Office Space.

8 x 12 glossy print, Don’t Go To Work by Oak and Acorn.

Today is officially my boyfriend’s last day at his job of 5 years. He will be the third person in my life to quit their day job and pursue a more creative, independent career. It’s a little ridiculous how contagious quitting can actually become. Especially considering that, over the past 2 years, all of these people have seen me stressed out, poor, overworked and exhausted. It must really say something when that looks like an appealing alternative to the daily grind. Continue reading »

Your Shell is Showing.

                                                                                                                                      Ode to Lloyd Dobler by Elloh

“Just take this pen and write me.”                                                                                                                                                         -Diane Court, Say Anything

For a 32 year old, I’d say I’m pretty hip to technology. Give me a stylesheet, I can decode it. Insert some html on a webpage? I’m your girl. Process graphics, create vectors? Yeah, I’m pickin’ up what you’re puttin’ down. That said, I have an increasingly overwhelming sense that I can’t keep up. I have refused to join twitter, or engage in any manner of tweeting. Until two weeks ago, that is. And I’m starting to suspect it’s the last straw.

A tortoise by nature, I have crammed my hard, round shell into a ridiculous bunny suit. Joining Myspace, then Facebook, getting Skype, tending to photo albums on Flickr and Picasa, 4 different e-mail accounts, 4 online shops, a blog, succumbing to the Twitter tidal wave, and so on, and so on. I am drowning in status updates, text messages, links that continuously drag me here, there and everywhere. Well, my shell is busting through the seams, and I’m afraid safety pins aren’t gonna do the trick this time. Continue reading »

This Little Piggy Went to Market.

Anyone watching the news or listening to the radio this summer probably heard about the release of a new book, Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip—Confessions of a Cynical Waiter. Anthony Bourdain described it as a front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential, and from what I’ve heard, it certainly sounds like just the kind of book that service industry veterans like myself can rejoice in. In all my years as a waitress and barista, my co-workers and I got so much satisfaction from those rare opportunities to retaliate against obnoxious customers.

This may seem childish and petty to some, but if you have ever waited on people, you can appreciate these small victories and perhaps even see them as part of a necessary system of checks and balances. But I digress. My point here is not to relish in the new-found doubts that diners and coffee drinkers will now harbor thanks to this book. In fact, in some strange way, the seemingly never-ending influx of entitled customers often provide the entertainment, adventure, and absurdity characteristic of the service industry. The one thing I miss terribly is the camaraderie that results from facing this common enemy. So much humor surfaces in kitchens, behind counters, and in stock rooms, and all precisely because the public can be so ridiculous. Continue reading »

Stepford Employee

I’ve been in recovery from a string of job rejections within my own company for a little while now, and it’s becoming obvious I’ve got to make some changes. The notoriously gorgeous Seattle summer is fast approaching, and my number one priority this time of year is to simply get out and enjoy the weather. But there is always the risk of becoming totally depressed with the lack of job prospects, so I find myself faced with a very ugly fact – I need attitude augmentation. I’ve just let myself go. My smile is sagging down to my knees, my sense of duty has unattractive dimples, my professionalism has wrinkles, and I just don’t have that overall perkiness of some of the younger employees. Perhaps with a little nip tuck of the old attitude, I can seem a little fresher. At least for a little bit longer.

Sure, friends and family love me just the way I am, but they’re not the ones that matter. It’s those that don’t know me, who don’t care to know me, who don’t share my interests at all, and who like to slap me around a little that I’m after. I want to be…a Stepford employee. Continue reading »

Talk Encouraging to Me, Baby

You’re not going to believe this, but THIS REALLY HAPPENED. I was chatting away to my cube mate the other day when I felt a little tap, tap, tap on my shoulder. A woman who had interviewed me about a month ago for an internal position that I didn’t get was standing over me. “Excuse me,” she said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Now, I’m not really upset I didn’t get this position I applied for. I knew it was a lateral move, promised no significant pay increase, and was understood to be legendarily boring. But still. If my own company won’t hire me, I thought, who will? So yeah, for that reason I was kind of bummed. But of course, I obliged to converse and we snuck away into an empty office.

