Career, College, and Degree Search

I remember a story I read online from a couple of years ago when I was unemployed, a story that gave me hope even if I didn’t wind up copying the strategy its protagonist employed to get a new job.

Apparently, a writer out of work took a sandwich board and stood in public in San Francisco, announcing that she would “blog for food.” The ploy attracted some attention, even inspiring a news story or two, and it certainly spoke to me when I heard about it.

As an aspiring writer, I can relate to where I think this writer was coming from. I know what life as a writer is like, the severely low-paid and often thankless hours that blogging can entail, and I know the sacrifices that living life as a writer can sometimes require. I don’t know what depths of despair drove the writer to the point of standing in public with a sign, how many listless months of underemployment or joblessness it came on the heels of, but her tactic got immediate results.

I learned of this writer’s strategy because some employer posted an ad in Craigslist saying that he would hire her. Though it’s a little cheesy, I also think it’s sweet that he said something to the effect of, “I can’t pay you in food so I hope that money will do.” I don’t know what became of the writer, but I hope that her new job worked out and that her days of holding a sign board have long since ended.

My good friend Chris told me awhile back that his former college roommate and our mutual friend Vladi had built a website geared around helping people locate Yoga classes. It seemed like an interesting idea at the time, though I didn’t much explore it until getting a chance to talk to Vladi this past weekend.

Now, it appears we could be working together.

There’s an old saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” I definitely wouldn’t be getting a chance to work with Vladi if I hadn’t met him while Chris went to USC, gotten to know him as the fun-loving Ukranian who could sell sand to a man at the beach. Even now, more than six years after graduation, he still drives a couple hours to see Chris when he’s in the area, and for that, he’s a good egg.

That being said, what I know and can bring to the table for Vladi is important, as well. Like a lot of people with a new website, Vladi underestimated the importance of search engine optimization. He wants his website to grow and attract subscribers and be a success, like any developer or business owner, I suppose. That’s where I come in. SEO is geared so much these days around creation of high-quality, organic content, and I write well, I write fast, and I write cheap.

This comes at an ideal time for me, as I’m in need of more work, and it’ll be nice to have a chance to help a friend. Don’t tell him I said this, but a part of me would be willing to work for free.

I’ve been writing a baseball blog for a few years, and I sometimes wonder if I’m doing something wrong. Off the top of my head, I can think of four fellow bloggers who’ve been hired to work for Major League Baseball teams.

Don’t ask me how this process works, but what I do know of it hints at something interesting. Sometimes, opportunity lurks in the most unlikely of places.

As I write these words, scant hours have passed since Baseball Prospectus contributor Mike Fast announced via Twitter that he would be going to work for the Houston Astros. This came a few weeks after ESPN writer Keith Law declined a chance to work for them.

Fast and Law are far from the only people who’ve gone this route. I don’t know the real names of MGL and TangoTiger, two baseball writers who contribute to a site I’ve visited a handful of times, but I do know that each has had a front office job with an MLB team.

Then there’s Voros McCracken. In the early ’00s, Voros was just another so-called stathead, devoting countless hours to devising a new metric. Then, his handiwork, Fielding Independent Pitching Statistics began to gain in popularity, and one day, Voros got an email from someone with the Boston Red Sox asking if he’d like to work for the team.

Voros’ story gets more interesting from there. He was subsequently diagnosed with a mild case of bipolar disorder, the job with the Red Sox didn’t last but a couple of years, and Voros works today analyzing soccer for an unnamed European team. Not every opportunity is a God send, I suppose. Still, every little bit helps.

Hall of Fame baseball legend Ty Cobb hit .367 in his career, highest batting average of all-time, and there are some who may call him the greatest ballplayer ever. But before his 24-year career in the majors, Cobb was just another struggling minor leaguer. Like a person busing tables while waiting to work at Google or driving a taxi to save money for a limo fleet, Cobb toiled in the minors in his first year, 1904 playing for a traveling team in Alabama.

Cobb hit upon an interesting strategy to get himself noticed, sending letters about himself to then-Atlanta Journal sports editor Grantland Rice (himself a future legend as a writer.) Cobb probably wasn’t the first ballplayer to take this tact, and he certainly hasn’t been the last, though perhaps he had the greatest success with the ploy. Rice finally wrote that “a young fellow named Cobb seems to be showing an unusual lot of talent.” The Georgia Peach got a spot with an Augusta-based team, upped his batting average to .326 in 1905 and was in the majors by year’s end. The rest is history.

In this economy, job seekers would do well to follow Cobb’s example. Despite some signs of improvement, it’s still a zoo out there in the working world, with lots of competition for every open job. Any applicant would be a fool to think they’ll stand out on merit alone. It doesn’t mean writing phony, self-promoting letters to a newspaper, perhaps, but it can mean having a killer blog or website or even just going into an interview exuding confidence. As Ty Cobb showed, with enough of this, we are all potential Hall of Famers.

I’ve managed to have a lot of jobs in the six years since I graduated college. A journalism degree and personal obstacles will grant that for a man. Any job is better than no job, I’ve learned, and any job can be a springboard to the something better. Still, low-level jobs are sometimes barely worth the hassle.

