Keeping My Eye To The Keyhole

When I think back upon my vaaaast array of employments, my favorites have involved me being outside. Be it paperboy for the Herald Examiner in Hollywood (or later during high school when my mom was that paper’s  Echo Park/Silver Lake/Los Feliz distributor) or a foot messenger walking a beat in Century City (even though it was during the horrible Santa Monica Pier-destroying El Niño winter of 1983, too) or scooting around town in my Mazda GLC hatchback as a city-wide “consulate liaison” (a glorified courier), or a Sparkletts Man in Glendale/Glassell Park/Atwater Village the truth is I’m often times more content to be out of an office than inside one.

Nothing’s brought that more home than my having been in Cubicle 759J on the cavernous 7th floor of a cavernous LAX-adjacent office building this past three months, where being a temp more often than not I’m still looked at sideways by the regulars as the outsider, the corporate equivalent of a platoon’s FNG. I’m cool with that mostly, but the fact that a quarter of a fiscal year later I’m still this unknown or unknowable outsider can’t help but rankle a bit.

So when I got an email yesterday short-notice announcing a jobfair today at a place a bit further down the road looking for candidates with clean DMV records to don company uniforms and drive company vehicles around the greater L.A. area and do a specific type of work I thought about how frustrating it’s been soliciting my wares as a writer/editor this past 18 months (well maybe 15 since the first three I just pretty much walked around the neighborhood feeling really pathetic), and decided I’d iron a shirt this morning, take out my earring, go get me a copy of my driving record and put in an application.

Maybe the pay ain’t so great and the commute might be even worse than Silver Lake to El Segundo and who knows what else, but the fact is where I’m at now is going to dry up soon (if not before our vacation next month, than shortly thereafter) and the rarefied air of journalism gets thinner with every rejection, and the blue collar aspects of the potential position definitely appeal to my inner outdoors type. So we’re just going to go see what we’ll see.

UPDATE (12:51 p.m.): Well the first-stage application/prelim-interview went well, but at such a low hourly-rate I’d be hardpressed to take any offered gig unless subsequent interview levels reveal some sort of opportunity for fast-track advancement.