Whizziwig Blogs

I moved to Seattle for one reason; to realize my dream of being a Barista. Numerous people have told me that Seattle is the coffee capital of the world, so when two of my best friends took internships at Microsoft for the summer, and I had nothing to do before starting my grown-up, post-college-graduation job in the fall, I decided to try to make my dream a reality by moving to Seattle with them to sleep on their couch.

My family always told me that at some point in my life, I should take a service job. It would teach me humility, they said. It would also make me realize it’s abnormal to have been making $20/hr since I was 13. In college, my creative writing teacher brought this idea back. When I asked him how to be a writer. He looked at me with his beautiful blue eyes and explained the empathy and beauty of working in a restaurant. He said it would teach me something about people. Which is important to being a writer. People.

I set out one ground rule for the service job hunt. No work that required skill. While being an Ice Cream scooper sounded good, it seemed like too much skill was involved in properly sizing scoops and packing cones without breakage (I’m a klutz). No clothing stores, I can’t fold and don’t expect to learn. Really, my hope was to be paid to be a body in an air conditioned room for the next month. I had no rational way to reconcile this with my desire to be a barista, so I ignored the cognitive dissonance .I had no previous experience making espresso in anything other than an Aeropress — a device that looks like a cross between a French Press and a gravity bong. Hell, I’d never even made drip coffee.

Day zero of the job search consisted of half-heartedly looking on craigslist for jobs other than barista that sounded interesting. One ad read “Bike Messengers Needed,” which sounded perfect — I love biking and have a death wish. But that turned out to be an incredibly explicit gay personal — the poster claimed to have a discreet apartment in downtown Seattle where he would casually give blow jobs to couriers. I failed to catch whether or not he paid for this privilege.

It seemed as though there is a nearly unlimited need for inexperienced college students to do interior house painting. I have no idea why there are so many different companies dedicated solely to hiring overeducated teenagers for what should be skilled labor, but there is. While the requirements fit me perfectly (absolutely no experience necessary, they all claimed), two points prevented me from responding to any of these companies. First — the fumes — I am incredibly sensitive to any sort of psychoactive chemicals — 50mg of Zoloft made me feel like I was living in a rubber bubble, and the last time I smoked pot, it made me shiver uncontrollably for two hours. The other issue was that I threw out all my junky clothing while moving out of my college dorm because I suffer from the problem many guys have — if I have unattractive clothing in my closet, I will wear it, because I’m ’saving’ the good clothes for some undefined time in the future.

I began to be discouraged that becoming a barista would not be as easy as I had imagined when the Starbucks at the Space Needle mandated 3 years of experience being a barista in a “high traffic environment.” The ad that caught my eye said “Want to help defeat the GOP?” which I do, and “Earn $300-$500 a week,” which sounded appealing enough — I’d defeat the GOP for free if you asked me nicely. I called them and set up an appointment for the next day.

I started my first real out-and-about day of the job search by visiting Grassroots Campaign headquarters, where an incredibly upbeat man named Pat made their case. They’re a for-profit fund-raising firm working with the DNC and MoveOn, going door-to-door to raise money to funnel directly into Dean’s 50 states project. For the first time in my life, the liberal rhetoric of ‘needing to get the Democrats in power’ bothered me. As much as Pat said that the money they raised would help shift the Dems away from being accountable to special interests, I didn’t believe him — the Dems would see this grassroots money as nothing more than a nice bonus on top of SIG donations.

The schedule they laid out for me sounded abominable — a 9 hour workday for $60/day.

• 1-2pm — Daily briefing, talking points from the DNC. i.e. Brainwashing
• 2-4pm — Lunch! They never explained why this was such a large chunk of the day.
• 4-9pm — Knocking on doors, asking for donations.
• 9-10pm — Paperwork!

The entire prospect made me feel dirty — it was complete with incentives for exceeding a daily donation quota. I told them I’d come back in two days, but decided to sleep in and write this instead.

I got back in my car and drove to upper Queen Anne because it was the only part of Seattle I was at all familiar with. My first coffee shop application at Cafe Ladro made me realize this was going to be harder than I expected — they wanted references. Names and phone numbers of employers that I didn’t have on me. I’m a Stanford graduate! I’m clearly responsible and qualified. I filled the application in with the phone numbers I had of former bosses in my cell phone and prayed they wouldn’t call them on their personal phones. The application asked me what I liked about coffee, and I developed my stock answer I’d use for the rest of the week — “It’s a more socially acceptable way to caffeinate than Jolt Cola.”

Next up was MetropolitanMarket, whose application reminded me of a grade school social studies exam. The entire back page of the form was filled with 15 short answer questions, starting with “What interests you about working in the grocery industry?” to which I replied “Grocery stores are well lit and smell nice.” I then moved into an explanation of the postmodern beauty of consumerism, referencing the photographic work of Andreas Gursky. The hardest question turned out to be “Give an example of a situation when you disagreed with a safety requirement and how you resolved the matter.” The only example I could come up with was needing to deal with the cops while massively overstuffing a cabin in Lake Tahoe during a ski trip — a situation I rectified by making everyone hide in the upstairs bedrooms until the cops left.Give an example of a situation when you disagreed with a safety requirement and how you resolved the matter

What interests you about working in the grocery industry?What interests you about working in the grocery industry?

