Hello friends,

YC here. I had fun taking a walk down job-history lane in my last entry, so today I bring you a continuation.

Guitar Store

Somehow I had forgotten about this when I was writing the last one. This was post-college, but pre-guitar teaching. At this point in my life I was still very focused on writing and recording music and performing in a band, which would one day be how I made a living. But I needed the proverbial day job, not least because I was a few grand in debt after recording and releasing an album, many copies of which are probably sill boxed up in a basement somewhere. I thought working in the guitar department of a music store would be a really chill job and that I'd be good at it, but when I applied to work at the store they put me on the cash register instead, with the promise that I might eventually get moved to guitars if I did well. Greg, a middle-aged white guy with a goatee, was the store manager; at least that's how I picture him now, though the description feels so on-the-nose that I can't rule out the possibility of having retroactively invented those details. I remember being wowed when he told me during the interview that some of the sales people in the guitar department were making $60k/year. Mind you, this was many years ago, when $60k went quite a bit further than it does now, and in any case it was a lot more than I'd ever made before then. I bet Greg was full of shit, though. And while I think in my naivete I imagined guitars to be the most salient aspect of working as a guitar salesman, in hindsight I think it was probably more about sales, so I probably would have been disappointed had I actually managed to land that role. In the end I stayed at the register during my entire stint at the place.

An occasionally contentious part of my ringing-up duties involved asking the customer for their phone number. Most would provide it, but a more privacy-minded minority would decline, or say something like "What do you need my phone number for?" and I'd say "So I can look you up in the system." Which was true, as far as it went — I didn't have any way to view a customer's purchase history if they'd never given their information. But the real reason for collecting that information was so that the company could market to them, so it was reasonable to opt out. But asking for it was part of my job, and thus was one of my first exposures to the sort of Stockholm Syndrome (I know that Stockholm Syndrome is a fake idea but it's a useful concept here, take it figuratively) that can come with doing a job. I would get annoyed at customers who I felt were making my life difficult, even though objectively speaking they weren't in the wrong, and perhaps in truth it was I who was making their lives difficult, although it was of course not by choice that I did so. Thus is the cruel logic of the system. One perk of working the register was that we got to choose the music playing in our section of the store. One time I put on Sufjan Stevens's Illinois and someone came over to ask if the CD was skipping (it wasn't, and Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is a beautiful song).

I didn't last too long at that job, because after three months or so my then-drummer — who had been hired alongside me, and was also living with me in my parents' house, much to my mother's consternation — and I informed Greg that we would be taking a "leave of absence" to go on tour with my band. I remember being surprised at Greg's icy response to this news, because when we were hired he had stressed how friendly an establishment this was to working musicians, and so I figured he'd be understanding. Incidentally, the sales guys at the store used to joke about how the warranties they sold people were basically a scam, as they were so rarely redeemed that they were essentially pure profit for the company. And then when I was getting ready to leave for tour, I came into the store to purchase a guitar tuner pedal and the sales guy — my erstwhile colleague — had the gall to look me straight in the eye and ask if I wanted to purchase the warranty for the tuner. I declined. I recall too being surprised when I called Greg several weeks later to say my drummer and I would be back from tour soon and were hoping to have our jobs back, to which he replied very impersonally that there were currently no openings. But we'd just spent three months learning to use their piece-of-shit POS system! Ah well. It would have to be something else — this is when I would end up in the guitar teaching job, which if you read my last part you know was no pleasure cruise, but at least I got to touch the guitars there instead of just looking at them.

US Attorney's Office

This isn't a job I actually did, but it is a job I theoretically had. Allow me to explain: I was teaching guitar (see part one) and after 18 months or so I badly wanted out. I was trawling Craigslist for jobs. (Do young people still look at Craigslist? I feel like that's something you don't hear about as much these days.) The idea of working in an office — any office — seemed really appealing to me. I wanted a set schedule and to stop working with children. People weren't really talking about "email jobs" then, but that's what I wanted. So I came across a listing for a role at the US Attorney's office in Philadelphia. Now, don't get on my case about the politics, here; first of all I didn't really have much ideological direction at that age, and secondly as I've already told you I didn't end up actually doing this job, which I'm going to explain shortly.

