I'm Only Here for the WiFi (4 page)

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 People apparently beat the bicycles mercilessly with a sledge-hammer every time they use them, judging by the state of most of them.

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 They weigh approximately one zillion pounds.

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 They have two gears: stuck in molasses or free-falling down a hill.

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 No matter what the weather is or where you are going, you will arrive drenched in sweat.

Of the three, personally, I prefer the metro. But each is necessary in its own turn.

Regardless of your preference, not having a firm grasp on any and every form of public transportation at your fingertips is an unforgivable sin. It is often the difference between having the morning of a True Adult and flailing down the street with coffee spilled down your shirt as you come up with an excuse as to why you are late for the fourth time this week.

But I am convinced that this hurdle—learning how to start our days right from every angle—though one of the hardest, is one of the most essential. We always admired our parents for somehow getting everything together, being awake and aware, and even handing us a packed lunch all while we were trying to brush our teeth. Now is the time we should be learning how to make the most of our early day—or even be up to see it at all—because, let's face it: For every worm we're not going to get this morning, there are three perky white girls named Sophie who've already gotten three. We can't let Sophie win—we have to get our mornings in check.

A
lmost everything in life, from eating a sparse bowl of
Trix (which they inexplicably turned from whimsical fruit shapes into colored balls), to paying your rent on time, requires money. And such is perhaps the most devastating realization of adulthood: If you want something, or need something, you're going to have to take care of it for yourself. The things that, as children, we always assumed just materialized in our homes—food, new clothes, dishwashing liquid, toilet paper—are the things that often sneak into your wallet while you're sleeping and abscond with the last $40 or so you have in your checking account. Worse yet, this money that is so essential to the living of daily life and the ability to do your laundry, eat food occasionally, and live in some kind of four-walled structure that prevents you from being rained on, has to be earned. We have to go out and get jobs, work at them every day for many hours a day, and wait for a check to come every two weeks. (I know, I was just as brokenhearted as you when I got this news.)

While the definition of
work
may be different for everyone, getting a job is something that even the most talented of freeloaders isn't going to be able to avoid forever. (Unless there is some magical land where unemployment checks never run out—Sweden, maybe?) As soon as we're spit out from whatever formal education we were pursuing, the stopwatch that is Unforgiving Life As an Adult starts running, and it is up to us to work our way through it. But how do we get jobs? And, more importantly, how do we carry
them out every day, without exception, even when we're hungover?

The process is a complex one. From scanning endless want ads and job listings (of which you have a vague suspicion that at least 40 percent are fake), to creating a resume, to the interview, to eventually becoming Employee of the Month or some other such professional honor, there is nary a moment's rest. At all times, it is essential to stay as competitive and cutthroat as you can possibly be, edging out your competition by making your cover letter just 10 percent wittier, or 34 percent less needy-sounding. It doesn't take an economist to understand that hundreds of thousands of twentysomethings out there are essentially jousting to the death over criminally underpaid administrative assistant positions, and standing out from the crowd is essential to survival.

There are, of course, the more existential questions that will inevitably present themselves, the “Do I even want this stupid job?”–type crises of the career hunt. It's undeniable that a huge part of our motivation at the tender age of “I'm ready to be exploited in this unpaid internship” is the actual concept of having a job. Everyone wants you to land a “good” job—your parents, your more judgmental friends, all those ever-watching eyes on Facebook. But what actually constitutes a “good” job? It's more a vague image than anything else.

You probably wear nice-ish clothes, maybe a J. Crew blazer or some of the more sophisticated items at H&M. You have a morning commute that takes a decent amount of time, but allows you to listen to your adult contemporary music or read your Kindle on the public transportation of your choice. You get to go to happy hours after work and socialize with other people wearing nice blazers, drinking pints of craft beer, and talking about things like
The Daily Show,
concerts you'd like to attend, and the various places within a twenty-mile radius that feature a nice brunch spread on Sundays. It's the kind of job your mother would be proud to tell her friends about, that allows you to report back to everyone with a fulfilled “I got my money's worth on this college thing” kind of smile, and that encourages you to open a—
shudder
—LinkedIn profile.

Of course, the best move would be to take a long time to actually consider what it is that you want to be doing in your life. Even within the relatively similar-looking world of Office Work™, there are a million and one variations on what it is you might actually end up doing. (We all grew up believing that people who put on nice clothes and went into an office all day were performing the universal task of writing a bunch of numbers into a giant book for “business purposes,” but it turns out that isn't so!) Beyond that, it's quite possible that a nine-to-five career is not what you want to be dedicating most of your time and stress to for the next forty years. Maybe you want a job that leaves you a lot more breathing room on your off-hours to not stress about tomorrow's meeting and pursue a hobby, or raise kids, or socialize more. In that case, enjoy explaining to everyone
you meet from now until the end of time that you didn't follow the path society was so hell-bent on having you take. If you do want one of those blazer-y jobs, however, your work is certainly cut out for you, especially in this economy.

