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  While the definition of work may be different for everyone, getting a job is something that even the most talented of freeloaders isn’t going to be able to avoid forever. (Unless there is some magical land where unemployment checks never run out—Sweden, maybe?) As soon as we’re spit out from whatever formal education we were pursuing, the stopwatch that is Unforgiving Life As an Adult starts running, and it is up to us to work our way through it. But how do we get jobs? And, more importantly, how do we carry them out every day, without exception, even when we’re hungover?

  The process is a complex one. From scanning endless want ads and job listings (of which you have a vague suspicion that at least 40 percent are fake), to creating a resume, to the interview, to eventually becoming Employee of the Month or some other such professional honor, there is nary a moment’s rest. At all times, it is essential to stay as competitive and cutthroat as you can possibly be, edging out your competition by making your cover letter just 10 percent wittier, or 34 percent less needy-sounding. It doesn’t take an economist to understand that hundreds of thousands of twentysomethings out there are essentially jousting to the death over criminally underpaid administrative assistant positions, and standing out from the crowd is essential to survival.

  There are, of course, the more existential questions that will inevitably present themselves, the “Do I even want this stupid job?”–type crises of the career hunt. It’s undeniable that a huge part of our motivation at the tender age of “I’m ready to be exploited in this unpaid internship” is the actual concept of having a job. Everyone wants you to land a “good” job—your parents, your more judgmental friends, all those ever-watching eyes on Facebook. But what actually constitutes a “good” job? It’s more a vague image than anything else.

  You probably wear nice-ish clothes, maybe a J. Crew blazer or some of the more sophisticated items at H&M. You have a morning commute that takes a decent amount of time, but allows you to listen to your adult contemporary music or read your Kindle on the public transportation of your choice. You get to go to happy hours after work and socialize with other people wearing nice blazers, drinking pints of craft beer, and talking about things like The Daily Show, concerts you’d like to attend, and the various places within a twenty-mile radius that feature a nice brunch spread on Sundays. It’s the kind of job your mother would be proud to tell her friends about, that allows you to report back to everyone with a fulfilled “I got my money’s worth on this college thing” kind of smile, and that encourages you to open a—shudder—LinkedIn profile.

  WHAT YOU DO VS. WHAT YOU SAY YOU DO

  Of course, the best move would be to take a long time to actually consider what it is that you want to be doing in your life. Even within the relatively similar-looking world of Office Work™, there are a million and one variations on what it is you might actually end up doing. (We all grew up believing that people who put on nice clothes and went into an office all day were performing the universal task of writing a bunch of numbers into a giant book for “business purposes,” but it turns out that isn’t so!) Beyond that, it’s quite possible that a nine-to-five career is not what you want to be dedicating most of your time and stress to for the next forty years. Maybe you want a job that leaves you a lot more breathing room on your off-hours to not stress about tomorrow’s meeting and pursue a hobby, or raise kids, or socialize more. In that case, enjoy explaining to everyone you meet from now until the end of time that you didn’t follow the path society was so hell-bent on having you take. If you do want one of those blazer-y jobs, however, your work is certainly cut out for you, especially in this economy.

  First you have the hunt itself. Have you decided what you want to be doing? Have a dream career in mind? Good, now kindly ball that up (metaphorically, or you could actually write it on a piece of paper) and throw it out the window. Chances are that you’re not going to find a full-time position teaching philosophy at an Ivy League school to only the best-looking students, complete with three months’ paid vacation and a workweek that includes more hacky sack in the courtyard than actual office hours. And even if such an opening did exist, you’re certainly not going to stumble onto it while browsing Monster.com. No, you’re going to have to broaden your horizons and reduce your criteria to “nonlethal” and “within walking distance of a window.” More or less, any office-related position should be appealing to you, as it includes air-conditioning, a break room, and the ability to cruise Wikipedia listlessly in the vast expanses of time when you haven’t been assigned anything specific.

  There are the usual hot spots for finding such jobs—especially if you’re not picky about something entry-level or entry-level-adjacent—the classified ads, job fairs, the aforementioned Monster.com. And then you can turn to the less orthodox, if sometimes surprisingly efficient, employment databases, like Craigslist.

  What is Craigslist, if not a cesspool of all our most base desires and unfiltered thoughts, collected together like scraps on the world’s least-sanitary bulletin board, screaming out in all caps for someone like us to reach out and say that we’re not alone? Putting a job posting on Craigslist is like saying, “Hey, I’m a risk taker, and understand that my future employee is either going to have a facial tattoo, or be twenty-three and know literally nothing about anything.” No self-respecting forty-five-year-old who is looking to branch out into a different company in the same sector, interested in fielding a few offers and getting his name back out there, is going to browse Craigslist in his spare time while eating Cheetos and occasionally clicking over to YouPorn. CL is the bastion of those of us who aren’t afraid to include things on our resume such as Highly Ranked Redditor and Founder/Editor-in-Chief, Seattle Food Blog.

