In Search of Fulfilling Work...

"I am a young energetic college graduate in search of a fulfilling work environment, and I believe that a place at your company is the sort of employment opportunity I am looking for."

With an opening line like that no wonder I got nothing but shitty, shitty jobs. As my time in Boulder comes to a close I wish to reflect on what was sadly my main pass-time here. We have several to get through, so I'll jump right in.

Old Navy - Three weeks - Quit

After unsuccessful interviews at LiquorMart, and PlayFair Toys, I was desperate for any pay check I could get, what with my first bills piling up and all. So when I was offered the job at Old Navy I was happy to agree to work whatever, whenever. However, within a week of 6am shifts and never ending training exercises I was about done with Gap Inc. It was tedious, boring, and they forced us to push credit cards on customers. But in their defense, they are taking steps to stop using foreign sweatshops and start progressive programs. On the other hand, the job sucked and they played the same five pop muzak songs on loop. As soon as I had another job in the wings, I was out. I would've got a photo but the Old Navy is now an annex of REI.

Pharmaca - Eight months

Broadway - Four months - Transfered

What I consider to have been my most substantial job here was cashiering at Pharamaca Integrative Pharmacies. Those who bothered to read any portion of Chapter One of the Chronicles should know how I felt about the job. In November around when I decided to start grad school early, I described my life as "sluggishly waiting out the clock everyday at a job that keeps me stuck in a small box on my feet for eight hours doing nothing I find particularly interesting or in anyway consequential." What I've noticed is that I didn't mention anything about the corporation being hideously evil, so perhaps it wasn't quite as bad as some other places I've worked (see below). On the other hand, I haven't reread all my entries, nor do I want to, lest I relive my "mental anguish." One more important note though, it was at Pharmaca Broadway that I met some of the people who defined my life here in Boulder. If not for that job I would have probably ended up in a very different place.


Pearl - Four months - Quit

So after a few months at one Pharmaca I thought that if I transfered to the less hectic, closer store I'd be a little happier. I also cut down my hours to very part-time. I worked mainly Sundays, as I had Latin class during the week. The thing about Sunday: already a slow day, and this Pharmaca usually got little business. Coming from one of the busiest stores it was quite a change. Not for the better really, as there is a happy median between too busy and too slow. One that I've yet to find. When things would get really slow the management would get antsy and have me do ridiculous things. Also I could often see one of my superiors peeking over the aisles glaring at me now and then. I think the main issue with that job is they really didn't need to be there, and neither did I. Once again, when I had my next job lined up I kind of left them suddenly and informed them via e-mail.

Environment Colorado - Three weeks - Fired!

I've already spoken a great deal about this job. Proportionately to the time I spent there, I've probably said more about it than any other. Thus, I can keep this short. It fucking sucked when I didn't get contributions, and it was awesome when I did. The whole thing ended up being just above minimum wage after there hid(Photo)den rules, and when the proposal to join the class action lawsuit against them came I considered it seriously. If you really want to read it all again, check out my only entry for June 2007 (now with line breaks). Again, I would've got a photo but the The Boulder Optical Building which houses their office is covered by a large tarp right now.

Peaceful Mountain - Six weeks - Stormed the fuck out

Probably my most enjoyable job out here, filling and labeling shit at Peaceful Mountain was short-lived and bittersweet. I met some cool people and mastered the art of the bagged lunch. Then it all went to shit. My brother did a good job of summing it up in his hijack entry. I won't say anything terribly derogatory about the jobs, since I know that they regularly google their company for mention in blogs and websites. I'll just say that when they fire their team, they do it with style. Anyway, can't really complain too much, got a few more paychecks (which I'm only now paying the tax on). And then I basically spent it all on this computer. So many cores, and rams, and.. uh.. drives. And sweet, sweet Ubuntu. I'd love to have a picture of their building, but I'm far too lazy to ride the bus out to Valmont. Plus, that's prairie-dog country.

Vitamin Cottage - Four months - Quit (with notice even)

After an interesting trip to the Grand Canyon in August, I rejoined the workforce for what would turn out to be last job in Boulder. It went... poorly. I really couldn't stand cashiering there at all. Obviously I'm being nit-picky, (just look how long this list is) but I think that whatever it was that I didn't like about Pharmaca was worse at the Cottage. Despite that my co-workers were all pretty awesome, they were the reason I stayed at the job so long (a relative term of course). I wish them nothing but the best. Much like Environment Colorado, I rambled a great deal upon my resignation in my only December 2007 post.


