CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Universal Waste of Time of Job Interviews for Menial Labor

Friday, September 15, 2006

this entry brought to you by clap your hands say yeah, "let the cool goddess rust away"


When I turned 18, I'd never had a job before, but it was time that I got one. My mom, of course, was urging me, and while I admit I wasn't exactly happy to get off my lazy butt, I actually did want a job, so I could afford things for myself like comic books and video games. This, then, set me on my first taste that is the soul-crushing path of looking for a job.

I don't know why looking for a job is so difficult. I don't know why jobs that offer only a little more than minimum wage make you go through rigorous interview processes, often being interviewed two, three times, making you fill out 150 question personality quizzes, forcing weeks to go by from dropping off application to actual orientation date. Obviously, this kind of thing is expected when a company is looking for that one special person for an important, salaried job, but when you're hiring for an orientation class of 15 people to do entry-level bullshit work, this is just time consuming and unnecessary. What's more is that this rigorous process doesn't even weed out the undesirables, which I would think would be the entire point of the whole drawn-out rigmarole. Any time you start one of these shitty jobs you find a person that started when you did that is heavily into drugs, has served prison time, and got fired from their last job for doing something illegal. All this weeks-long process does is discourage honest, hard-working people, who will think "Fuck this wait-- I could be waiting this long to be hired for a better job," while dishonest people or just plain bad workers who are desperate and can't get a better job stick with it because they have less to lose. The whole multi-step hiring process companies use defeats the whole purpose of being selective and studious in the first place. There used to be a time where, if a company was hiring for menial labor, would take your info, look you up and down to see if you could physically do the job, and told you to come in the next day to start. Sure, it didn't stop criminals and lazy workers from getting jobs, but then, neither does the current way.

So it was time to look for a job. By the time I was desperate enough to try McDonald's, I'd already tried a mess of different places, and had gotten several rejection letters or just simply never heard back. Well, there was always McDonald's, I said to myself. I didn't want to work at McDonald's, but then, I supposed nobody really ever does. I swallowed my pride and went to the local one to fill out an application. I got a call a week later for an interview at a different store several miles away, and once I had that interview, they told me they did all the interviews for the district at this particular, more centralized McDonald's, and I would have a follow-up interview a few days later at the location I actually wanted to work at. This seemed completely unnecessary for something as bottom-of-the-barrel as McDonald's, but hey, whatever.

The day of the second interview I walked down and was told to sit and wait, the assistant manager would be right out. At the previous interview, the manager was indeed "right out"-- despite this location being completely empty at the time, the assistant manager kept me waiting for 10 minutes. Eventually she burst out of her office, and with much adieu about being the busiest person in the world, curmudgeonly came to my booth, glanced of my application as if only looking for keywords, and when she flipped to the back made an audible groan. She barely made any eye contact with me and hastily introduced herself, beginning with the standard "Why do you want to work at McDonald's?" opening interview question. I was already very uncomfortable about this woman making no effort to show me I wasn't wasting her time, but I forced a smile and gave her the rote response of what I felt I could offer to the company in as pleasant a way as I could possibly muster as she agitatedly looked at her watch. When I was done with my answer, which I'm positive she hadn't heard a word of, she seemed to want to skip the formalities of the actual interview part. "You've never had a job before?" came her blunt words.

"Uhm... No," I answered, wondering what the hell this had to do with anything.

"So you have no experience? Not even volunteer work?"

Yeah, lady, I flew to fucking Ethiopia for the past four years to help give emergency surgeries for kids with cleft lips with Carl Reiner. That's why I want a fucking job at McDonald's.

I told her no, I did not have volunteer work, and she markedly rolled her eyes, and then they settled on mine, making the first real eye contract through my entire "interview". Her face was leathery and haggard, like she was wearing a very realistic prosthetic mask, and her face was slumped in a permanent frown. This wasn't a normally happy person I'd just happened to catch at the wrong time. This person wore this scowl every day. She was a bitter old lady, who obviously wished more out of her life, but here she was, assistant managing a McDonald's. And through some bizarre delusion of importance, the cold, lonely woman somehow expected something out of applicants for McDonald's, universally regarded as the lowest of all jobs you could possibly have. Even crack dealers, who run the risk of getting shot to death in a turf war or by some random, desperate crack head, will tell you they'd rather do what they do than flip burgers. And this woman had the nerve to turn me down because I didn't spend my summers wrangling hyperactive, sweaty fourth graders down at the YMCA for no pay. And all she really needed to ask was "Will you steal from us? No? Can you press picture-coordinated buttons while hurried, hungry people yell at you for not moving fast enough? Yes? Be here for tomorrow so the pain can begin. And wear this degrading hat."
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on this day last year did you ever want to change the smell of your poop? this is one of my favorite all-time entries.
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with love from CRS @ 11:41 PM 

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