  The things you find lurking on sites like this—ones who include as many misleading links to phishing sites and porn as they do to actual job offers—can be as frustrating as they are endearing. Someone needs a secretary, doesn’t have a great command of the shift key, and put her actual cell phone number out there to be contacted by whatever dregs of society might happen to be floating by the Jobs: Full Time section at four in the morning on a Tuesday. It’s the kind of offer that is too uncoordinated to be fake, and, should you come across it during unforgiving day 534 of your job search, it looks like a succulent filet mignon after a hunger strike. You decide to send a general cover letter, and your resume, along with maybe a vaguely charming e-mail. And perhaps, in some alternate universe, that would be enough.

  But this is today, in our world, and for every coffee bitch position available in an office in a big city, there are going to be at least five hundred twentysomethings clawing each other’s eyes out to get it. So you have to be creative, be persistent, and stand out from the crowd. Once you’ve culled a list of potential jobs big enough to survive a 99.999 percent rejection rate and still land an interview or two, you can start honing the craft of making your presentation stand out from the tidal wave of other people with nearly identical qualifications. (If five hundred of you majored in history, participated in student government, and worked 2.3 internships in the past three years, it’s going to require more than a saucy emoticon in the subject line of the e-mail to make you the candidate the hiring manager has to respond to.)

  And how do you make yourself appear in a résumé to be twice the professional, thrice the charmer, and four times the international man of mystery than you are in real life?

  It’s simple: You lie.

  Though perhaps not in the way you were told that lying would be when you were a child—all some clear-cut vision of “right” and “wrong,” something that is either absolutely one thing or the other. As with many things in adulthood, you will find that life is a veritable tapestry of gray areas, each point as open to interpretation and tweaking as the next, and your job is to make all those blurry lines blur just enough in your favor. For example, saying that you attended two meetings of a planning committee for the Student Association in which your primary function was ensuring that at least s
ome of the budget was getting siphoned into alcohol doesn’t exactly scream “leadership skills.” But presenting yourself as Student Advocate for Allocation of Funds sounds distinguished, and vague enough to be “probably pretty important” in the eyes of whoever is reading this.

  Your internship? Downplay the part about taking people’s lunch orders and emphasize the one day you got to sit in on a meeting with legitimate employees. Your special skills? There is no sport, hobby, or activity you cannot pretend you are way more talented and experienced in than you actually are. If you say “advanced salsa dancer,” who is going to call you on that? Is the HR rep going to make you dance with her around the office like some busted version of the ballroom scene from Beauty and the Beast? No. So make it sound as if you’re committed to something outside of work hours.

  As for the interview itself, this is where all those nebulous-but-oh-so-desired “people skills” come in. And what exactly are all these vaunted people skills? As I understand the term, they include the following:

  • Shaking someone’s hand with the right combination of firm and welcoming so that you appear to be neither challenging the person to an arm-wrestling match, nor offering the back of your hand to be kissed like some kind of Southern belle at a debutante ball. (It also helps if your palms do not have the humidity level of a terrarium.)

  • Looking people in the eye when you talk to them, but not so much that you look like an infomercial salesman on hour nine of the all-night telethon.

  • Being self-deprecating without being a Paul Giamatti character.

  • Taking charge of situations, or at least appearing to take charge of them while you browse Wikipedia articles at your desk.

  • Making light conversation that puts others at ease, and never feeling that terrifying need to keep talking when you’re nervous that leads you to ultimately reveal the anxiety-induced constipation you’ve been battling leading up to the interview.

  In reality, the interview will probably be pretty straightforward. You’ll likely get questions thrown at you like, “What is your biggest flaw?” This is largely an opportunity for that irritating go-getter from middle school SGA to say something like, “Well, I guess you could say I’m a perfectionist,” prompting everyone to projectile-vomit on each other.

  You’ll also be expected to discuss various aspects of your work experience, the kind of person you are, what your future goals might be, and other topics that you can essentially tap-dance over with Exactly What You Think They Want to Hear. The truth is, there are no right answers. It’s just kind of a feeling that people get—the feeling that says, “This guy/gal is clearly the missing piece to our Accounts Receivable puzzle!” It’s an instinct that cannot be explained by science, and is largely responsible for the inexplicable business success of utter toads like Donald Trump.

  But what happens when you actually get the job? After clawing your peers’ eyes out for the chance at an interview, only to all but promise your firstborn to get the job, it’s hard not to feel mystified and more than a little nervous as to what to expect. The good news, however, is that there will be a few constants when it comes to workplace hazards. No matter where you go, you will always find four things: your best friend, your worst enemy, a reason you want to quit, and a reason you are terrified of actually quitting. Every job, in every sector, has these. What will they be? Based on my humble experience in the three major fields of work you might be getting into, I feel more than qualified to take you on a mini-tour of the Carnival of Horrors that awaits you.