Needless to say, I had a lot of tax forms to watch for. I just got last of them a few days ago, in fact. Really only four, but still... four. I don't know what's to be done with me really. I guess my reasoning for my poor job performance out here was that I always was working because I had to in order to do what I really wanted. This presented a problem: What the hell do I want? I still don't know, and I doubt that's unusual either. It'll be interesting (to me at least) to see what kind of job I get when I get back to Maryland, and if I react to it in the same way. More than likely, I'll be unhappy with it. If I recall correctly it was Milan Kundera who said something to the effect of: No man is happy if he dislikes his city. Although I certainly don't hate Boulder (despite what some of my likenesses have said), I haven't lived in Boulder for a long while. Since April 14th in fact. That was the day I decided to go the Czech Republic. My heart has been there ever since, so I could never be happy anywhere else. What scares me is that perhaps when I get there, I'll find that my heart has moved on again.

God knows where it'll take me then. ~D

_______________________________
"You will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not" -Cat Stevens

Again, I quit.

The following is paraphrased from the words of a co-worker at my, soon to be former, workplace:

So, in the meeting he said that there were two management styles they could employ. In the first the managers enforce the rules established by "corporate". In the second, preferred style, we all police each other and report those breaking the rules to the management. I resisted the urge to tell him that this was fascism he was describing.

Although I don't entirely agree that what my manager said, word for word, was in fact fascism, I can find few other words that truly capture what a corporation really is. I will not make a direct statement defining my employers as such a weighted term, for I have no business labeling anything fascist. I simply haven't read enough to truly use such a word. Furthermore, I could easily be fired for what I've said already, and added to the list.

On second thought, my existence at Vitamin Cottage is inconsequential, and tomorrow will be my second to last day. Therefore, I will say whatever I damn well feel like. Thank you, invisible audience for giving me the chance to do so.

In Boulder there are many natural grocery stores to choose from, but most are now owned by WholeFoods. One of the few exceptions is Vitamin Cottage, an independent business that started around half a century ago in Colorado, and can be found through the state, and in New Mexico. The particular store where I work is the most successful of them all, in terms of sales. There are many possible reasons for this. One is that the store practically shares a parking lot with WholeFoods. This makes it easy for customers to shop at both, getting lower prices at Vitamin Cottage, and then if we happen to be sold out of or not carry something they need, they can head over to the giant WholeFoods. We're a small store so we are out of things often, and if one were to shop exclusively at our store, they'd have to deal with the constant annoyance of not getting everything they need/want. People are lazy. I too would rather get all my shopping done in one trip, rather then go out of my way to save a few bucks.

So this situation has worked out great for Vitamin Cottage, and if all that really matters to you is price, it's a great place to shop. But if you're just as concerned about supporting smaller, less evil corporations, a concern which many customers have expressed to me personally, this store is not your haven. Even the assistant manager himself said to me during my interview, "Why not work at Wholefoods, we're a corporation too, what's the difference?" I had hoped that this question was merely his way of testing how committed I was to supporting local businesses, but I now have no doubts that as a tool of the corporation, this is his way of looking at it. Many customers came our way after the local co-op closed down, saying "This is our last refuge." But it's not. There is nowhere to run now. Every month the cement that the employees walk through hardens a little more (management not excluded, in fact it is they who deal most with the corporatism and bureaucracy) . It's become all rules, structure, and uniformity.

Many people I have met out here have at one time said to me, "Were you here when (such and such local business) closed down? That was the one of last of the real 'Boulder' places." Each time they referred to a different shop that was at one time the lifeblood of Boulder. You can imagine I was discouraged to find that I had moved to a dying city. I have though much on it to try and debunk this idea, by finding something still thriving that truly captures that which makes Boulder "Boulder." The mountains will always be here, I suppose. Locally owned zero-waste cafes aren't hard to find. There's still plenty of pot everywhere. But these are all merely on the surface, the aesthetics of what I believe Boulder once was. Right now, having been here for a mere year and half, I think that Boulder is a vibrant city, with one of the highest standards of living in the country, and many progressive policies and ideas. It's a city with a long fruitful life ahead of it. But as it grows bigger and "better" as a city, the community dies. It was the people that made "Boulder" what it was. Just as a human heart is fragile and ever-changing, so is "Boulder". I'll reiterate my beliefs (so as to give myself another chance to state them more clearly). The community that was once found here in Boulder is what has all but died out. That is what the people whom I've talked to saw disappear with the closing of that one shop on the corner.

