Everyone is a number in this dystopian near-future where cameras track your every move. Score above 90 and your set for life. Score below 75 and you’re on your own, kid.
The Cycler Series
The Cyler Series: What would you do if you woke up one day as a member of the opposite sex? For Jill McTeague, this is no hypothetical question. It’s real life!
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Anna Wintour makes crazy demands of Andrea day and night, like asking her to ship a skirt all the way to Paris so Anna can wear it to a party. Shock of shocks, the entire fashion community is summoned to contribute skirts and Andrea and another assistant choose a selection from hundreds of donations from the likes of Prada, Chanel, Donna Karan–you name it. We’re supposed to be stunned that Anna Wintour, the most powerful woman in fashion, actually has the pull to elicit such feverish activity from the fashion community. Anyway, long story short, Andrea works day and night taking care of annoying details great and small so that Anna Wintour never has to worry about mundane things like dry-cleaning and picking up her cat from the vet. We’re supposed to be filled with venom for Anna Wintour. It’s only fashion, after all. Who does she think she is expecting someone else to order her lunch? And here’s the best part. While Andrea, who narrates the story first person, never tires of denigrating fashion as an ignoble and trite profession, her flesh and blood counter-part, author and New Yorker wannabe Lauren Weisberger, is making truckloads of cash by penning the most ignoble form of drivel imaginable–the tell-all! And she doesn’t do it very well either. Despite her undoubtedly hyperbolic complaints, I don’t hate Anna Wintour. I hate Andrea. She’s twenty-three and while, yes, she does indeed have a bachelor’s degree in English, let’s face it, if she were qualified to do more than order Anna Wintour’s lunch, she’d be doing it. When I was twenty-three, you know what I was doing? I was guarding an empty equipment truck on a movie set in the freezing cold in Hell’s Kitchen. Well, that or typing mind-numbingly boring memos at one of my hundreds of soul-destroying temp. jobs. Or, no, here’s a good one, removing rusty nails and other potentially dangerous objects from a trash-strewn back alley in order to protect the precious feet of some unknown actors who were about to shoot a scene there. That’s the kind of crap you do when you’re twenty-three. So anyway, I thought it would be fun if you, my dear readers, contributed some of your humiliating job stories so that the Lauren Weisbergers of the world could learn that, as it turns out, one does not ascend from the university to the New Yorker without slugging it out with the rest of the working stiffs in mail rooms, junk yards, cubicles, greasy spoons, factories, and lord knows where else. Tell her, people. Tell it like it is. 26 Responses to “The Devil Is An Ungrateful Brat Who Should Be So Lucky”Leave a Reply |
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So I’m reading
Well, when I was 23, I joined a virtual reality start-up in Seattle. Unfortunately, it ran out of money in 6 months and as I had no money of my own, So I wound up living in a corner of the office for six months more. Fortunately, my neighbor had a bathtub and I eventually ramped down my unpaid work to zero, which let me write a novel and get a job at Disney.
But, yeah, 23 year olds do stupid things like that. Some of us should just stay in the womb till we’re 30.
That would make birth awfully painful, Avi, but I hear you. I think what makes people finally worth knowing around the age of 30 (and of course I leave ample room for exceptions to the 30 rule–like for Woofy who was already worth knowing at the ripe old age of 23) is all the painful but humanizing stuff they have to endure on the job in their twenties. This, by the way, is also the reason why people who never have to do menial work never become fully human.
I worked as a beach comber one summer. You know, one of those guys who walks around the beach with a “pick-stick,” those long sticks with trigger activated tongs on the end. During that summer I:
o) Discovered women’s bathrooms are far dirtier than men’s (at least at the beach)
o) Discovered that humanity is thoroughly filthy and disgusting beyond what you can even imagine.
o) Discovered that just because a diaper doesn’t say disposable on the box that doesn’t mean a damn thing.
o) I quit when the manager says to me, “Take that pail, and that brush, and go clean the bird shit off the railings.”
That’s what I’m talkin’ about. But honestly, Matt, were there no benefits to working on the beach?
I don’t know whether this fits your thesis, but when I was 23 I was a division officer on a United States warship bound for the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Desert Shield. I was in charge of the daily toil of about fifty enlisted men (ship was all male at the time) ranging in age from 18 yrs old to 50 yrs old and the safe operation of the vessel while standing daily underway watches. During my ship’s transit of the Suez Canal we had credible intelligence suggesting that the threat of a chemical attack was imminent. Thus, for those several days, we were all required to have our MCU-2P gas masks on our person at all times along with a single dose of atropine and 2-pam chloride (which were alleged nerve gas antitodes). The antidote was to be self-administered into the meaty part of the thigh in the event of an attack.
I would have happily chased down Anna Wintour’s wayward skirt, dry cleaning or even changed the litter in her cat’s box had her insipid 23-year old assistant been willing to change places with me.
I don’t know what the benefits are to working (more or less around the clock) on a sea-going ship, but the ocean is incredibly beautiful when you are 1,000 nautical miles from land as is the night sky. Unlike Woffy, however, I was not much worth talking to when I was 23.
Beautifully put, Rocketeer. I hope somehow this blog finds its way to Lauren Weisberger. And I beg to differ on one point. You were well worth knowing at 23.
