Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (10 page)

M
y temp job turns permanent when they officially hire me as a production coordinator at the end of February. It’s my first full-time, salaried,
office
job, and as such, it teaches me a lot about life. Because as I discover, like so much of life, the office is a big show. First of all, there’s this seemingly constant need to demonstrate my value to the company, and the easiest way to do this, as I soon find out, is by simply being there from nine to six even if I don’t have enough to do to fill those hours. And because of this structure, I also quickly learn that, for the most part, efficiency is not rewarded. What
is
rewarded are things like dedication and loyalty.

The company is primarily known for producing movie trailers, but they have a new division that is producing DVD bonus features—those short little segments found on most DVDs, e.g.,
The Making of One Tree Hill, Season One
. As the production coordinator on these shoots, I’m mostly responsible for making sure the talent—which is Hollywood-speak for whichever person we’re interviewing (whether or not he or she seems to exhibit much talent)—has everything he or she needs to be comfortable. When we’re not shooting interviews,
I’m mostly responsible for making sure that each producer has everything he or she needs to be comfortable.

We don’t have a computer at home, so one April day, just a few months after being hired, I stay after six to file my taxes. My desk just sits in a hallway, so when one of my superiors walks by on her way home at around seven o’clock, she sees me and pauses in her tracks. “Oh, Amelia,” she says. “It’s so good to see you here after six.”

I smile and shrug. “Yeah, well, this work isn’t going to finish itself.”

At the same time, I discover how difficult it is to stay late at work, as that postpones my absolute favorite part of the day: going home and eating dinner.

Recovering dieter that I am, I still have a few bad habits. Namely, I still believe that I don’t like certain foods when in reality I
do
like them; I had just forbidden myself from eating them for so long that I started to believe I didn’t. For example, when Matt and I’ve finally tired of microwaved dinners and takeout, and Matt offers to make pasta for dinner, I actually say the following words aloud: “I don’t like pasta.”

Fortunately, Matt has the strength of character to see through such a ridiculous statement and the necessary enthusiasm to teach me the joy found in a bowl of spaghetti and marinara sauce with one heaping ladleful of grated Parmesan on top. And as it turns out, I am a quick learner. Other dishes I begin looking forward to coming home to thanks to Matt? Takeout moo shu shrimp with plum sauce, grocery-store salad-bar salads with blue cheese dressing, and Hebrew National hot dogs with mustard, ketchup, diced pickles, and raw onions on top. Not exactly James-Beardian cuisine, but straightforward delicious food that I cannot deny liking.

My office job also teaches me about hierarchy, and not just
the internal hierarchy—about those people in the company who are my superiors and the few who are my inferiors (interns)—but also about the hierarchies within the entertainment industry. I quickly realize that my friends who work as assistants to producers who are producing actual movies—as opposed to the DVD bonus features I’m doing—are superior to me. Similarly, the cooler the movie one’s boss is producing, the cooler that assistant is (even if at the end of the day, all of these assistants are doing the exact same thing, e.g., reading scripts, making their boss’s travel arrangements, placing their calls, and so on). I am mainly working on a piece for the DVD release of Season One of the television show
The O.C.
Ergo, I am not very cool.

But one of our friends, Martha,
is
. Specifically, Martha is cool because she is the assistant to the director who is currently directing the movie
The Family Stone
, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Diane Keaton. During the production of the movie, it turns out that Ms. Keaton’s line reader isn’t working out and she needs someone new and as soon as possible to run her lines with. Martha, who knows Matt’s been looking for work, says she knows someone who could do it.

And, just like that, Matt, ex-assistant to Marty Panzer and ex–blackjack banker, is driving to Bel Air to meet Diane Keaton, aka Annie Hall, aka Mrs. Corleone, at her house to run lines with her
for money
: $20/hour to be exact.

Simultaneously, just like that, I am now
dating
Diane Keaton’s line reader.

Simultaneously, I’m beginning to realize how stupid my job is. And at the same time, ironically, I’m hungrier to succeed at it. I’m hungry to rise up through my company’s hierarchy so as to be able to rise up through the industry’s hierarchy.

But in order to do so, I understand I must put in my time.
I must wait patiently for my performance review, at which time I can make a case for myself about why I’m good at what I do, but beyond that, the ways in which I’m dedicated to the work.