What does this all have to with anything? I believe that the incorporation of small businesses is a big part of the changes Boulder has seen in recent years. Vitamin Cottage is milking this by maintaining an image as a friendly neighborhood grocer, while becoming just as corporate as the rest. So it profits and expands, allowing it to be a competitor with the other businesses that are taking over Boulder, but some customers, those who still long for the old "Boulder" they knew, still think they are supporting their (dying) community. Forgive me if I postulate too much. I have no proof of any of this. Perhaps this Boulder of legend never existed. Perhaps corporations aren't a bad thing, and every new rule at Vitamin Cottage will benefit the customers and employees in the long run. Perhaps in twenty years no one will miss those small, local stores.

I really fucking doubt it. ~D

___________
"Open your heart. I'm coming home."

Movin On Up!

Yeah, I pretty much quit my job at the Peaceful Mountain. Lets just say things weren't too peaceful last week, if you know what I mean. And if you were there, you know what I mean. Yay worker solidarity! But anyway, my brother (who is pretty much the coolest) and I went to this awesome part tonight, and I totally danced around like a fool until I got wasted and peed myself.
That was bad, but I did manage to embarrass myself in front of people I didn't know, and make a few new friends as well, so all in all it was a good night.

Really? Did I really pee myself? Really?

Anyway, I just wanted to say what a great brother I have for driving me around, and for not totally trashing my blog when he accidentally got editing access to it. The worst he did was to write this little bit, which is practically what I would have written anyway. He could have put something really offensive of embarrassing up here, but instead he just confused me into thinking I had written an entry whilst too drunk to remember, or was otherwise loosing my mind... which I may be. All the same, he did introduce me to Kurt Vonnegut, so I owe him there, which means I'll probably let this little infringement slide.

Oh, and I like the smell of old ladies farts.

_____
I don't remember writing any of this!!!

The Rise and Fall of Drakos the Activist

So as far as blogging is concerned I slacked off last month. I'm sure you don't particularly care, but in my defense I've been pretty busy being disillusioned. Three weeks ago I started working for Environment Colorado, supposedly a state-wide non-profit organization, but it reality I was but a pawn canvassing for The Fund for Public Interest Research Groups. You've probably seen the PIRGs in action around campuses, personally I remember seeing MaryPIRG people running voter campaigns back at UMCP, as they exist in about a dozen states. Now the idea behind the Public Interest Group is that they fight against Private Interest Groups that represent certain major corporations. So big business has its lobbyists, dicking around in the state houses convincing representatives to push a corporate agenda. So ideally, the PIRGs supply lobbyists that also sway politicians, but in ways that are beneficial to the public.

Bullshit. I do admit that COPIRG has passed some good legislation in the past few years, example: Amendment 37 which requires 10% of Colorado's energy to come from clean, renewal source by the year 2012 or something. Just recently this was raised to 20% through an additional bill. That's all well and good, but they could be setting much tougher goals. Enivironment Colorado, the environmental facet of COPIRG, does a have a difficult job in setting up its campaigns, if you try to get too much change, the public will be hesitant to support it (especially since the PIRGs demand monthly contributions), and if it's to small, all that contribution money is really just going down the drain. Since lobbying is such a instrumental part of legislation in our government, it does take a lot of money to get bills past, but the PIRGs have, in my opinion, become that which they were originally created to stand up against: greed and the corporate mentality.

Surely my opinion is biased by the fact that I was fired yesterday for not duping enough innocent people into giving $15-30 a month for a least year, but I have to say that even I was surprised at how much they really devalue their employees when they aren't meeting quotas. Considering that it is entirely up to the directors what site we go to each day, and whom we go with, I feel a great deal of the job is luck. I currently have had the second best day in the office (since the start of our summer campaign), from one day that a guy walking by more or less dropped $100 a month into my lap, but apparently that isn't enough to allow me to at the very least have worked today. The way the quota process works (something that the directors will never mention unless cornered) is each time you miss the weekly total you get a strike, two strikes in a row, or three strikes in a year, or if 75% of your members don't stay on for a full year, you're fired. So as far as policy is concerned I ought to have been given the chance to come in today and at least try my best to bring my total up. Not so much. Too big a hole, she said. Don't bother coming in, she said. I guess I can't be too disappointed, I really had stopped trying this week. I spent only about half the time I should have actually canvassing, the rest was spent either in Starbucks, or just sitting cursing the organization.

