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Authors: Jennifer van der Kwast

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BOOK: Pounding the Pavement
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Pleading a long list of “urgent” phone calls, Mark hands me a crumpled sheet of instructions and leaves me alone in the room with a dusty timer.

“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes,” he says with a wink and heads out the door.

As soon as he leaves, I crouch down low in my cubicle and hit the timer. There is no point in waiting. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I begin the typing test, my fingers dancing nimbly on the keyboard.

There is something about the buzz of the fluorescent overhead lights, the shrill of unanswered phones down the hall, the blue glow flickering off my aged computer screen. This anonymous office feels very familiar to me. I am comfortable here.

I sail through the test, one page after another. I hit my stride during the Word exam and my momentum carries me well into the Excel and even the Powerpoint sections. I don’t mind tests. In fact, I rather enjoy them. Taking tests reminds me of college, and I was good at college.

The timer rings while I am checking my answers. As if on cue, Mark Shapiro flings himself into the room and lingers in the doorway for a moment, one fat, cocky eyebrow raised.

“So? How do you think it went?”

“Fine,” I shrug.

A pained cry erupts from somewhere in the room and I nearly leap out of my chair. I realize the brittle, graying printer is slowly spitting out my test results.

Mark Shapiro yanks out the page and glances at it.

“Not bad,” he says, handing it to me. I skim over it quickly.

Typing: 50 wpm

Word: 93%

Excel: 90%

Powerpoint?

96%

I find it hard to stifle a laugh.

W
hen I arrived at the headhunter’s agency two hours earlier, it had been raining. Thick, violent sheets of rain. But now the deluge has subsided, and the sun has poked a hopeful head between clouds, peering to see if the worst is over.

Summer has never been my favorite season in New York. Summer is a nasty, bitter, old windbag, armed with blasts of hot air for insult and steel drops of rain for injury. But I do like New York after a rainfall, when the streets glisten with invitation, a gracious perfumed hostess in pearls.

I step out of the office building on Park Avenue and am so pleased by the change in climate I decide to walk home. I do have twelve dollars left on my MetroCard, but I am reluctant to use it. Those are the last twelve dollars I have to my name. As soon as my card runs out, I will be officially broke.

While I stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change, I close my eyes and allow myself a moment to bask in the shielded sun’s warmth. Still, I refuse to let the sweet coolness lull me into any sense of false optimism. I know what this summer brings. I know it brings sweat stains on the knees of my pantyhose, damp patches under the arms of my silk button-down shirts, and matted, sticky hair clinging to the back of my neck.

I also know what this summer does not bring. As Mark Shapiro has dutifully informed me, the summer months are notoriously slow for the job market, catering primarily to recent college grads who snap up the poorly paid entry level jobs and feasting on summer interns who toil for nothing more than college credit.

The light changes and I step off the curb. A taxi screeches as it
careens around the corner. It doesn’t occur to me to step out of the way until it is too late. The cab flies full speed into the pungent puddle in front of me and I remain paralyzed in its wake as the infested wave, a mossy gray stew of urban rot, crashes over me.

chapter two

    People
lose
jobs. People
look
for jobs, they
go
job-hunting. But it is also important to remember that people
are
unemployed. Unemployment is, by its very nature, inactive. It is a condition, a state of being, much in the same way that a person can
be
an artist, or can
be
stupid.

There are many rules that apply to job-hunting. But there are just as many, if not more, that apply to being unemployed. You enjoy the time off. You try out new hobbies. You force yourself to be social and meet new people—people who could, potentially, provide access to more job leads. You interview for jobs you have no intention of accepting, if only for the practice. And first and foremost, above all, you develop a routine.

This is mine:

The panic attacks usually start some time around 2 a.m., when the world is dark and quiet and I am slipping into a terrifying dream that either has me missing the deadline for a college term paper or stepping onto the wrong express train, heading twenty blocks in the opposite direction on my way to an interview. I toss and turn for a couple of hours, pounding and fluffing my terror like a lumpy pillow.

Most mornings I wake up before 9 a.m. and that really pisses
me off. The 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. slot is the hardest part of the day to kill. Because if I let temptation get the best of me and turn on my computer any time before 11 a.m., I’ll discover I’ve received
no new e-mails
and that
no new job listings
have been posted on the online bulletins. For the rest of the day, I’ll have to live with the bitter disappointment. Ideally, I’d prefer to sleep in past noon, leaving only seven (all right, five) hours before I can start drinking when it’s still considered socially acceptable.

When I finally do manage to pull myself out of bed it is for one reason and one reason only: there is a Snickers bar in the refrigerator.

My next major event of the day is getting dressed. This might seem like a rather mundane activity to note in the schedule, but its significance cannot be overlooked. It would be all too easy to fall into a bathrobe-and-fuzzy-slipper funk, whittling away the daylight hours with the shades drawn. Miss Havisham at least had her wedding dress. Emily Dickinson was writing poetry. What’s my excuse?

That said, I no longer force myself to wear fly-collared blouses and tailored skirts
just in case
. If I do choose to get dressed my daily wardrobe is standard: jog bra, wrinkled gym shorts, anything that might pass for matching socks, sneakers, and a faded college T-shirt marking the year and the event that rewarded student participants with free attire. Today, I boast my contribution to Yale’s 1997 A Cappella Fest. It’s a lie. I didn’t go to Yale. And I am quite positive I didn’t visit the campus to take part in the finger-snapping, foot-stomping charade of mediocre vocalists. How the shirt has insinuated itself into my standard daily wardrobe is a total mystery to me.

You’re probably thinking my next stop is the gym. You’re wrong.

At 10:30 I decide it’s okay to start smoking.

