The End of the 00s: Top 10 Jobs I Lost This Decade: Failing Up, Sometimes, but Mostly Sideways, by...
The End of the 00s: Top 10 Jobs I Lost This Decade: Failing Up, Sometimes, but Mostly Sideways, by Jackson West
by The End of the 00s
I’ve been looking for, finding and losing jobs since I was 14, the legal working age in Washington State. The first job I was fired from, after just a couple of months, was a filing job at a pool equipment supply company in Seattle. I did get former Supersonics All-Star power forward Shawn Kemp’s old home address out of the deal, so that’s something. But that was the dawn of the 90s, and while I’m sure I gained and lost at least ten more jobs in that decade, I’m pretty sure it couldn’t compare to the volatile 00s. I wasn’t always fired, mind you-straight-up firings, lifetime, I can count on one hand. No, these days things are much more passive-aggressive. Generally the work was temporary from the get-go, or else I was downsized, and sometimes I even quit or transitioned to part-time on relatively good terms. I, like most Americans, have been fully widgetized. The concept of job security is a sort of mythical legend from a pre-historic dreamtime.
The new narrative, I’m told, is that with hard work and good ideas, you’ll hop ever higher, each time finding new and better opportunities-your employer is no longer burdened with the expensive responsibility of cultivating your loyalty, skills or health. But I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where even successful entrepreneurs like fried clam tycoon Ivar Haglund celebrated the endemic lack of ambition amongst the populace in commercial jingles, and frankly I would be happy just to get by doing something that doesn’t bore me beyond hope.
In the last decade, I’ve weathered two full cycles of the San Francisco Bay Area’s hyper-volatile brand of Gold Rush capitalism. Granted, I have rarely made the best personal decisions-private art school in New York, for starters. Binge-cycle polydrug abuse. Making the move from web production and technical writing into, idiot that I am, creating “content” for online publishers. But I’ve seen people do far less advisable things and succeed anyway. Seems to have something to do with the Ivy League, family wealth or, failing those, an Oprah-bait memoir. So while I’d so very much like to blame myself, I can’t entirely discount macroeconomic machinations, otherwise known as The Man, and in all his terrible manifestations.
I’m currently living in a residential hotel while filing local news part-time for a major national media conglomerate (for little remuneration) and a minor local media startup (for no remuneration), while considering substitute teaching, cab driving, or both, as a sideline-so I’m well on my way to losing even more jobs in the teens! But this isn’t about my giddy optimism for future sad material, this is a lowlight reel of mistakes already lived, in roughly chronological order.
* * *
§ Shockwave: My first gig was at Wine Shopper, where I edited HTML (in Homesite, on a Pentium desktop with a CRT display- those were the days) for a couple of weeks, making twice what I was making as an administrative temp on the bond floor of J.P. Morgan’s Wall Street office the previous year in New York. I had lunch in South Park and went to my first party at 111 Minna. Then I got not one, but two temp offers through my agency-and even though it didn’t pay quite as well, decided to go with Shockwave because it sounded more fun and promised to take better advantage of my wildly expensive NYU Tisch education.
Shockwave, named after the browser plugin, had every dot-com cliché down pat, from the video game room to the free, catered lunches every day and the Friday beer bash. The creator of early hit Radiskull and Devil Doll walked around the office with sunglasses on, pretending to be a rock star but was more likely hungover. People complained about the lack of variety while standing in line for the free, catered sandwiches and salads served for lunch. I spent most of the day playing Shockwave Golf and wishing I could leave early to garden my sunny backyard plot of dirt in Oakland and drink beer. I lasted about four months. Not long after, the free lunches were history, layoffs commenced and eventually the company was purchased by Atom Films.
§ Macromedia: Surprisingly enough I ended up with a job at Macromedia, the company that spun Shockwave off as a content portal, after working for a couple of other SOMA and Mission startups with payrolls bloated by easy venture capital and the “go big or get out” ethos of the time. I produced the Macromedia EDGE email newsletter for the marketing department, and took full advantage of broadband and the company’s dedicated servers for MP3 storage to raid Napster. I seem to remember showing up at work high on ecstasy once. It was not an ecstatic experience. I also remember sending a wildly political response to a wildly political company-wide email thread. Something about the Taliban in Afghanistan if I recall. Jesus, that was stupid.
I got let go shortly after accidentally releasing the email code for delivery without confirming with the server administrator who had the keys to FTP access for uploading images but who was always frustratingly difficult to find. It was, ultimately, my mistake, and I wasn’t even drunk or high at the time. (Though I’ve since learned that my laziness needs no lubrication.) It was a long way from the BART station anyway. And did I mention I had a garden?
§ Sonic Solutions At this point, the bottom was falling out from under almost everything. But I managed to find some freelance work here and there-developing a custom, automated online radio Web site for a New York trance DJ, writing articles about Flash production for CNet Builder, and developing interactive tutorials for Sonic Solutions’ line of DVD authoring software.