  Your Best Friend

  FOOD SERVICE JOB

  Here you will learn to love your drinking buddy. Since one of the major pluses of working in food service is not having to get up until around 2:00 p.m. (with the agonizing exception, perhaps, of Sunday brunches), going out after work for a few rounds is pretty much the professional sport of the restaurant world. Everyone likes to meet at an after-hours place, get shitty on Rumplemintz and whiskey, and get on the merry-go-round of casual sex partners the work environment provides. If you can find your own personal drinking bestie among the crew, you have found your savior. With her, you can gossip about coworkers, bitch about front-of-house bullshit, rag on customers, and cover each other’s backs while you eat like a squirrel, crouched behind some refrigerator. In food service, a workplace best friend is indispensable.

  OFFICE JOB

  One thing that is often notably lacking in office work environments—something which food service tends to have in abundance—are people who can just kind of chill. They don’t have to be the weed dealer of the HR department, but they should at least be able to shoot the shit and kick back at a decent happy hour. Oftentimes, the stress of the “let’s-gouge-each-other’s-eyes-out-to-get-ahead” work environment manifests in coworkers who are legitimately afraid of relaxing with one another, lest they get Brutus’d sometime in the middle of March when their guard is down. If your office doesn’t have a cool person, I recommend suicide.

  RETAIL JOB

  If there is one thing that you need for a happy life in a retail environment, it is someone who is looking for shifts. It’s 9:00 a.m., you went out drinking the previous night, you are too hungover to even look out the window, let alone go deal with eight hours of refolding stacks of T-shirts, and you are supposed to open the store in two hours. If you don’t have a trusted colleague who is always looking to pick up some last-minute hours—you, sir (or ma’am, I don’t know you), are nobody.

  Your Worst Enemy

  FOOD SERVICE JOB

  You will undoubtedly encounter, during your time as a food service worker (whether you’re spending it as a food runner, busboy, waiter, hostess, or—holy of holies—bartender), the dreaded Evil Manager. This is the person whose entire life is based on making the dining establishment a living hell for her employees, an endless labyrinth of redundant napkin folding and petty corrections over minor errors. For, you see, the Evil Manager has just the smallest, most lethal dose of power over a very concentrated pool of victims—and she is going to wield it in the fullest.

  OFFICE JOB

  There is one person who, no matter how much you enjoy your job or feel that you perform to a satisfactory degree in the eyes of your bosses, will make you want to wipe him off the planet with an oversized bottle of Windex: the go-getter. This is the person who consistently comes in way before it would be considered appropriate, leaves later than anyone else in the office, and is deliriously happy to take all that sweet, sweet extra work that no one else wants to do. The thing about an office environment is that it’s a delicate balance of demonstrating what you can physically do as opposed to what it is realistic to do. Yes, technically, we could all come in at 6:00 a.m. and leave at midnight while taking some work home—but we shouldn’t. However, if someone on the team takes it upon himself to prove that such a workload is, in fact, completely feasible—the rest of you are absolutely screwed.

  RETAIL JOB

  Your worst enemy here is the customer. You spend your days cleaning up after people who think that a dressing room is their own personal playpen in which to throw things around to amuse themselves, and the products you’ve so lovingly arranged are there to be destroyed at their leisure.

  Why You Want to Quit

  FOOD SERVICE JOB

  Because spending all day staring at people eating delicious-looking food that you have zero time to eat, all while living off tips that some customers seem to get a kind of sadistic thrill out of cheating you on, can become grating after a while. It’s clear that some people get sucked into the relatively easy money of tips and find themselves, long after they’d hoped to move on to something that doesn’t leave them smelling like bacon/a deep fryer at the end of the day, locked into expenses that they can only cover with a good Friday night shift.

  OFFICE JOB

  Despite all the societal benefits that an office job undoubtedly provides, it also often leaves you with a feeling of perpetually being at work. There is always something more tha
t can be done—a project to polish, an e-mail to send, research to do—and you know that for every minute you just chill out watching TV and eating take-out Thai food, some insufferable go-getter a few cubicles down is efficiently squirreling away lots of extra work to bring in and show the bosses the following morning. The job, in some ways, begins to infiltrate and consume other aspects of your life—as it is often considered “not a job, but a career” (i.e., something that you are expected to sacrifice a normal social/romantic life to get ahead in).

  RETAIL JOB

  There are relatively few fulfilling aspects of a retail job, to be honest. The money is often decent, but never good. You have few options for upward mobility. The customers, as previously mentioned, are egregious. Oftentimes, stores will give you a discount that is just high enough to keep you spending your whole paycheck on their overpriced products. The daily grind of this tends to wear on you, until you have a hard time thinking of any job in the entire world—including the person who scoops up horse poop at rich people’s farms—as less enticing for one reason or another.