At 11—drum roll, please—I make for my final destination: the
Aeron office chair. Fabric web upholstering, backward recline, forward tilt, adjustable aluminum arms, the works! (There’s a story about this chair, but I’ll get to that in a bit.) I then turn on my computer and log on to my Hotmail account. Today I’ve received one new e-mail and my heart soars. It is from Marjorie Newman, head of a boutique literary agency.

Dear Sarah,

Thank you for sending your résumé, but you are far too overqualified for this job. Good luck!

Best,

Marjorie Newman

Is it thrilling to think someone actually considers me overqualified for anything? Of course not. I know I’m not overqualified. I’m just qualified in a way no one knows how to deal with. Still, I find the letter oddly flattering. So I save it.

At 1 p.m. I decide to take my first break and head to the gym. (Happy now?) I do not go to the gym because I am health conscious. And despite what several magazine articles say about exercise being an excellent stress-reliever, that too is none of my concern. I go to the gym because there are TV sets, all of which receive cable, and no one is going to be there to argue with me when I flip to HGTV to watch homeowners remodel their log cabins. This is the only hour of entertainment I will indulge in. I am not permitted to watch daytime television at any other time. (This is a stringent rule. Without it, I could easily spend the entire afternoon watching marathon reruns of
Newlyweds.)

At 2 p.m. I come back to my apartment and watch
Newlyweds
.

After the conclusion of one episode, and one episode
only
(yes, I have rules for breaking rules), I head back to my bedroom and ready my lasso. For the rest of the afternoon I will straddle the Aeron, my well-worn saddle, tip an imaginary Stetson on my head, and cock the barrel of my mouse to make sure it’s loaded.

And this is how it generally works. Me, a regular Gary Cooper, cruising the online plains—head tilted, eyes squinted, sniffing for trouble.

S
o. About the chair.

Consider the Aeron a passenger seat on a particularly turbulent flight, and the plane my former company, 451Films.com. I was strapped tightly to that chair for takeoff. And it was all I managed to salvage from the fatal crash.

At 451Films.com we used to pride ourselves on being visionaries with magic wands who tapped the best of New York’s undiscovered filmmaking talent. But a week before Christmas, due to failure to remit, our wands were repossessed. So were our water-coolers. And the copy machine we’d been leasing.

Holiday cheer at the time was, at best, waning. A memo had been issued from the cockpit that there was a storm to be weathered, a few bumps ahead, but not to worry—the destination, of course, would be well worth the ride. Unfortunately, by that time everyone in the cabin was too airsick to care. We’d just as soon strap on a parachute and flash a thumbs-up before we leapt out the emergency exit.

Sure, there was still work to be done. But it was menial work, mindless work, work nobody wanted to do anymore. Aspiring filmmakers who didn’t know any better sent us their film reels and written
proposals, hoping to be featured on our website. We watched, we read, knowing full well that “acquisition” was no longer a word that fit in our company lexicon.

At one point there was a calm, which there always is. And then a ripple of excitement. The office was abuzz with the sort of breathless anticipation we hadn’t felt in months. And the word on everyone’s fevered lips was “layoffs.”

I arrived at the office that Monday morning some time around 11 a.m., much earlier than I usually managed to drag myself in. And still I had to wait another hour before my boss, Gracie—or Princess Grace, as we took to calling her behind her back—came prancing in, two large Henri Bendel shopping bags strapped to her shoulders. An early-morning trip to a tanning salon had left her cheeks glowing a fierce red. She didn’t say hi when she walked by (she never did), she merely breezed right into her office. This time, I followed her.

“Oh, good, Sarah, you’re here,” she said, massaging her neck. “Could you call a messenger to take these bags back to my apartment? My back is killing me.”

Princess’s blatant disregard of the cut in company expenditures was hardly surprising. As far as she was concerned, the rules never directly applied to
her
.

“Actually, Gracie, we need to talk,” I said, taking my familiar seat on her office sofa. She gaped at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Annoyance? Indignation? Fear? With an exaggerated sigh, she crossed her legs and aimed her pointy-toed shoe at me like a dagger drawn from its sheath.

“I’m listening.”

I took a deep breath. “I heard a rumor that all the rest of the assistants are being let go today. Is it true?”

If there was anything Gracie hated most, it was a direct question. So she avoided my eye and toyed with the collar of her candy pink cashmere turtleneck. “You know, I wasn’t supposed to tell you until this afternoon—”

“Tell me what? That I’m fired?”

She glared at me. Like it was my fault for putting her on the spot. “In a way … yes.”

“When?”

“Umm …” She fumbled on her desk for a hairpin. “End of the day?”

“You mean, today?”

“Well, actually, no.” She stuck the hairpin between her teeth. I watched with no small amount of irritation as she spent the next couple of moments wrapping her Nordic blonde hair into a tight little bun on top of her head. She finally sealed it with the hairpin and sighed again. “Officially, your last day was Friday.”

Damn. I must have cut out early and missed the farewell party.

“Do I get any severance?” I asked.

She laughed. “I’m sorry. You’re serious? With what money?”

Excellent point. I had almost forgotten we’d had to make do without coffee and toilet paper for the past couple of weeks.

“Well, then, can I take my office chair?” I asked.

Princess shrugged. “Why not? I don’t suppose it makes much difference.” She turned on her laptop, signaling the end of the conversation.

“I’m also taking the halogen lamp next to my bullpen.”

“Fine.”

I excused myself from the room.

“Oh, Sarah,” she called, as I was stepping out the door. “Don’t forget to call the messenger.”

I turned back to glare at her.

“Never mind,” she said sheepishly. “If you shoot me an e-mail with the phone number I can take care of it.”

BOOK: Pounding the Pavement
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