I remember that it seemed like a fairly generic office-assistant-type role, requiring Excel skills and the like. So I applied, and I went in for an initial interview, which was with an HR representative. I want to say her name was Nancy. I sat down with Nancy and she told me a little about the job and I did my best to project reliability and competence. And then Nancy told me — unprompted! — that the job required a background check but did not require a drug test. She was very clear about that. I told her that would not be a problem at all and I was sure I could handle all of the responsibilities. So I advanced to the next round and sat down with some other people and told them about how I'd made websites or whatever and could definitely use Excel and that I was a team player and a good communicator and blah blah blah. And then not long after I got a call from Nancy in HR and she told me that I was being offered the role! All I'd have to do is complete some paperwork for the background check.

I was very excited, and soon afterwards I came into my guitar teaching job and informed Ken, the music lesson manager, that the following week would be my last. I gave one week of notice because I didn't like Ken and I wanted to be a little bit of a dick but not too much of one, even though I've always thought the expectation of giving notice was total bullshit as your employer will happily fire you with zero notice so why do you owe two weeks to them? Anyway, Ken acted really offended that I didn't give two weeks but I didn't care. I planned it out so I would have a week between ending guitar teaching and beginning the new job, during which I planned to spend most of my time doing two things: 1) playing Call of Duty and 2) smoking weed.

So I said my goodbyes to the music store and started doing just that. Meanwhile I received some paperwork from the government regarding the background check, which included a questionnaire I had to fill out. The booklet warned in big foreboding letters that there would be criminal penalties for any false information provided. Most of it was a breeze, as I'd never been in any legal trouble at that point. Then there was a section that asked me to list every incident of drug use I'd engaged in during the past seven years. The allotted space for responding to that question nearly enough for me to have responded truthfully, but in any case why would I do that? They weren't going to drug test me. So I answered that I'd never done drugs, sent the thing back, and returned to smoking weed and playing CoD.

So you can imagine my surprise and confusion when not long after, and only a few days before I was expecting to report for my first day of work at my new office job, I received another packet in the mail. "Congratulations on your new role!" it read. Then it continued: "Please report for your drug test within the next 48 hours." Surely there's been a mistake, I thought. I called Nancy in HR. "Nancy," I said, "I thought there was no drug test for this role?" "That's right," she said. "Then what's this about?" I asked. "Let me put you on hold for a moment." I waited. Eventually Nancy came back and informed me that their office had recently changed contractors, and actually there was a drug test.

I hung up the phone in a cold sweat. I had already quit my guitar teaching job, telling my family and everyone else that I had taken an exciting new opportunity in the city. I had been smoking weed every day. I attested on the background check, under threat of severe criminal penalties, that I had never done drugs. I broke down and explained the situation to my dad and brother while I weighed my options. I tried calling the company and saying I was going to be traveling and wouldn't be able to take the test right away, but they told me I couldn't put it off and would have to find a testing facility wherever I was. I looked up methods of rapid detox. I pondered smuggling urine — maybe my brother's? I wondered whether I'd actually go to prison if I got caught lying on the form. In the end, I decided there was no option other than to walk away from the job. I called Nancy back and tried to make it sound like I was taking a principled stand against the invasion of privacy inherent in pre-employment drug screening — which is of course a totally correct belief, but obviously she could tell I was really saying that because I smoked weed.

So then I was unemployed. Whoops! I didn't know what to say to my mom, who had been so excited about my new job. I ended up telling her that unfortunately, the US Attorney's office had called me back and informed me that there'd been a hiring freeze, which she believed, bless her heart. During the stressful period of job-searching that followed, my mom would call me every week or so and urge me to check back in with the office and let them know I was still available to work. I would tell her that I called, but unfortunately there was still a hiring freeze. I think I may have begrudgingly stopped smoking weed during that period, even though it felt like a completely unjustified ceding of my personal freedom to the cruel machinery of the Market. Spoiler alert: I did eventually find another job, and that job did not drug test me, but I did not end up faring much better there than at my previous roles. But that's perhaps a story for next time. I've never told my mom the truth about this. Maybe I will, soon.

YC