I sat down with absolutely no idea what to expect; she closed the door, turned around to face me, and proceeded to…compliment me. She told me I was an excellent interviewee, actually using words like “bright” and “articulate.” She went on to say that when I left the interview, her thoughts were “wow, she was amazing…she’s going to get so bored.” She wanted me to know that I positively shined – so much so that she worried about the future of my career should I come work for her. Needless to say, I was/am flattered, dumbfounded, and utterly euphoric. It’s like someone stepped out of the gun smoke hauling a first aid kit and bent down to bandage my wounds. Continue reading »

You Could Still Be Talking to a Wanker.

A while back I went to see my third recruiter at an agency that places people in “creative” jobs. We talked, I gave them my portfolio consisting of some marketing blurbs, a couple of gardening articles, and a series of paragraphs copywritten for websites that sold either shoes, electronics, psychic readings, or constipation meds (I like to think this makes me versatile). I left feeling like she and I had connected and that this would surely lead somewhere. Three long months rolled by…

I had pretty much decided I would never hear from this person again until she called me last week. She had a lead, and so I had an interview! Much to my dismay however, it was the dreaded phone interview. I loathe a phone interview. I can’t tell what they’re thinking! There’s no body language! The whole time I imagine the interviewer rolling their eyes, stifling a yawn, or doing the “yap, yap, yap” gesture with their hands. The last phone interview I had, I’m pretty sure the guy was eating. Continue reading »

Take Those Ridiculous Things Off.

Nothing ever goes the way you imagine it will. And I suppose that’s the wonderful and horrifying side of taking a chance. Wouldn’t you know it, that on the very day I could hear the last pretty penny of my business loan clink against the bottom of my piggy bank, I landed a freelance writing job, which partly explains my two month absence from the Blackbird blog. And now that the job is winding down, I’m faced with a strange irony. Rather than earning a respectable living through my t-shirt business, the business itself landed me a different job that allowed me to reclaim financial stability. Continue reading »

This One Goes Out to All My Peeps.

Back in Virginia, my middle school used to host an annual dance for the students. And so, every spring hundreds of awkward, socially inept tweens would gather ’round the basketball-court-turned-dance-floor and stare at each other or down at their shoes. In preparation for this momentous occasion, my mom and I would scavenge the mall for the most hideous dress available, pair it with clip-on earrings the size of my fists, and top the whole ensemble off with an Ogilvie home perm. It was like a makeover in reverse. Even worse, I would show up at the dance, talk to my same two lame friends and, if it was a good night, dance with a boy three inches shorter than me that hadn’t bothered to brush his teeth.

Well, as much as I’d love to say that these types of experiences are faint memories, now barely visible in the rear view mirror of the polished, socially graceful woman I’ve become…I’m afraid I can’t. In fact, as an adult, I have often entered social situations, felt horribly uncomfortable, and ended up staring at my shoes for hours upon end. Because my years of work in the service industry demanded a certain amount of conversational skill, I learned how to handle awkwardness with more finesse, but it never completely dissipated. So, to be authoring a blog about putting yourself out there feels a bit like my way of dealing with personal social shrapnel. Continue reading »

Tips from a Reliable Source.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing recently wrote the below article for Information Week. If you are remotely interested in having bloggers write about you, it is well worth the 5 minute read. I have provided just the first few paragraphs along with a link at the bottom if you’d like to access the full article.

17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You

One of the best ways to get publicity and generate buzz is to get bloggers to write about what you’re doing. Boing Boing co-author Cory Doctorow provides some tips on making it easy for bloggers to point to you.

By Cory Doctorow
InformationWeek
March 11, 2008 10:00 PM

I edit a blog, Boing Boing, that’s pretty darn popular (Technorati says we’re one of the five most popular blogs), so there are a lot of people who try to get me to write about their stuff. That’s cool — I love getting good suggestions for things to write about. I couldn’t find everything on my own.But often I can’t write about the tips people send me, because the people who posted the material did something crazy to make life tough for bloggers. I suppose that if you’re aiming for obscurity, that could be a feature, but if you’ve put up a Web site because you want people to find out about your stuff, then being blogger-unfriendly is most certainly a bug.

