Save Me World!!! — aka Excuse me Brother can you spare a Job?
I’m in the city and it’s amazing! A friend asked me to house sit for her. Her place is at Union and Fillmore (which is pretty lucky, I should be paying her for not having to drive home every night) and it’s amazing. Pizzaz, City Life, Fun People, New Experiences! It’s everything I hoped it would be. So While I’m running around like a Toddler on Crack trying to find my favorite Coffee Shop to work from and my favorite scene to fall into this weekend, it hits me that I need to find a job. The man is coming in with his fist out asking for my money for such pointless necessities such as Food and Rent, The Audacity!!! Does he know who I am?!?!
The answer is no he doesn’t, and he doesn’t care. So the background job search has become a foreground job search, which means instead of asking friends and acquaintances to “keep an eye out” for a good fit, I’m now cursing the folks at Mycroft for not making a Craigslist jobs SF search engine plug-in for firefox. Clearly the folks at Mycroft need direction, I’m available to surpervise starting at 45k/year — I don’t even need benefits!
I realize that I don’t want to be stuck in a job so worse comes to worse I may take a job as a barista until I can find a good fit, but I’m here in the city and I’d love to explore something that interests me. I’ll take a moment to reflect on that publicly on the off chance that someone with a job need sees this; it will also help me organize my thoughts. Jobs that I could, and would like to do, fall into 4 categories…
Office Administration
Less of a dream job, more of an area I know I can make a difference. I’ve worked in office administration before in different capacities. I’ve been a receptionist, a personal assistant, and a general office assistant. I’m able to complete my duties, and take personal ownership of things I can help on. Invariably I end up assisting with a higher-level project. In a large office setting, being an office assistant would be a very boring job. In a startup atmosphere, or a company that gets it, it can be an exciting and challenging job. This is probably what I’ll end up doing (unless I get lucky in my search) so I’d like to pick a company where I can gain experience in more then the simple office management tasks.
Customer Service or Human Relations
These two are pretty different but have the same core requirement, a love of people and an ability to make their lives easier. I’m very interested in management philosophy and I’m a believer in management’s most important duty being to remove obstacles from employee’s path. Employee’s are the ground troops and do most of the work, management is there to teach, guide, and help them do their job. Customer Service or HR work would give me an opportunity to test and improve my skills in that. Dealing with different people, discovering their problem and fixing it, that’s my kind of job. This is another tricky one though because untrained reps usually get jobs at companies who don’t care too much about their customers, which is not a philosophy I jive with. I have found some great companies in the city and have submitted resumes to a handful of them.
Other
I’ve saved my favorite and most ambiguous category for last. other, mmm it rolls off my tongue. It just sounds tasty. It’s hard to describe, more of an “I’ll know it when I see it” type of thing. Freelance Film Editing? Manager of a Small Retail Store? Company Blog Writer? CMB (Chief Marketing Bada**) of some new web startup? Revolutionary? Wedding Video Recorder? Write a book? President of The United States? If it’s different, and I love it, I’ll do it. You might not even have to pay me (much). I’m a man of many interests and if it sounds like fun instead of work, it’s worth a significant pay cut. I’m actually working on some of these projects on my own in my free time (video editing and wedding videos) and seeing if I can turn it into a paycheck. I’m writing a pitch for creative marketing director of a cool company that simply doesn’t “get” marketing, but they don’t get it – so I’m not all that hopeful that they’ll spend money on it.
Wish me luck, or give me advice. There you have the situation!