Ahhh! I am 23! Haven’t been for long, but 22 was full of a lot of bitch work, believe you me! And I’m STILL updating spreadsheets.
at 23, i was living in germany without a visa and couldn’t get a job to save my life (this is WITH a college degree.) not even the us army would hire me. so i ended up as a freelance cleaning lady for a few months — did some offices, did some homes and — worst of all — did some restaurant bathrooms. i have to report to matthew kressel: i dunno about on the beach, but in a “cafe” (which is where they go to drink beer in germany) men’s bathrooms are much, much, much, much worse than women’s. much.
then spent a couple of months as a chambermaid at a boutique hotel, until my work permit application got turned down. then i got hired by an aging hippie to be her slave at her clothing boutique. this was my anna wintour. after she realized that i had work ethic and wouldn’t steal, she left me in her store, mostly alone, during the entirety of weekly business hours (six days/week, 9 – 11 hours/day), often going off on week-long trips to rainbow gatherings.
being an unrepentant hippie/new ager, she made me play jazz fusion in the store (arrggghhh!) and wouldn’t let me organize the clothing logically: shirts with like shirts, skirts with like skirts, etc.) instead, i had to “make the energies flow” through the store by hanging a yellow skirt on a rack next to yellow, red and green shirt, next to a pair of green pants, next to … as a result, i was the only person in the world (including her) who knew where everything in the store was, so even on the rare days she’d come in and give me a day off (never with any notice, of course, so i could make plans) she’d still call me, panicked, asking where something was. she wouldn’t price the jewelry, though, or give me the key to the jewelry cases in the window, so half of my job was explaining to irate customers that they simply couldn’t buy the jewelry, and i didn’t know if they ever could. plus, she made me wear the stores’ clothing and pay for it myself, and you’d better believe it was overpriced (she’d get in those (east) indian-made dyed shirts with little mirrors in them, which she’d buy for about $1 apiece, and sell them for, i shit you not, $80.)
the devil does NOT wear prada. the devil wears an “authentic” indian deerskin robe.
The benefits of working at the beach were numerous. Watching the dawn on an empty beach just before 6am, when the air is still cool and the seaguls still have dominion. The girls, of course, and getting to shout at people with megaphones who blocked the adjacent highway.
Some other interesting jobs I’ve had:
o) putting foam rubber covers on dry-cleaning hangers
o) working the all-nighter shift at a 7-11
o) frying chicken for “Billy Bob’s Fast, Fresh, Famous Chicken Fingers” in Atlanta
Great story, Claire. There’s a corner of hell for that lady. She’ll roast and roast.
Mate, I don’t even remember being 23 . . . But I’ve worked as a cleaner (of a university office), as a waitress (for four days), as a receptionist at an expensive marina where I was sexually harassed by the rich men buying the boats at the front of the building and the poor men fixing them at the back (I lasted a week), I’ve done IT support at a university (mostly telling people how to turn their computers on–it was the Humanities faculty), I’ve tutored and lectured and researched at a university, and now I write.
There were a stack of other jobs, including selling frocks and nighties at a really crappy chain store when I was 14 and nine months (youngest legal age to work in Australia), but I seem to have forgotten most of them. I was fairly crap at almost all of them and was fired at least twice.
I’ve never enjoyed any of my jobs as much as I like being a writer. This is the life, eh, Lauren, innit?
A writer’s life certainly has its upside, Justine. It beats selling edible underwear and joy jelly at the mall (sixteen years of age) or typing dictation for a man who used to bring his voice recorder into the john and take monster pees while dictating letters (early twenties). I was tempted to write “wiz, shake and flush” at the end of each one.
I’m not even going to ask what “joy jelly” is, but clearly not something you spread on bread . . .
Wiz, Shake & Flush: autobiography of a bloke who can’t even be arsed typing his own letters
I think that doing grunt work and menial jobs creates character, however that doesn’t stop me from congratulating Lauren Weisberger. So what if she only did ten or eleven months as a so-called assistant? If its anything close to the book, it sounds bad and stupid. All of the press (good and bad) about her book only creates more interest and possibly more money for Lauren. Obviously her experience is not up there with the response from the Rocketeer, but did we all not choose these jobs (if you can call them that)? Maybe not our first choice, but no one made us work at these hideous places. The early twenties is about working in that boring and mundane job, I’m still in one and I’m close to thirty. If I could write a book to capitalize on this I would be all over it!
I’m late on this conversation, but at 23 I was actually working for my own egomaniacal celebrity boss (a writer/producer/director), who once furiously hurled his sandwich at the wall across the room because they were out of the one he wanted, and I’d gotten him something else.
Megan
I wish more people had the guts to say that
Ah, 23, such a faded memory! I recall a lot of sex, cocaine and parties. Work entailed a Pirate costume at Disneyland. Hoghlight of the summer was the “Banana Ball” thrown by the “tour guides” of the Jungle Cruise. It was a fabulously fun and irreverent time. Fashion staples were Calvin Klein jeans…and it was a BLAST. Hopefully Anna and her “crew” are all enjoying the ride, whether they are headed to Paris or the dry cleaners.
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