First you have the hunt itself. Have you decided what you want to be doing? Have a dream career in mind? Good, now kindly ball that up (metaphorically, or you could actually write it on a piece of paper) and throw it out the window. Chances are that you're not going to find a full-time position teaching philosophy at an Ivy League school to only the best-looking students, complete with three months' paid vacation and a workweek that includes more hacky sack in the courtyard than actual office hours. And even if such an opening did exist, you're certainly not going to stumble onto it while browsing
Monster.com
. No, you're going to have to broaden your horizons and reduce your criteria to “nonlethal” and “within walking distance of a window.” More or less, any office-related position should be appealing to you, as it includes air-conditioning, a break room, and the ability to cruise Wikipedia listlessly in the vast expanses of time when you haven't been assigned anything specific.

There are the usual hot spots for finding such jobs—especially if you're not picky about something entry-level or entry-level-adjacent—the classified ads, job fairs, the aforementioned
Monster.com
. And then you can turn to the less orthodox, if sometimes surprisingly efficient, employment databases, like Craigslist.

What is Craigslist, if not a cesspool of all our most base desires and unfiltered thoughts, collected together like scraps on the world's least-sanitary bulletin board, screaming out in all caps for someone like us to reach out and say that we're not alone? Putting a job posting on Craigslist is like saying, “Hey, I'm a risk taker, and understand that my future employee is either going to have a facial tattoo, or be twenty-three and know literally nothing about anything.” No self-respecting forty-five-year-old who is looking to branch out into a different company in the same sector, interested in fielding a few offers and getting his name back out there, is going to browse Craigslist in his spare time while eating Cheetos and occasionally clicking over to YouPorn. CL is the bastion of those of us who aren't afraid to include things on our resume such as Highly Ranked Redditor and Founder/Editor-in-Chief, Seattle Food Blog.

The things you find lurking on sites like this—ones who include as many misleading links to phishing sites and porn as they do to actual job offers—can be as frustrating as they are endearing. Someone needs a secretary, doesn't have a great command of the shift key, and put her actual cell phone number out there to be contacted by whatever dregs of society might happen to be floating by the
Jobs: Full Time
section at four in the morning on a Tuesday. It's the kind of offer that is too uncoordinated to be fake, and, should you come across it during unforgiving day 534 of your job search, it looks like a succulent filet mignon
after a hunger strike. You decide to send a general cover letter, and your resume, along with maybe a vaguely charming e-mail. And perhaps, in some alternate universe, that would be enough.

But this is today, in our world, and for every coffee bitch position available in an office in a big city, there are going to be at least five hundred twentysomethings clawing each other's eyes out to get it. So you have to be creative, be persistent, and stand out from the crowd. Once you've culled a list of potential jobs big enough to survive a 99.999 percent rejection rate and still land an interview or two, you can start honing the craft of making your presentation stand out from the tidal wave of other people with nearly identical qualifications. (If five hundred of you majored in history, participated in student government, and worked 2.3 internships in the past three years, it's going to require more than a saucy emoticon in the subject line of the e-mail to make you the candidate the hiring manager has to respond to.)

And how do you make yourself appear in a résumé to be twice the professional, thrice the charmer, and four times the international man of mystery than you are in real life?

It's simple: You lie.

Though perhaps not in the way you were told that lying would be when you were a child—all some clear-cut vision of “right” and “wrong,” something that is either absolutely one thing or the other. As with many things in adulthood, you will find that life is a veritable tapestry of gray areas, each point as open to interpretation
and tweaking as the next, and your job is to make all those blurry lines blur just enough in your favor. For example, saying that you attended two meetings of a planning committee for the Student Association in which your primary function was ensuring that at least some of the budget was getting siphoned into alcohol doesn't exactly scream “leadership skills.” But presenting yourself as Student Advocate for Allocation of Funds sounds distinguished, and vague enough to be “probably pretty important” in the eyes of whoever is reading this.

Your internship? Downplay the part about taking people's lunch orders and emphasize the one day you got to sit in on a meeting with legitimate employees. Your special skills? There is no sport, hobby, or activity you cannot pretend you are way more talented and experienced in than you actually are. If you say “advanced salsa dancer,” who is going to call you on that? Is the HR rep going to make you dance with her around the office like some busted version of the ballroom scene from
Beauty and the Beast
? No. So make it sound as if you're committed to something outside of work hours.