The Interview

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The interview process at this company is hardcore. They’ve been looking for someone to run executive support for MONTHS, but until someone can run the gamut of all 4 interviews successfully, every candidate thus far has been turned away.

But! My interview was so much easier (probably because I’m a consultant). I was in and out in a matter of minutes. And considering I’d driven all the way to Connecticut for it (and in rush-hour traffic no less, right through NYC), it was almost disappointingly simple. Not that I’m complaining. Employment is damn good. It’s just that I’d just spent two and a half hours in a car chanting my new mantra: “Truth! Honesty! Openness! Truth, Honesty, Openness!” which also happens to be the mantra at the company. Have you ever gone to an interview with the sole objective of telling the truth and being completely honest? It’s a hell of a mind game, let me tell you.

It's Quittin' Time!

My, but it's been a while since I posted a comic, hasn't it? Here:

Well, that pretty much wraps up THAT story arc. I'm sure none of you are shocked that it ended this way. Shortly after quitting that deeply demeaning and abusive job at the boutique, I landed myself another position a little higher up the chain but in Connecticut. More details will be coming. It's better, but as you'll all see, it's not all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. My GOD, I wish there were unicorns.

Leading by WHAT Example?

Good Heavens! Where have I been? Oh, that's right, looking for employment. It's certainly been a roller coaster (the least fun kind--the kind they have at the kiddie parks that just goes in a glorified circle and is shaped like a snake or a dragon and you feel mortified by the mere thought that someone might see you on it and recognize you).

Ultimately, my struggle for the acquisition of money meant that I couldn't very well turn down a job offer, even if it was a crap job with no benefits, poor pay, and a mean-spirited boss. A job in the hand and all that.

Meanwhile I keep looking for something significantly better. To give you an idea of the range of pay scales I've been offered, I'll tell you that the hourly salary of the highest-paying job was 10 times greater than the lowest paying job. That is a SIGNIFICANT difference, even when you don't consider statistical significance.

My current job suffers from a great amount of apathy from all who work there, including the owner of the gift shop, where I now wrap gifts [while being heartily lectured on "girl" colors and "boy" colors for gift wrap ('where does green fall on this binary gender range,' I wondered? 'Don't use it,' the managers replied. But come ON! There's a whole stack of green tissue paper and several rolls of green ribbon! If you didn't want me to use it, don't put it out there to tempt me!).

The best option, at this point, is to just find something better. I will feel unreasonably guilty about quitting, but I'll certainly have a much happier outlook once I'm out of there.

When It Rains, It Pours

This is perhaps the busiest looking comic I've ever drawn. And there's not a ton of movement either, it's mostly facial expressions. So I apologize. It was necessary.



This sort of actually happened. Right after I accepted a job with my current employer, I got a call from Kelly Sciences. Of course, I didn't reject them outright. I waited to hear how much they would pay me (not very well), before declining their offer. I guess it's true that as soon as you're employed, everyone else wants a piece of you.

So that's it. This was my official announcement. I'm staying on the west coast. I have a job, and I'm here to stay. I miss my east coast friends already but hopefully, we'll have plenty of opportunities to visit one another. Now I have to settle in and really make some friends in the area. I don't know how the next 3-5 years are gonna go. I can only hope for the best. Tally ho!

DO NOT WANT

This is how my I felt during my Job Search in October. I was so over finding a job. I'm not even going to talk about it anymore. I had just renewed my NJ car insurance (exorbitant!), and I miss some of my east-coast peepz (I'm a tiny white girl... I'm not sure I can use the phrase "peepz" but... eh. what the hell). Really, I was ready to resign myself to hoboism and crawl into my crappy cardboard box on Vine. Making friends? Also apparently overrated.

But hey, look at me, I can be an optimist too!: Plus side - I have some version of all the clothes drawn above, including that super sassy suit in the first frame, although it's got pants, not a skirt. I'm such a fashion plate, I amaze even myself.

EDIT: And as always, events did not occur as shown. This is just a reflection of how I feel.

My New Muse

Since returning to California I've been reunited with some friends I met back in August and also made some truly awesome new friends.



Skedaddle the chinchilla belongs to one of my old-new friends, but I didn't meet Skee 'til October of last year. He's adorable and clearly my new muse. He just hops all over the place, explorin' and being unbearably cute. I often cannot contain my *squees of glee. Until October, I'd never seen a chinchilla in person before, so this was an unexpected and welcome surprise. So soft and fuzzy.

I'm now making plans to have a chinchilla someday when I retire.

So generic question to OKC land out there, what's your favorite kind of pet and why? Do you think you'd want a different kind of pet when you're older or do you think your preferences will stay the same?

Random

I've got nothing to put here.

