“Right now, this is a job. If I advance any higher in this company, this would be my career. And, well, if this were my career, I’d have to throw myself in front of a train.” –Jim Halpert, "The Office"
So, I was obviously way too busy “studying” (i.e. going to the bars five nights a week, barbequing everyday, and watching reruns of Saved By The Bell) senior year to really go out there and look for any meaningful, respectable job. While some of my friends had jobs set up for them after graduation through some lucky alignment of the stars (or finance degrees), I spent my time having a lot of fun and not worrying about the whole career thing. Of course, when one of my fraternity brothers told me it was time to kickstart my life, it was three weeks before graduation, and I wasn’t in the mood. Senior week was coming. I pushed things off—can’t let that job search get in the way of day drinking (still don’t regret that decision).
I graduated with a good GPA, and left on graduation day feeling pretty impressed with myself. I mean, shit, I got to wear a medal when I accepted my diploma. But then, I got back home, and realized that the job search had to start someplace. That place was, I’m a bit ashamed to say, A Large Insurance Company (ALICo). After all my schooling, and the late night debates about whether Radiohead or Wilco had more of an influence on 21st century Latin American diplomacy, I was going to be a fucking insurance salesman. Dare to dream, right?
My cousin, an employee of this firm, referred me to ALICo, saying that I could probably get the job if I wanted it. He said I could do it until I found something more suited to my major or internships. In hindsight, had I actually gotten this job, I’d still be selling insurance—and that’s depressing. Anyway, I interviewed for it.
The first part of the process is one of the stupidest things companies are doing nowadays: a personality test. I’m sure you know what I’m referring to if you work in corporate
Then, there’s a typing test, which, I’m very proud to say, I passed with flying colors. Finally, you get to the best part—the basic math and reading test where they see if you have grasped a 7th grade skill set. After you finish the chopping block portion of the ‘interview’, you go home and anxiously await the call.
The next day, I got a call from some googly-eyed HR woman to tell me that ALICo would like to “move me along to the next stage” of the interview process, meaning she’d call me up and ask me a bunch of questions about sales and goals and challenges. I got through it fine—bullshitted my way out of pretty much every question, and made it sound like I’d been some kind of amazing pharmaceutical salesman and overcame like 100 obstacles in the past four years. She was eating it up.
When I got to the final interview, the whole thing went up in smoke real quick. After making me watch a ridiculous team-building video or something, googly-eyes starts the interview asking if I “understand what a background check is” a dozen times before telling me that I’m going to “be on the telephone a lot” and “you only get x-number of breaks each day, and if you take an extra minute because you’re stuck in traffic or had to feed your pet iguana, you’ll get in a lot of trouble.” I’m smiling through all of this, or grimacing, because she told me all of this during the phone interview the previous day.
After continually smacking me in the face with the perfectly obvious, she starts asking me questions—the same things she was asking me the day before. She offers the challenge question again, and then a couple of experience questions, and finally begs me to tell her about my internship last summer just one more time. I was ecstatic—these fucking blowhards had screwed up and given me the same interview twice!
I was wrong. Googly then informs me that, after a forty minute chat, I’m going to interview with one of the sales guys. Great—get to meet the guys down in the trenches, fighting tooth, fang and claw for every dollar, every policy sale. But then, in walks Brian, a guy with a real heavy Napoleon complex, a wanna-be trash-‘satche, and a lisp. I held my laughter back, my heart beating, figuring this was going to be it for me; I was going to start laughing in the middle of the interview, and I’d feel terrible because, hey, the mustache that looked like it was from a B-list ‘70s porno wasn’t really his fault.
