Sales Jobs and Transformers
My life is kind of a wreck right now. Normally I’d vent about this in my journal. But my handwriting posture has always sucked and my wrist and fingers ache after a page or so, and anyways my brain always ran faster than my pen. So more recently I’ve been venting on my Mastodon page, a platform I followed my dorkiest Cohost friends to, which has felt static and uninteractive since I joined. Also the character limit is stupid. I know other instances exist that I could join with no character limit, but I don’t see any of them feeling less barren and static, and switching instances looks to be a pain in the ass. Mastodon feels like a dressed-up RSS reader most of the time, where interaction and replies are a side effect more than an intended feature.
So then I remembered I made a blog when Cohost was shutting down. I’ve made many blogs in the past, all deleted because I never did anything with them. The idea of having a blog has been a recurring meme in my head going back as far as I was aware of them. I always had big ideas I never followed through on. When I made this one, I spent hours fussing over what template to use and what customizations to make. I tried writing a post about Will Wood that I kept restarting; I had no idea how to approach the post because I didn’t even know what I wanted to say about him besides I like this guy’s music. That’s not interesting, I think. You have to draw some kind of conclusion, make some sort of point for a post like that to be engaging.
So you see, I immediately get consumed by SEO brainworms like I have to make clickbait YouTube thumbnails and boost my ENGAGEMENT. Like I have to make my blog “successful” for it to be worth doing. Like blogs aren’t all just random people shouting their thoughts into the void. So, what the hell? I should just let myself ramble. At least there’s no character limit here!
To jump right into what brought me to making this blog post now, well, I’m at a serious low point in my life right now. I’m between jobs again, struggling to find anything that will pay even close to a livable wage, I’ve got about $150 in my bank account, $15k in credit card debt, and a $280 payment due next month. I’ve got just enough left for food and gas for maybe another week or so if I really stretch it. I still owe my parents a month and a half of back rent totaling $600, and in another month or two I will be responsible for my own car insurance payments. My expenses are already going up, but my pay is definitely not. At this point it looks like I’ll never be able to afford to move out of my childhood bedroom. I wonder often if I should’ve gone to college when I had the chance. I wonder often if it’s even worth trying to make a living in this country today. I can only remain optimistic by remembering how lucky I am to have parents who let me continue to live under their roof, even if they can’t support me any further than that. I try not to think about how completely fucked I would be if I did not have such supportive parents.
There’s nothing much I can do to find a job right now, so I'm blogging through the low-level anxiety. It’s Sunday as I write this. I’ve got two potential prospects coming tomorrow. I’m expecting a call from a local self storage facility that I brought my resume to, telling them I could start working on Tuesday. I was just told to expect a call, not given a time or date. The kind woman who took my resume summarized the job duties and let me know new hires start around $15/hr, with no benefits, but as I have 2-3 years in various customer service positions, I might be able to swing 15.50 or even $16/hr, gosh golly gee! After payroll taxes that’s about $600 for a 40-hour week, or $31k a year. And that’s if I’m lucky enough to be graced with $16/hr. No benefits.
The other prospect is an interview scheduled for Monday at 2:30, for an “entry level roof inspector” position. From the job board listing it’s not clear if it’s just inspections or if you’re also selling stuff. I can’t sell stuff. They promise “$3,000 - $8,000 a month” which is a wide enough range I highly suspect commission is a big part. They also say “In this position, you could potentially earn over $2,000 a week. Your compensation is directly tied to your performance.” Which sounds like you could also make $0 a week if you don’t sell anything, hmm. We shall see at the interview if this is a real job or secretly another fucking sales role. Imagine if it was actually solar panel people. That would kill me.
I really can’t do sales. Despite my awful financial situation, I just had to walk out of a sales job this past week. I managed about 3 weeks doing retail vendor sales inside of Costco stores before my soul gave out. Sales jobs are among the more ethically foul and odorous jobs in the world, and I couldn’t stand that stink on me. Two weeks selling Primo water dispenser subscriptions (and doing surprisingly well at it, all things considered) and half a week selling AT&T phone plans before I was so emotionally drained that my coworkers could see on my face how miserable I was and basically told me I had to quit for my own health. I couldn’t disagree. Even then, I had to hold back tears just to call my manager and tell him I was done. It was the first time I’d really quit a job without having another opportunity lined up, and I really was not in a financial position to be quitting my job. Like, this was decidedly not something I should’ve done from a strategic point of view (something my parents were all too happy to remind me of), but look at this way: it was either that or the suicidal thoughts I was having every day would continue getting stronger.