What makes a site blogger-unfriendly? I’ve been keeping a list for the past couple of months. These are simple design and deployment mistakes that kept me from picking up a link and reposting it where millions might find it. Here’s the list, a kind of anti-checklist for anyone who’s spending money and time trying to get a message out:

Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.

Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.

For Doctorow’s 15 other useful tips, click here!

Plop a Fat Note Right in Mahoney’s Inbox

So my latest and greatest idea, yet to be dismissed and tossed onto the enormous, festering pile of already considered ideas, is to go to work in advertising. The goal would be to work for an agency for a while, branch off on my own after learning the ropes, freelance my skills to worthy, sustainable businesses with a soul, all the while sitting back in the local pubs and coffee houses writing radio jingles and commercials. Sounds pretty good to me at this point! So now what?

One thing that has been reiterated constantly to me lately is that the job search takes bravery. Being a total coward makes this difficult for me, but I did something COMPLETELY outside of my comfort zone the other day. I emailed a dude at an agency and asked him for an information interview in exchange for a coffee beverage of his choice with all the trimmings. That’s right! I just plopped a fat note right in Mahoney’s inbox, asked for 12.3 minutes of the man’s time in exchange for caffeine, and sat back to wipe the sweat off the keyboard while I waited for a reply. He declined the coffee, but….he did say I could call him. Continue reading »

A Car and an Iceberg Away.

By the age of 6 I had already decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was gonna live on an iceberg. In a rusty old Volvo. And there I would sit, eating raw fish with my hands. If that for some reason didn’t happen I was going to be a singer with 12 kids.

I guess things don’t always pan out. I don’t own a car and I dislike children, so obviously I have to look into some other options. I’m in school now working on my third degree and this time it’s going to be different. It’s almost like having a new boyfriend. My nursing-degree boyfriend was nice for a while, but turned out to be kind of abusive. My literature-degree boyfriend sucked the joy out of reading, and frankly didn’t bring in the big bucks. So I’m hoping my veterinary medicine boyfriend will make me feel better about myself. I swear he’s not like the others! Continue reading »

Forget enthusiasm. Just be polite and professional.

So, it’s finally the weekend, your coveted two day stretch between the 5 laborious and exhausting days you spend at work. So what are you going to do? How about call up someone you barely know and, in a roundabout way, ask them for a HUGE favor! YEEAAAH! This ghastly practice is called networking. And while this isn’t the only way to do it, it’s one of the few ways to get in touch with a specific someone you feel could help your situation. So, you suck it up, pace the room, and give them a ring. I had to do this a couple of Saturdays ago, and while this woman (we’ll call her Miss Sprouts) is extremely nice, you may still feel like a filthy beggar soliciting a well-dressed pedestrian on the street. I called Miss Sprouts because I heard she was good friends with the woman who owned an agency I was interested in working for. To make a long story short, I was able to get my resume forwarded to the agency, allotted no face-time, and was ultimately rejected. So while my efforts may seem fruitless, I was able to walk away with one lovely sentiment:

While on the phone with Miss Sprouts, I went off on a tirade exclaiming how I had to get out of my current job lickety split or I was probably going to get booted out on my rump. “I just can’t fake the enthusiasm anymore!,” I said. And that’s when she eloquently replied, “honey, forget enthusiasm. Just be polite and professional. Continue reading »

Put Yourself Out There

When I embarked on a search for my professional identity, inspirational oases were few and far between. I would find myself on the Best of Craigslist at two in the morning, longing to find my frustration and anxiety echoed in the stories of others. While there were a few gems that brought comfort and some semblance of a community, by and large, the road was a lonely one. This can really suck when you already feel awkward, clumsy and maybe a bit self-conscious like our friend the robot here.  Kind of like you don’t quite fit in anywhere.

Well, in an attempt to start filling this void, I created the Find Your Blackbird blog. There are five primary areas to explore. The Lost Demographic is a small collection of stories–tales of bravery, fear, embarrassment, and hilarity courtesy of volunteers and contributors. Continue reading »