Then my editor at CNet was laid off, music publishers essentially shut down the online radio station, and accidentally including the email of my contact at Sonic Solutions in regular CC, not a blind CC, for a holiday email blast pissed him off something fierce. So no more work to return to at that well. At least it convinced me never to send a holiday email blast again. I did rather enjoy blowing over $1,000 of my last invoice winnings on a long weekend in New Orleans at a bachelor party held in October of 2001 (the bachelor, who was living in Vermont at the time, was too nervous to travel, but the rest of us went anyway out of patriotic duty or something). So at least I got to see Nola before the flood.
§ Hewlett-Packard: This gig actually went pretty well, for the most part. I only reeked of ganja occasionally when carpooling to Sunnyvale with an integrated circuit designer from Berkeley in the morning. I was translating human resources department documents from Word, destined for print, to HTML destined for the company’s intranet. It was easy work that I quickly automated, leaving me more time to research vacuum tube electronics and take long lunches, eating at the nearby North Indian buffet and browsing the aisles at Halsted, a magical shop stuffed to the ceiling with recycled electronics components.
Considering my nightly drinking and smoking, I didn’t do a terrible job. But eventually they brought someone younger, cheaper and more earnest in, had me train him, and let me go. It was my first job in the Valley proper, and the long commute and creepy, pedestrian-free office parks where my only encounters with fellow animal life were feral cats and leafblowing groundskeepers pretty much convinced me never to do it again.
§ Premier Retail Networks: I just mention this one because you should know that there is a company, one that actually hires a lot of actual artists, to produce content for the television channel that plays in all Wal-Marts, as well as some other big box chain stores. The gig only lasted a couple of weeks-they wanted someone with a childlike illustration style (though I never did take that class taught by John Canemaker) for storyboard pitches in some synergy campaign involving Coca-Cola and Harry Potter, so that kids who might actually be reading could have their emotional attachment to literature and film leveraged for brand loyalty and their metabolisms hooked on high-fructose corn syrup. So that’s how that sausage is made.
Little did I know that it foreshadowed my future of desperately hoping for disposable, low wage media work with no benefits, a labor situation that would make the dessicated corpse of Sam Walton shed a single maggot tear of victorious joy.
§ Osborne McGraw-Hill, Pearson: At some point, out of the blue, a literary agent of sorts called from San Diego. Who knows where he got my name-a CNet byline? My mom?-but he was looking for a writer to finish a book on Final Cut Pro 2 that had been abandoned unfinished by its author in Tennessee. $4,500 for four chapters, probably fifty cents a word in all. Then he wrangled a deal for me to write my own book-feel free to look it up on Amazon, but don’t buy it, it’s terrible-which I then also abandoned 17 chapters in.
I saw $6,500 of the $9,000 advance, and had to pull teeth at that to get payments even after fulfilling the staggered copy quotas-and for the amount of copy, illustration and example graphics, well, it was a less than minimum wage job. Depressed and resentful, I played Civilization III and day-drank my relationship into the ground. But at least I learned first-hand what a racket the technical publishing world is, and the break-up did leave me free to finally get the hell out of Oakland and move across the Bay Bridge.
§ Williams-Sonoma: Here’s the thing. I actually can put up with bullshit, soul-sucking jobs for quite a while. (About six to nine months.) Unfortunately, Williams-Sonoma made the mistake of turning me from a permalance Pinocchio into a real, live employee managing graphics and copy on the Pottery Barn Teen Web site right at the nine month mark. It was all downhill from there. At this point, it was probably pretty clear I was a candidate for an Employee Assistance Program, but the only interaction I had with Human Resources was when they asked me to sign away any rights in exchange for a modest check after not classifying me properly under state labor laws so they could stiff me on overtime.
Yet the real point when I realized that I didn’t give a fuck if I kept this job or not was after being invited to one of the monthly meetings where we processed mail from fans of the Pottery Barn Teen catalogue. The letters, all from young women (“Teen” enjoyed the wealthiest demographics of Williams-Sonoma’s stable of brands, because who the hell spends hundreds or thousands on a bedroom set for a kid that’s off to a dorm room in a few years?) who unanimously referred to the catalog as a “magazine.” This was seen as a business victory, and my ethical qualms over the manipulation of media literacy the company indulged in just earned me glares.
Another time, canoeing on the Russian River with friends and tripping on psilocybin, an Ivy Leaguer employed by the local non-profit-industrial complex harshed all over my buzz by pointing out the realities of the trade in luxury housewares imported from sweatshops worldwide. Yes, she was and is right, but I hope she’s never bought anything at IKEA, and of course, easy for the pedigreed class to get on my case for having a fucking job. I should know, I do it to other people all the time.