It was, in fact, that bad. If you’ve worked in sales, you know. If not, well… You have to already be a chipper, outgoing extrovert with lots of self confidence. That’s basically a prerequisite. And little old weird queer autistic mildly depressed stoner me is… not most of those things. I’ve got a strong work ethic, and that alone carried me for the first week. I played the salesman character so well that I made 11 sales in my first week, beating many of the other reps who’d been there for months. They told me if I made 10 the next week I’d be automatically promoted to “Leader” – which I soon found meant I would get a nice gift worth a couple hundred dollars and then I’d have to attend meetings one hour earlier on Fridays. No raise.
The emotional labor of playing this salesman character combined with the physical labor of waking up at 5:45am to be at the office by 7:45am to be at the store by 9:30am, staying until 8:30pm to be home by 9:30pm, then waking up to do it again the next day was killing me. The day I quit, my very few real-life friends texted me wanting me to join them as they went to a Korean BBQ restaurant. Something about that made that day just a bit harder than the others, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Even after I quit, it was too late to join them, and anyways I was too busy sobbing uncontrollably the entire drive home screaming “What am I gonna do?!” to myself repeatedly over cranked music. I wouldn’t have been presentable at a social function.
Between the two though, I’d prefer the self storage job. So I don’t know why I’m even bothering to go to the interview. I guess just to see if I’m wrong and that job is actually some kind of money-making miracle. Either way I’ll be out working in the Texas summer sun, it seems. I thank my mother for getting me one of those big stupid Stanley cups last year, it’ll probably be put to heavy use.
When I’m not in a panic to find another job, or avoiding cleaning my disastrously cluttered bedroom, I’m watching stuff. Just. Stuff. All the time. My room is at least one quarter optical disc media by volume. I have more DVDs and Blu-rays than probably most people born in 2002. I’m always eager to talk about the things I’m watching, because then I don’t have to think about how scary life is right now in these United States.
I’ve decided, for no particular reason, to start watching the original Transformers cartoon series. I found the Rhino DVD of Season 1 at a Movie Trading Company in Hulen, TX after one of my shifts, and after watching only a few episodes I’d done enough research to know that the Rhino DVDs have pre-production animation issues fixed by the current Shout Factory DVDs, which I promptly marched to my Walmart and bought. So now I can add that Rhino DVD to the pile of old discs I need to sell on eBay or Facebook soon.
I’m only 5 episodes into the first season, but it’s been fun seeing how the show establishes its surreal world that operates on children’s toybox rules, and it’s goofy ass characters with names like Sparkplug Witwicky. Maybe I’ve just got gay brainworms, but this show is really fun to read through the lens of “Optimus and Megatron are just super dramatic ex boyfriends”. Not sure how Starscream factors into that. Megatron’s new boyfriend who he abuses in the same ways he probably used to abuse Optimus before he learned to stand up for himself? Starscream is always begging for Megatron’s validation, or the validation of the other Decepticons, he wants anybody to appreciate him, I can see how he’s a fan favorite.
I love how simplistic and cute Earth is in this show. The world governments don’t get involved unless it’s completely on the Autobots’ side, and most the action takes place in remote, isolated locations, power plants and airbases in the middle of some sprawling unnamed desert that seems to take up most of the land in this America. Maybe they crashed on Earth during modern times and those 4 million years put them in a far future post-apocalyptic slowly rebuilding society. Or maybe it’s a cheap kid’s show from the 80s made to sell toys entirely due to Ronald Reagan deregulating advertising to children.
I’ve also been watching another lighthearted war show, Band of Brothers, though I am admittedly behind. I need to watch Episode 5. It’s a dark, bleak, hopeless portrayal of war that rivals All Quiet, but still manages to humanize in the right places and find brief glimpses of beauty. It’s able to do a lot with the miniseries format, like bringing back David Schwimmer 4 episodes after he gets reassigned, or getting you to care a lot about one particular guy just for him to get a bullet in the neck because he looked the wrong way. I watched The Sound of Music for the first time a few months ago, so the Edelweiss stuff made me point at my screen.
I’m actually watching a few other things at the same time too. The current season of Doctor Who is airing, and I just watched the latest episode “The Interstellar Song Contest” last night and whoof I am locked in for the finale I tell you what. At the same time I’m rewatching Series 5 in my attempt to refresh my memory of the Smith and Capaldi seasons, and I’m watching through Series 12 in small doses because Chris Chibnall’s run as showrunner is genuinely difficult to watch at times. Oh and I’m watching the original Space Battleship Yamato series from 1974. And Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. And maybe Bubblegum Crisis. I'm on an old anime kick, okay?
I think I have undiagnosed ADHD.