What more than likely broke my spirit, aside from a few days of shitting weather ruining my average (which is considered no excuse), is the story of a fellow canvasser who was one of the most devoted I'd met. Standing in the pouring rain he tried his hardest to stop every passer by, while I ducked under a shelter and waited for the sun to return. He missed quota twice in the past few months, so if he missed it again he was gone. My first week he needed $200 on Friday to survive. He did it. The next week it rained four out of five days. He needed $450 on Friday to survive. He did it. The next week he was with me twice, and I was pretty much a death omen. He needed $500 on Friday, the day after his 21st birthday, to survive. I assume he didn't do it, because he's gone without a trace. I hope to hear that he's found a job now that appreciates his effort. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the director purposely gave him sites like Longmont and Westminister that are basically the most conservative in the area to see him go. Why would she do that? Because he talked too much about things like quotas and lawsuits.. things that directors avoid mention of like the plague.

My good friend out here was right when she said that the PIRGs do more harm than good by destroying the spirit of promising young activists. I'm living proof, for as of today I will do everything in my power ensure global warming's worst effects, just to spite those PIRG bastards, and every asshole on the street who said, "Global Warming? What a joke?" or just gave me the finger. Not really. I encourage all of you out there, if you are approached by a canvasser, politely tell them you appreciate their hard work on the streets, but you don't agree with the kind of support their organization is looking for. Put your money and effort instead into personal conservationism: buying fuel efficient cars, supporting local and organic farming, recycling and composting, and eating less mass produced meats and dairies. Everyone can make some kind of small effort. And if you get the chance, put a potato in the tailpipe of every Hummer you can. Sigh... I'll let y'all know when I'm no longer unemployed.

Update: I recently received an invitation to join the class action suit against the PIRGs, started by disillusioned and abused former canvassers. I have no real monetary digressions against Environment Colorado so I ignored it, but I'll be with them in spirit. Also I fixed this entry to make it prettier.

My Triumphant Return: Part II

It's hard to believe that it's been almost four months since I came back to Boulder. It has certainly blown by much faster then it did in the fall. Maybe it's because I was working full-time at Pharmaca back then, having my soul sucked out on a daily basis. Maybe it's because school makes the time back much faster. Or maybe it was my brother's extended stay. Yelling at him certainly was a pass-time. Anyway, the time has come for me to plan my next visit home, and as of an hour ago I've booked a flight for June 2. I'll be staying through the next Sunday, the 10th. So.. I dunno.. get pumped or something.

Also... I may have quit my job. If an e-mail is legally binding that is. Hmmm... So other than that, and studying for finals, not much new going on. Well... once again the internet has declared me a liberal. Alright well I'm gonna shut up now. But first, here's a nice photo of the Flatirons I took last weekend from Chataqua Park:

Selling Drugs.

Anyone who read my last entry probably gets the impression that I was unhappy that week. I wasn't exactly pleased with work situation, but I'm sure and least one of my dedicated readers will be happy to know I'm keeping on top of my life now. After a full week of unsatisfying labor at the feet of Gap Inc I went on a craigslist resume sending rampage. The result of which was amazingly quick and in my opinion a lucky break. Today I had my first day of training selling drugs. (Saying that never gets old). It was easy, my co-workers are nice people, and I get a 30% discount, and health benefits at 90 days. The only problem is the alleyway where this goes on is somewhat less of a manageable walk, but that's what the Hop, Skip, and Jump are for after all. The names might be corny, but they work. I can't say that I'm not a little surprised at myself, as I had no idea I'd be working at a pharmacy, uh.. I mean drug dealer...ship less than a week ago. Neither did Old Navy. Chuckle.


In other news, I received a free trial of Gamefly from drinking as much Sobe as I do. So basically I get to rent as many videogames as I can play in a month for free. I should be receiving the fourth one in the mail shortly, so needless to say I'm happy, but only a few weeks remain till I guess I'll have to go back to legos. Also, because by way of my actions I have received a coupon for yet another free trial of Gamefly, however, as I already have an account it is against the rules for me to use it. I suppose might try canceling and resigning up, but I feel like I've rode the gravy train long enough. So here's what I'm going to do: The first person to post a comment asking me for it, under the condition that I feel you'd really have a use for it, gets my free trial code. Obviously make it recognizable to me who you are, and as I'm assuming no one I don't know actually reads this, it'll be easy enough to send it your way. It's a good deal, for even if you only have time rent two games and return them with enough time to cancel before the month is up, that could be $100 you save. In the unlikely, and I'd wager almost impossible event of a tie, we'll settle it with a fight of sorts. (or maybe this).