§ SFist: What did I do all day, hungover at work, that contributed to my inevitable firing at that job? Browsed blogs, started writing my own, and eventually signed up as the editor for the San Francisco colony in the Gothamist empire. It was fun! I got to work with great people! It didn’t pay! And my manager at Williams-Sonoma was probably getting reports on my Web browsing from the IT department! Not that my job was any great loss from a career development standpoint. Mostly it just meant that, at least once the Employment Development Department figured out that I was fired for cause, I didn’t really have a way to pay the rent or buy food.
Of course, another nine months or so later I managed to end up getting fired from that job. (A koan: if you’re fired from a job that doesn’t pay, is it really a job?) Between staff discontent, a few missed posts, and my pleas to the publisher for help with my rent (when I should have been asking for equity) I managed to go from “editor” to “editor-at-large” in a couple of tear- and vodka-streaked phone calls. Good times. I actually remember them fondly. Because it was probably the first time I actually cared enough about my work to cry.
§ Yahoo: I did manage to keep myself afloat for a couple of months at SFist with a gig blurbing news stories for the Yahoo landing pages that were automatically set as your homepage in Internet Explorer when you made the mistake of actually installing the software on the CD-ROM that came with your SBC or Rogers DSL account. The work was largely unremarkable, and my performance largely lacking, except for one incident.
We were asked to choose the types of stories that make the “most emailed” list on Yahoo News, which heavily emphasizes the “weird and wacky.” So some hippies in Spain decided to take off all their clothes and ride around on bicycles in a “weird and wacky” protest of the environmental and social impact of the international oil trade. I duly blurbed the headline and synopsis, and cropped a picture of a crowd scene (shot from the side) of nude cyclists down to a thumbnail that measured around 64 pixels. Maybe, if you squinted through a magnifying glass, you might have been able to register four square blocks representing a man’s naked haunch or the side of a boob.
This not only got me reprimanded (“we can’t give users any reason to remove the news widget from their homepage”), but was cause for an email to go out through what I think was the entire news division-no nudity, ever. This was an abject lesson in catering to the lowest common denominator, by which I mean the easily offended in the suburbs and flyover states not computer savvy enough to have never installed the crappy ISP-branded, lead-generating Yahoo landing page in the first place.
§ Gawker Media (Thrice!): Naturally, and thanks to the intervention of a friend, I next ended up at Fleshbot. And while I still like the former editor as a person (I subscribe to his Tumblr!), let’s just say that he served to teach me that a good personal relationship is not necessarily a good indicator of a good professional relationship, at least when it comes to writers and editors. Besides the fact that I was still getting consequences-drunk, had little institutional memory related to the site or the subject matter, I managed to keep that going for a few months. Until I drunkenly posted a roundup of photospreads of naked girls that wasn’t up to standards, woke up hungover to an angry email and assumed I was fired. But! Apparently I wasn’t fired. And so went the first round of my on-again, off-again relationship with Gawker Media.
A couple years later, after rehab, a stint in the online tech trades at Giga Omnimedia and a four month stay in New York to finally complete my BFA in film and video production (so that I could go to grad school during the inevitable dot-bomb 2.0 I could see coming from my work in said tech trades), I ended back at Gawker Media, this time with Valleywag. Which, honestly, was a lot of fun, even if every morning I woke up in a cold sweat feeling two posts behind schedule.
My colleagues were smart and capable, the subject matter was interesting to me and a few others of a highly desirable demographic, and we seemed to benefit from a certain publisher’s apparent disdain for the blue-sky optimism of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneur fetishists and the venture capitalists that encouraged them with real American dollars. (The feeling, naturally, was mutual-Gawker Media being disdained as “a lifestyle business.”) I was happy to play the role of “token socialist,” and tried to focus more on institutional analysis than personalities, but while I generally met my ever-inflating pageview quotas, it all came to an inglorious end. My name made all the various too-insidery reports of staff being cast to the four winds, meaning for the first time I wasn’t just laid off, but laid off in public.
To be fair, an arrangement was made for me to take a stab contributing to Lifehacker and work with people I’d long admired. But for whatever reason (tone? quotas? shirking? something I said in Campfire?) that was shortly over, as well, though at least this time I got a nice call from the publisher and my name managed to stay off of MediaBistro, so thank goodness for small favors.
* * *
So there you go: from drunk to just stupid, how I went from quietly losing boring, if decently paid, technology jobs to losing fun, but poorly paid, journalism jobs. I’ve actually been at my current, aggressively part-time job since February, meaning by early next year I will have at least held on to that for an entire year. It pays for shit, but I qualify for affordable, city-subsidized health care-the first time I’ve had coverage at all except for the brief stints as a real employee at Williams-Sonoma and as a returning student at NYU.
And I have time to date and work on a screenplay and play video games and contribute pro bono to publications that I adore in the hopes that they become wild successes and reward me for my early support and generosity of time. Because, obviously, that’s worked so well for me in the past.
Jackson West isn’t angry, though maybe a bit bemused, and frankly thanks everyone alluded to but not named here for ever having put up with him for as long as they did.