Here are five of the worst jobs I’ve had:

1. Selling insurance: Oh man this one was bad. Worse, I left another job (#2 here, actually) thinking it would be a step up. Basically, I worked for a broker selling insurance by phone out of his office. Besides having a crappy, overpriced product, most of the problems stemmed with my boss who didn’t pay minimum wage, was flagrantly dishonest with customers, and acted just kind of dickishly in general. I left that place in a hurry.

2. Telemarketing for a window replacement company: Telemarketing, by its nature, can be a tough gig, with dismissive or downright hostile customers and low success rates. That said, there are good telemarketing jobs, and there are bad ones. Good for me was working for an early-stage startup with a cool product, generous compensation structure, and supportive atmosphere. The job didn’t last but I still refer friends to work there. My gratitude in part stems from the fact that I previously worked for a shady window replacement company that did poor work, had horrific customer service, and didn’t honor warranties. Worse, for a two-month stretch while the economy went to hell a few years ago, paycheck after paycheck bounced and had to be replaced.

3. House painter: After my gig with the startup ended, I was unemployed for about four months, and in the midst of it a friend got me a stop gap job helping him paint houses. My friend is a nice guy, his boss a nice fellow as well, but I learned to hate our customers in this job. In my worst experience, I worked on the house of a guy who really went out of his way in his outrageous behavior. He was arrogant, condescending, and stupid. One of the evenings I was there, I mixed up a request to him, and he laughed and called me a drug addict. A part of me wanted to quit or bash the customer’s face in right there. I despise drugs, and no one should ever be talked to like that in a workplace. I sucked it up and finished the job. The customer, being the man he was, found a way to stiff us on the last part of the bill.

4. Leather delivery man: This is actually my current job, and I like the work, though it would drive most people crazy. Five days a week, I fight my way through San Francisco Bay Area traffic, going to 20 or 25 drycleaners in an average day, picking up and delivering leather jackets, rugs, and other items. The traffic’s nasty a lot of mornings, some of my customers don’t speak great English, and my boss borders on psychotic some days. Still, I’ve learned a job is what a person makes of it often times, and in the 18 months I’ve been there, I’ve come to enjoy the drives and my customers and have used what I learned selling for the startup to get us more work.

5. Newspaper flunkie: I once thought this would be my gateway to something big, though it didn’t work out. My first year out of college, a family friend helped get me a job clerking on the sports desk of a major daily newspaper. But the pay was low, the work conditions stressful, and I didn’t handle it all well. I lasted about three months, offering continual attitude and performance problems before I was let go.

My girlfriend and I each signed up for Klout this week, and my lady subsequently made an interesting discovery.

While looking around the home page for the social directory, my girlfriend saw that the San Francisco-based firm is looking for copywriters. She looked my way since she’s awesome and knows I live in the Bay Area and love to write. My lady noticed something else interesting, as well. Anyone applying to work at Klout, which rates its users powers of influence on the Web, needs a minimum Klout to do so. I had a 45 out of 100, a bit above average which was enough to convince me to put in an application.

Such is the power of social media.

Gone are the days when nepotism or luck were all one needed to land a job. Social media goes a long way these days toward people finding and securing work.

I’ve long since had a URL for my blog– an almost prehistoric form of social media, I should say– at the top of my resume. It’s gotten me work, including this writing gig. It’s the first thing I want to show off to any potential employer, the thing ability-wise I might be most proud of. Really, my blog is my resume. My resume resume is shit, and if that were all I had, I might still be unemployed.

I also take pride in the fact that I have an active, respectably-followed Twitter account and a decent enough command of Tweeting to show off to potential employers. Twitter’s helped me get a few significant links for my blog, which has led to spikes in traffic and another feather in the resume cap. It’s even gotten me a book offer to write about Dominican baseball, questionable though it may have been. I may have Klout, though I’m no one’s book author, at least not yet.

I’ve been volunteering in the soup kitchen at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco for about three years now, and I don’t know if the story has changed much. I like to work the morning shift when I can show up at 7 and help feed maybe 500 people breakfast, though if there’s not a group there volunteering, our serving ranks can be pretty thin.

Granted, there’s usually a crowd of folks required to put in some hours to stay in good standing with their general assistance, though they aren’t the happiest of workers, and we can easily be under staffed. I’ve even heard of people being pulled out of the food lines to help out, though I’ve never seen it on my watch. This is the time of year, though, where Glide doesn’t have to worry.

Glide relies on its website to fill meal shifts, touting on there that 60 percent of its work is done by volunteers. As of this writing, all volunteer shifts are filled for the next two weeks. This is the time of year where students or workers on vacation maybe give a day or two to fill some extra time. The holidays also attract well-meaning if misguided volunteers who forget that hunger also exists eleven other months of the year. And volunteering always remains an attractive option for people out of work– it’s a good way to keep one’s skills sharp.

It’s great that people want to give this time of year. Perhaps if they really want to make a difference, they can come back on a Monday or Tuesday in mid-February when I’m sure the ranks will once again have thinned.