As a creative working an office job, you may come to love that copy machine. Illustration by Summer Pierre, from her book The Artist in the Office
In honor of Labor Day, I figured I'd veer a little bit from our usual in-home content to talk about some outside-the-home career realities. I spent five years working in corporate staffing, so this sort of thing is oddly near 'n' dear to my heart.
The Empire must be filled with people who have to make an offbeat personality fit into a very very non-offbeat job and workplace, and I'm curious as to how they do it. I'm only 23 and am looking for work and even having to fit myself into the norm for interviews etc is (warning: overly dramatic and kind of ridiculous statement ahead) kind of killing me inside a little. Applying for jobs with companies whose ethics I question, and whose goods I don't believe in and wouldn't buy makes me feel sick and suffocated, and like I'm trading in on my own integrity. How can I deal with these feelings? Everyone tells me to suck it up and get on with it. I feel like I'm being completely ridiculous, but this is important to me. -Arlina
Oh man, Arlina. I relate to this question so profoundly. With the exception of a few lucky periods of freelancing, I spent over a decade (between ages 22 and 34) working corporate jobs. Some of my greatest moments included a temp job for MDA where I spent all day on the phone calling taverns that were selling paper shamrocks for charity, another temp gig where I was word processing documents for a company producing urine testing kits, and dozens of shitty copywriting jobs writing ad copy for terrible products I'd never use. I spent year after year, sitting in basement cubicles writing crap like this. Every once and a while I would snag a "cool" corporate gig, like the couple of years I spent as an editor for Movies.com — but they were still 9-to-5 jobs where I was required to sit through corporate training programs and felt like a fraud.
All those years of toiling away taught me some critical coping mechanisms and ways to make myself feel ok about what I was doing. I will share these with you. Continue reading »