The Joys of Living in the NorthEast

This comic was drawn after I had returned home, once again to NJ. I finished this comic on the plane (tight quarters for a tablet, let me tell you). Some of you might recognize an old visual pun that has been done before. Oh, not by me. Snow falling in one big WHUMP has totally been done before, and much better by the guy who draws "Bone". I remember back when it was running in the Disney Adventure magazine. Ahhhh, comic love! So, yeah, it was still summer in Jersey (and HOT), but soon, it would be fall, and maybe I would take a quick jaunt up to Massachusetts for a romp in the snow when the season comes. Nothing better than a New England winter to lift one's spirits! Fall is still my favoritest season. Everything smells great in the fall.

P.S. I spent like 5 minutes making that stupid leaf stamp and it didn't even work out the way it was supposed to. GRAH Oh, and discuss!: Your favorite season and why!

Bye Bye Berkeley

This was drawn the day before I left California. Man, I was excited to be going back to New Jersey.


After the high quality of the last 3 strips, this one ends up looking like crap, hm? That's what I get for composing a strip at 11 at night.

This strip is not to say that I don't like California. It's a nice enough state. But something tells me you guys are nuts for living in a place where half the signs of the apocalypse can occur in a single day. Maybe I'll be back if I get a job here! But I had just gotten word that I'd been rejected from the job I really wanted at UC Berkeley. Suck.

My Boxwarming Party

This didn't come off as funny as it seemed in my head. But maybe that's because this comic took me a whole 2 weeks to get together. I'm a loser. This was the last day before I left California to go back to Jersey. It was starting to grow on me. Just a little.

Cue Futuristic Music!

If I really don't want to live in a box in California, I'd better be making a small fortune and not eating (so as not to waste resources).

It's apparently really hard to find a nice place for less than 700k.

Sugar High

From working in the computer lab, senior year:

"Ahh, another late night in the computer lab. I'm working a double shift, from 8pm to 2:15am, and I'll probably feel pretty darn tired at the end of it, but my coworker, A- has got to be exhausted. She's been here since 7:45 this morning, taking 6 shifts in a row. Exhausted and CRAZY. This is what happens to you when you have no exams. She's written 3 essays today, and when I look across the hallway, she's actually dead asleep at the desk. I don't blame her.

I recently had a conversation with some of the older folks in my dorm about jobs and employment. Looking back, I haven't had it too bad, and my work experience is definitely well-rounded. They say that's a good thing, since a lot of places won't hire college students straight-off because they've never had any office experience. I've had plenty. I present to you a vague resume of my life:

Chore Pay - My parents paid me a $5 a week allowance if I did all my chores. This included making the bed, tidying up my room, doing the dishes, helping to fold laundry, taking care of the dog and so on.

Dotcom Pay - In 7th grade, I somehow managed to make it onto the roster as a beta tester for a pre-teen website. I gave suggestions and edited and created content. Pretty sweet gig until I realized that I was only making $200 a month. But the dotcom bubble burst 4 months later anyway and it ended up not much mattering. Which wasn't much of a shame because whoever chose their color scheme must have been blind. It was that ugly.

Icecapades Pay - In 10th grade, I became the newest skate guard at the local hockey arena. This would have meant a lot more if they weren't so desperate for staff that they'd hire any schmo off the street. They even hired people who couldn't skate. But the pay was minimal ($6.25 an hour), and my boss was a jerk. And it's hard to get to a skating rink that far away when you haven't got a car. And did I mention my boss was a Jerk?

File Pay - After skate guarding and nursing a lot of scraped knees and bruised egos, I got a job at the local news-clipping agency. You know how after talk shows they say, "If you would like a transcript of this show please contact...." I worked at the place that made those transcripts. I filed. Good God, did I file. I was so fricking efficient. And at the end of the day, it was like I hadn't even made a dent in the pile. There was no feeling of accomplishment, because as soon as I'd finished filing a stack, my supervisor would have already placed a new stack on my desk. It never ended. It was awful. The following summer I went back. And I managed to make it into the summer-worker elite of computer input. Which didn't suck. But my boss was still a Jerk.

And there have been internships and summer jobs

And now I work in a computer lab where people of questionable intelligence abuse me daily. "My computer won't start up!" "Why don't you have PC's?!" "I forgot my printing card!"

Today's comic is of myself and my coworker.



It never ends. I brought candy to work today. Too bad that sugar wears off so quickly..."

Corporate Love Slave

This entry is reprinted from the summer of no jobs:

As I continue my search for a summer job, I'm reminded frequently by my mother that the pursuit of money knows no shame. Thusly, I face down the task of working at HomeDepot, horrors of horrors.

I imagine myself decked out in a hideous shade of orange that both clashes with my skin color and works to make my self esteem drop to a negative level (heretofore, never deemed possible).



One might think that if I keep complaining of having no money, people might actually start believing me and forcing me to take jobs working for THE MAN.