After failing to find anymore coffee shops in Queen Anne, I found myself in Easy Street Records. Earlier in the week, I had emailed the manager of the store explaining that it was my dream in life to become Rob Gordon from High Fidelity, and would she please, please, please hire me. I hadn’t planned to spend any money that day, but ended up with $50 worth of CDs, which is pretty much the exact opposite of finding a job. After discovering out that the clerk I talked with was from my hometown, I thought it was a sign from God and went home to write a second sniveling indie fanboy letter to Tara, the store manager, who I still have yet to hear back from. I actually told her I’d work for free if necessary.

At Twice Sold Tales the woman at the counter looked at me like I was insane for applying without any previous bookselling experience. As far as I could tell, all they do is play with the cats and listen to public talk radio. I think I’m qualified to do that. The final coffee shop of the day was Uptown Espresso, whose application mainly consisted of the fill-in-the-blank “When I’m not working at Uptown Espresso I’m …,” another question I felt I’d adequately prepared for by passing the third grade.

Day two of the job search focused on walking East on 1st Ave, starting in Belltown, until Seattle came to an end. I made it about two miles from home before I started hitting places that wanted a resume, so I had to backtrack to home, buy a $10 ream of paper at Kinko’s and print copies of my resume. However, handing out my resume probably hurt me more than it helped, since every job on there was a $20/hr+ job working for a technical firm. And no one wants to hire an inexperienced customer service worker who is slumming it for the summer on a lark.

I fought my way into downtown, where I applied to Barnes & Noble and tried to make a big deal out of the fact that I was a creative writing minor. “I like words!” I tried to convey “Words are cool!” I even tried to play the Jewish card on the application “I’m a Jew, we’re the people of the book!” I don’t think they bought it. Also, I’m pretty sure I forgot to write my phone number on the application. I felt dirtier applying to Borders, since they’re not BuyBlue (and B&N is), but I tried anyway, only to be given a link to a website to fill out a UniCru application and personality test.

Up until this point, I had only read about such things in Nickel and Dimed, part of the assigned reading for my feminist studies class. The UniCru personality test is 185 questions, spread out over 37 pages to determine if you are too dumb to figure out the correct answers or too impatient to sit through all of it. For those of you who have never taken the UniCru test, each question has four answers — Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree. Some sample insults to your intelligence;

• You don’t work harder than you have to
• You are somewhat of a thrill-seeker
• You act pleasant even when you feel bad
• You don’t care if you offend people — asked twice, as well as — You are careful not to offend people
• Right now, you care more about having fun than being serious at school or work

I gave up on this at question 10. Fuck you, conservative book selling scum.

All the stores in Pike Place were staffed by people whose body language said “I’ve got a good thing going here, and I’m not going to cede it to you.” The stores around Pike Place weren’t much better — a book store clearly run by an aging gay couple and Pike Place Bagels was clearly staffed by an Asian family who was not going to let me in to their circle of doughy goodness.

I continued walking, dropping off resumes, until I ended up at Elliot Bay Books where I knew I had finished my search. When people back at school asked me what I was doing for the summer I told them “Working at an independent coffee shop. Or an indie bookstore. Or better yet, an indie coffee shop in an indie bookstore.” Which is exactly what Elliot Bay Books is. My application to them was so cloying, it even disgusted me, “Books are sacred things. I don’t write in them, and I don’t sell them.” Which I realized sounded like I thought I was above selling books, when in reality I meant I didn’t sell my college textbooks back to the bookstore when I was done with them. I finished off the app with “Jeez, that was sniveling. Really, I can be an acerbic New Yorker if needed. I promise!”

Seattle’s Best Coffee was my last stop before my roommate called needing access to the garage where we’re illegally parking my car. It was definitely my favorite application of the entire process. It didn’t even ask for professional references, just a big box that said “Tell us about yourself. BE CREATIVE.” and a box of markers.

Except that as I was handing in my app, a random guy whispered “Psst! Dave. Dave!”
“Umm … what?” I finally responded
“Over here,” he motioned away from the counter. “You see that guy?” He pointed to a large black homeless man who had walked in and demanded a glass of water, shortly after the baristas had explained the morning’s excitement of another homeless man stealing a biscotti, running out of the store, and subsequently spitting it in the face of a barista who chased after him. “My wife worked here. If you work here, you’ll see a lot of guys like that.”
“Like That” He repeated.
“Aha.” I said “Thanks for the info!” I took my complimentary iced mocha (Seattle’s Best was the only store to give me anything for applying) and left, dejected, for home.

It’s now Friday, on what should be day three of the job search, but I’m tired and still sick with what may or may not be West Nile Virus, so I’m sleeping in, and wondering why my phone hasn’t rang even once. Isn’t there any calling in this town for an embittered college student, secretly leaving in less than a month to see his girlfirend in London, who just wants to live like Common People?