Of course, all the while I’m wondering if some of the higher-ranked people, who I’m basically aspiring to be, and who hand out many of my daily tasks, somehow managed to skip my position, because had they have been where I am now, they certainly wouldn’t be going about things so horribly, and in some cases, so rudely. But then again, isn’t that part of it? Isn’t that how they weed out the weak, so that only the truly dedicated rise to the top?

One of the things I always liked about waiting tables was not knowing how much money I’d make on any given night. There was always the promise of the rare outrageously big tipper. Of course, the outrageously small tipper was much more prevalent, but I liked the suspense of collecting my tips in my apron pocket and not tallying them up until the end of the night, just as I liked going to the bank every couple of weeks with my stack of ones, fives, tens, and twenties and seeing how much it came to.

As a production coordinator, there is no suspense. Every two weeks, I make $940 after taxes. Oftentimes I take this number and divide it by the hours I’d worked those two weeks in order to discover just how little per hour I was making. (Sure, I have health insurance, but what’s health insurance to a healthy twenty-four-year-old who reasons that since she’s recently broken her foot, she isn’t due for another medical problem for at least a couple of years?)

What’s more disconcerting is that after a year, I’ve taken on much more responsibility, so each of the hours I’m there is almost entirely dedicated to actual
work
(as opposed to
checking my e-mail, Facebook, etc.). And when I find out that one of my male colleagues who is doing the exact same job as me is making more than I am, I decide to ask for a raise. The company does reviews eighteen months after your official hire date; for me that won’t be for another seven months. So, I
also
decide I can’t wait that long.

I consult with Bruce, who on top of his day job at the bank and occasional stint ministering at other churches is also paid to give lectures to businesspeople titled “Ethics: The Ethics of Decision Making” and “Managing Change: Excellence in the Midst of Change.” First things first, he gives me my own personal lecture on how you should never say things like: “I’m worth X amount of money.” Because, and as he speaks, I can hear his cadence change into that of a motivational speaker, “Your worth as a human being can’t be measured in dollars and cents. [Pause for dramatic effect.]”

Once we get through all of that, he helps me write a professional letter requesting the opportunity to discuss
how much I am worth
the idea of a raise. And just as Bruce directs me, I print it out, put it in an envelope, and place it in the mailbox outside of Mitchell’s (my head boss’s) office.

When I don’t hear from him after a week, I follow up with a friendly e-mail.

I believe there’s a term for what happens next: radio silence.

I broaden my already active job search to include positions outside of the entertainment industry.

Within a couple of weeks, I’m hired to begin paid training as an SAT and PSAT tutor. It isn’t a great job, as they can’t guarantee a set amount of hours per week, but at this point, Matt has found an assistant job of his own. Plus, when Ms. Keaton has a role she needs to prepare for, she still calls on
Matt’s services, which both of us feel is
bound
to lead to bigger and better Keaton-related opportunities. So even if this tutoring job pays much less and even though Matt and I haven’t merged our finances, Matt says he can pay a bit more in rent for the time being; I decide to take the job.

The next day at work, I pop my head into my immediate supervisor’s office and ask if I can speak with her. She waves me in. Her name is Gerda, pronounced in staccato: Gehr-DA. In fact, everything about her is staccato, from her short, bleach-blonde spiky hair to her Danish accent, which only intensifies her quick, confident sentences.

So when I tell her I’d like to give my two weeks’ notice, and she responds kindly with a regretful, “Oh, no. Why?” I’m surprised.

I explain that I don’t think I want to work within the entertainment industry, how I want more time to work on my book. (By the way, I’m working on turning my thirty fruitless postcards to Paula Pell into a coffee-table/humor book.) “Plus,” I add at the end, “I don’t know if you know this, but I wrote Mitchell a letter asking to discuss the possibility of a raise and he never got back to me.”

“Oh yeah,” she says, trying to suppress a laugh. “He showed me that.”

In the months and years to come, I’ll continually doubt the decision to quit my production job, as I’ll discover just how hard it is to come up with $940 every two weeks. But I’ll never doubt that I wasn’t cut out to be a Hollywood producer of DVD bonus features or otherwise. Nor that Mitchell and Gerda really were assholes.