We sit down, and things get off to a rocky start. He informs me for the 39th time that I’ll be working on the phone a lot and will have to pass a background check. He asks me if I know what a background check is, and by this point, I’m thinking of humoring him by saying, “No, Brian, does it matter if I robbed a 7-11 last year, and got caught drunk-driving on the wrong side of the road screaming ‘WELCOME TO ENGLAND!’ with four of my friends in the car?” Then he asks me about my old jobs. He mispronounces both of the companies I did my internships with, and I make the mistake of politely correcting him. By this point, the room is sweltering, and I think I was probably losing my composure a little bit. It was like some kind of offshoot of Groundhog Day called Interview Day where a constant stream of interviewers came in and asked me the same questions over and over again.
Things got harder. He starts asking questions about procedure, protocol, the top qualities a salesman can have, if I’m comfortable switching between screens on a computer, etc. I thought I was doing okay since he praises my GPA, and says it looks like I worked “real hard” in college. But all along the way, he’s viewing me with skepticism. I’m getting self-conscious because every time I use a word that has more than six letters, he looks up from his pre-written question sheet to give me a once-over through his transition lenses which are now half-dark. And then I know what’s gonna happen—my application will be in the wastebasket before I put my Wayfarers on outside the building. We go through more of the horse-and-donkey routine, me questioning him about the job, him politely answering. I ask him if he has any amusing anecdotes about the job, figuring that selling insurance to the elderly would merit at least a few chuckles. Stonefaced, he says, “Nope, can’t think of a time when that happened.”
So now I’m obviously not getting this job, but I find that I’m holding out shreds of hope for either outcome: I don’t want this job or the experience of working with some douche-noodle like Brian yelling at me about metrics, but I don’t want to be humiliated by failing at my first attempt to get a job that I’m pretty sure sixteen year olds with basic reading skills could do.
Yeah, I got humiliated. But, really, it coulda been a lot worse. I couldn’t believe this guy Brian sunk my application. After all of those interviews, this doofus tells me I’m no good for the job. I thought maybe I’d damaged my brain with all of that cheap whiskey in college (probably did). And then, with some help from my friends (the ones who talk a lot about Radiohead and Latin American politics), I realized that I would be terrible at selling insurance—I mean, these teetotalers were practically giving out the death penalty for people who took more than a half-hour for lunch. Could I envision myself sitting in a cubicle all day, having people ask me about insurance? Of course not. I guess the problem was, I didn’t want the job, and he could tell that, on some subconscious level (or after my constant questions about moving up in the company or ending up in another department), I'd be shitty at that job . That son-of-a-bitch.
And finally, I thought back to a true American hero, Jim Halpert, who slaves away all day at a shitty job for a boss who makes this guy Brian look like Stephen fucking Hawking. What if I stuck with it—all these guys who worked at ALICo said they started out on other career paths, but “after eight years, [they] just really love selling insurance.” Are they serious? I would be one of these dudes, and that scared the shit out of me. Of course, Jim Halpert has bonuses: Pam and Dwight Schrute. I’m pretty sure ALICo was full of guys like Dwight, though, none of them were even remotely funny.
I've seen this all before, though. In a shitful economy, tons of people--recent college grads, especially--seem to be trying to shoehorn themselves into ‘careers’ that they’re not well-suited for at all. Some kids go to law school, some kids go to grad school, some kids take the first job that they're offered because they see unemployment, or even underemployment, as a personal failure, a waste of talent. But, to make a move that will affect your entire life without really thinking it through is suicide. It's akin to jumping into the deep end without taking basic swim lessons.
I learned this with this goddamn insurance company; I've figured out enough in the past 20-some years that I wouldn't have lasted at that job. Frankly, I would've been pretty bad at it. And watching employees there, people who at one time had some idea of doing something remotely interesting and were now making a living in stifling cubicles, performing the same tasks day-in and day-out, you get a real sense of what "commencing nowhere" looks like in the flesh. Sure, it’s great to come home a month after graduation and brag to mom, dad, and your college friends about landing your first job, but at what expense down the road? I’d say you’re better off washing dishes or something. That'd at least give you time to daydream about, as Lester Burnham (American Beauty) said, “a life that less closely resembles Hell.”
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