Hear this world: I work for no MAN. Two of my previous jobs have actually qualified as goverment jobs (as scary as that sounds), and there's just too much paperwork to make it worthwhile. Meanwhile, my more recent government job had set me up with a government e-mail account, courtesy of NOAA, through which I attained all the nuances of the RAINBOW OF DOOM (also knows as the color-coded terrorist alert). I continue to point out that Bush, or whoever decided to put this terror level thing together must have failed out of preschool at least once, since every idiot knows that the rainbow goes Red, Orange, Yellow, GREEN, BLUE. Not BLUE, GREEN. Of course, back in the day, teachers would pass just about anyone, yeah?

Anyway, the point here is that, despite my need for money, working for corporate America doesn't quite appeal to me. But, mmmmmmm, beech shavings....

My groove: I'm feeling broody and artistic. Somebody should send me some black culottes.

Work Ethics?

The American ideal for a 21-year-old college graduate is one of two options. Parents hover over their no-longer-youngsters and pray for grad school, pray for them to get a job. Having already decided to take a year or two away from the studystudystudy mentality of school, I'm opting for the latter. My mother was not particularly thrilled at this rather sudden decision, but after one or two months of haggling my decision into her heart, she finally agreed that yes, perhaps this plan is for the best.

Neither of my parents finished college, and when they did attend, it was night school and during the height of the Cold War. I only realize this now because my major advisor was determined to make me understand why so many parents have difficulty seeing their kids not take immediately to grad-school after college. The Cold War, apparently, had the singularly unpleasant effect of attempting to create as many scientists as the system could handle. It was a scientist machine. There were no breaks, your country needed you to become a mad scientist, find some way to out-maneuver, out-think, out-invent the soviets. My father is an accountant, my mother is an executive at a large company. Although they never finished college, they both understand the importance of an education. They struggle to give me everything. My mother perhaps moreso. She is a helicopter parent and despite my insistent shooing and insistence that she just leave me alone to make my own mistakes, will probably always hover over me, attempting to do things for me.

Four summers ago, at the end of my internship at NOAA, I had 4 weeks or so of summer left and my mother demanded I look for a job. I updated my resume. I rewrote my coverletters. I forged out into the tiny local community, and made my lonely attempt for a job. My mother doesn't believe in giving up. She says, "Have you tried asking the church if you can paint fences?" This is the job my boyfriend had held earlier in the summer. I don't want to paint fences. I try the pottery place, the local restaurants, the flower shops. "We'll hold your resume," the owners and managers say meekly. Their eyes respond, "we already have everyone we need." Eventually mom gave up.


I drew this comic during my frustrating trial-by-interview. The same scenario occurred over and over again like a broken record...

Ideally, I would have gotten a job that summer, at the end of my internship. No luck though. I spent the remainder of my summer relaxing happily and confident that I had tried my hardest.

Now it's happening again, but on a larger scale. Now that I've managed to sell my mother on the idea that I won't be attending grad school right away, she's terrified about me finding a job. She wasn't going to mention it though. Through a school newsletter, I found a job description working for Cornell that sounded like it had been custom-tailored to my experiences. I thought, "I'll just fix up my resume and write a cover letter and see what happens." I was excited. It didn't pay particularly well, but that hardly mattered. I was just getting things up to date and seeing what was out there.

I forgot myself though. I told my mother about my seemingly good fortune. She was appalled by the pay. And it sent her into a flurry of activity, checking monster.com and other job search sites for better, more interesting jobs. This means that for the next 3 days, my inbox is flooded with emails from her and these job-search companies, with a single job-description per e-mail. Unfortunately, my mother's experience leads her to draw false conclusions. Firstly, she is excited because her preconception had been that there were no jobs available for marine scientists. When she found some on the internet, she was thrilled and enthralled. Secondly, because she holds a great job but got it without a degree from a college, she considers all prerequisite skills, degrees, or accomplishments to be suggestion only. Thirdly, she becomes so excited about finding me a job, she determines that any job that works with water will be just fine for me.

I have e-mails in my inbox. They require me to care for aquarium tanks "24 hours a day, please". Some require me to have a degree in Geology or Hydrogeology. One wants me to be both a plumber and an electrician. Another pleads for people with vet training. Her enthusiasm makes the job search much more frustrating. I appreciate her efforts, but how do you tell your mother to lay off? I want to say, "I can find a job on my own!" But it's more more complicated than that. Can I really? A real job? Not just some part-time crash for a little extra pocket change?

I can't see myself living in a lonely appartment complex in some suburb, commuting to work, hoping for some meaningful interaction with another human being. Paying bills. Shopping. Laundry. Dishes. Same day, different weather. I want this for myself, but also I do not.

I love my mother. But this is something I need to do on my own time, at my own pace. Maybe I'll go back to plotting my assassination of ice cream scoopers...