Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The Job Search

After months of searching (three months minus one day, to be precise), I have finally landed myself a job. Granted, my searching wasn't all that it could have been. Some days, instead of meeting my goal of one application a day, I would read on the couch all day, only sometimes pretending to look around for openings online or in the paper. Some days I would distract my parents from nagging me by ferociously cleaning parts of the house. I spent most of February attacking the dust and clutter that had piled up while the Mother Unit had been recovering from her knee surgery, pulling books off the shelf that had a quarter-inch of fuzzy dust on them and reorganizing the shelves by genre then by author, cleaning out drawers and closets that had been neglected for years. I got so carried away with my attention-diverting cleaning sprees that it even got me in trouble: while dusting and organizing our bar cabinet one day, I inadvertently picked up an ancient bottle of scotch and dusted off 150 years worth of dust. Oh, Todd* had a fit that day. I'm still not sure what upset him so much about it -- that I touched it, or that I annihilated over a century of skin cells and dust mite feces with one swipe of my rag. Is it a guy thing? I wouldn't want 150 years of dust on anything I owned, no matter how cool it was.

Eventually, Todd gave me an ultimatum (which may or may not have been in direct relation to the scotch incident): find a job by the end of March, or... Or what? I'm not sure; it wasn't exactly outlined very specifically in the conversation. I suppose I would have gotten a Lecture (they're terrible) and been forced to apply to Burger King or Old Navy -- two of the worst available places to work in my town, in my opinion. Either way, it got my rear in gear enough to start submitting an application every day -- from online, from the local paper, asking businesses downtown; anything I could think of without actually going door-to-door. Eventually the job just about fell into my lap.

As of Saint Patrick's Day, 2011, I am officially employed by a local optometrist as an optician-in-training, or optician's assistant. I file things. I un-file things. I answer phones and make calls and sign for boxes that the FedEx and UPS men bring in the mornings, after my first cup of tea but before my lunch fruit. I meet interesting people. I get yelled at by the doctor (to be fair, he kind of yells at everyone who works for him). I adjust glasses (sometimes). I am learning to do big-girl activities like file insurance and other things I don't understand yet.

Be proud, readers. I am now (finally) a real-life Productive Member of Society.

*Father Unit