes and costs of living and HR initiatives and ghost job listings and nepotism and gatekeeping, but really truly dismantled and put back together by a fellow human being.

I schedule an afternoon delight for 4-7 PM with a lover. His name is Agustín. The problem is that I live with my 90-year-old grandmother and her caretaker. Normally, my grandmother is in the living room and I can sneak someone into my room through the hallway.

She doesn’t have a problem with me having a guy over. In fact, she being a Mexican Jewish woman, she frequently harasses me for grandchildren or to get married (preferably in the reverse order).

The issue is that if she sees someone come into the house, she wants to talk to them.

“Did you go to high school together?” “Are you Jewish?” “Do you speak Spanish?” “How old are you?” “Where did you grow up?” “Which synagogue do you go to?” “Where are your grandparents from?”

All manner of nonsensical questions kind of kill the mood.

Two years ago, I showered with a woman here. Before we were about to have sex on my bed in this house, my grandma started yelling questions at me from another room to ask what I am doing and with who and that I shouldn’t close the door because it makes her worried. The woman in my room jumped off my bed, and ran out of the house so fast that she left behind her bandana and sunglasses.

On this particular Thursday this week, there is yet another hiccup. My 80-years-young great aunt has decided to make an impromptu visit. Because she is 10 years younger than my grandma, she is fully able-bodied and hears very well. She will notice if someone comes in, and then it becomes a whole thing.

They’ll ask about the guy for the next two years.

It doesn’t matter if I come out as a lesbian and shave my head and move to a commune and then go to prison for running an agrosex cult, they will accept my collect calls from the women’s prison in central California and ask, “What happened to that nice fellow we met? Agustín was his name? What is he up to? He was so tall and good-looking!”

It’s hard to explain to people born in the 1930s that sometimes, you just wanna fuck and it really doesn’t mean anything, plus Agustín has a primary partner because monogamy is dead and so is my emotional availability, so here I am squeezing in a very casual fuck in the afternoon in-between a job interview and dinner with a friend, like the girlboss I so aspire to be.

He waits outside in his car. I text that my great aunt will leave soon. It seems that she is doing a Jewish goodbye, which is the opposite of an Irish goodbye, unfortunately.

I want to fuck so, so badly. I want to feel my smooth annular chest chafe against his chest hair and smell his neck and pull on the back of his scalp to maneuver him exactly where I want him. I want to be pounded so hard that the week of Indeed applications, phone interviews, LinkedIn messaging, scheduling, resume preparation deliquesce like makeup powder blowing into nothingness against the golden light of a boudoir.

It’s not going to happen. My aunt won’t leave, my grandma is on watch. I scream into a pillow that I don’t own, because as the economy has made clear, I will never own anything.

In fact, this is the exact same pillow I would take afternoon naps on when I was six and my mom dropped my ass off at my grandma’s house because my mom needed to work on a weekend day, or just needed a break from it all.

Agustín and I make out and talk in his car. It’s nice, but completely insufficient. He’s 6”4 and I’m 5”8, so car sex is difficult. Plus I’m 24, and the whole feeling of being a kid living at home and being a teenager who has to sneak around and can’t even properly have sex like a normal adult because the economy is so bad, has turned me off so severely.

I feel so incredibly stifled, and this experience is the exact opposite of what I wanted. I wanted to forget about the cost of living and the low salaries and the shitty job market. Instead, I am rudely confronted with it, as is my clit.

There have been a lot of articles about the so-called “sex recession” among Gen-Z and Millennials.

Has anyone thought that maybe this sex recession is because we are living in an actual ECONOMIC RECESSION?

And that scraping by financially, having 11 hours of your day taken up by miserable commutes and jobs that should be 9-5, not 9-6, then not even getting paid enough to move out, so we all live at home — DOES NOT LEND ITSELF TO SEX?

If you want people to fuck and have kids, you need to give them the means to do it. And right now, I do not have that, so the only thing fucking me is this job market.

If applying to jobs is a brutal, wrenching S&M session, then the aftercare is getting a job with health benefits. So, pray for me, and let’s hope I get this publicity/assistant job. It actually doesn’t come with health benefits but I’m not 26 yet so it’s fine. For now.

xoxo,
femcel

P.S.

I am still working my ghostwriting gig where I write students’ application essays for graduate programs. I went to a cafe to write someone’s application for their MSW degree. Because I am broke and did not want to pay for parking, I parked my car right in front of the cafe, where I could watch it the whole time, and fill my meter if and only if a meter maid came by.

I have no fucking clue how this happened, maybe in the literal only 10 minutes I went to the bathroom at the end of my cafe time, but I got a $63 parking ticket.

I tried not do to the math in my head of the amount of money I would get for writing this application, against the ticket I would have to pay just for trying to work at a cafe and patronize a local business.

I know, I know. I’m dumb and it’s my fault. But the experience made me think a lot about that quote, about how not having money is expensive. This to me is a prime example — even spending $4 on parking felt like too much, so I did my best to avoid it, and it ended up costing me a lot.

P.P.S.

THANK YOU SO MUCH TO MY AMAZING FOUR PAID SUBSCRIBERS. Seriously, waking up to the notification of those four subscriptions made my fucking day, brought tears of joy to my eyes and my almost-overdrawn-again checking account. You are amazing and I am looking forward to beginning to publish some paywalled erotica and personal essays just for y’all.

My annual subscription cost is only $69 ;) ;) ;) — it’s $5.75 per month, which is basically like taking me out for coffee every four weeks. Think about it!