The McCahans West, as we have come to say, are awesome. My two cousins, Katie 15, and Reugen, 10, walked me into the house and showed me my room and bathroom (yes, own bathroom, sweet I know) both of which were labeled with my name. I knew this was going to be an interesting experience, not only because my cousins are a crazy combination of pro-wrestler, LL Bean hippie, comedian, Boston gangster, mad inventor, chef, and Barbara Streisand, but because in the last few years I really hadn't seen them much. I'd always been involved in something or at school and wasn't able to spend much time getting to know them. My uncle John (my Dad's brother) and my aunt Mozelle had decided to make the move to Bozeman just earlier that spring of 2011, my uncle having taken a job offer at the hospital. They were more than welcoming and made room for me in their already fairly hectic lives.
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| My room!! |
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| Katie singing in her Christmas socks |
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| Reugen the Lego mastermind |
I hadn't actually been able to find a job prior to arriving in Bozeman, though I had been looking. John and Mozelle, or Mo, had been checking the classified adds and calling me with any news while I had been scouring the internet. I applied to the local ski mountain, Bridger Bowl, but no positions were available. I began listing anything in the paper that I thought I could do and taking note of any help wanted signs I passed by on the street: coffee stands, hotel desks, restaurants, even the UPS store. I'll just say it, JOB SEARCHING SUCKS. No way around it. Up until that point, job searching had been easy. I've had the same seasonal jobs for six years, and have been working for people I already knew. So this whole stranger in a strange land throwing our resumes thing was totally new, and absolutely terrifying.
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| My horoscope while I was job searching... uncanny isn't it. |
I registered with the three job placement agencies in town just to see if anything turned up. I totally messed up the first agency interview when I brain farted when they asked me about my skills and didn't remember what "clerical work" meant. I think I'd always heard it referred to as "desk job" or "secretarial work". Yeah.. whoops. But after that stress mess, I had a great interview with Express Employment. Greg, the owner, and I hit it off right from the start. This dude really knows how to do his job. His phone skills are so suave, he could sell condoms to the Pope, and within the next week he called me about a temporary position working for a graphics company in town. He knew it wasn't what I was looking for, but it would get some income coming my way.
I went to the company, which I shall not name because I'm not sure who is actually reading this, and was ushered to the upstairs work room. I noticed immediately that no one introduced themselves, and no one asked me my name. I was given a number, shown how to punch in, and directed to a table where hundreds of envelopes sat waiting to be sealed by hand. I spent eight hours that day gluing shut large envelope while serenaded by the sound of machinery running and illuminated by florescent light. I think I got about a BAJILLION paper-cuts and the palms of my hands were red and sore. I was working with a couple other "temps" as we were called, but we didn't talk. We just glued and pressed, glued and pressed, all day.
This was a strange experience for many reasons. I had never before been basically ignored at a job. I had never been told what to do like I was six years-old, and I had never not talked to anyone (who's surprised?). The next day I was determined to shake it up a bit. I was moved from gluing the envelopes, to gathering envelopes that had been addressed into bundles and securing them with two rubber bands. After three hours of banding, the outsides of my fingers burned. I had figured out at least five different ways to put on the rubber bands so that I could rotate skin areas on my fingers. This day was better though. I started trying to make conversation with the guy next to me. His name was Richard. He had driven there from Oklahoma to visit his cousin and had decided to earn some cash in the meantime. He had a southern drawl, wore the same yellow sweatshirt everyday, and had a goofy grin when I made him laugh. I made it my goal to make him crack a smile whenever possible. The job was so monotonous... I guess I felt it gave me permission to act weirder then normal, just to mix things up. I'm pretty sure everyone in that workroom thought I was crazy by the end of the week. At one point I started dancing in the middle of the room because I was happy it was snowing. I'd like to think I was entertaining at least.
The other temp was an older man who I dubbed "Enthusiastic Man", or EM, (I never really could hear his name when he said it, and then I couldn't remember it, and then I started giving everyone in the work room quasi super hero names because I was bored). EM was always in a hurry, and was always looking to do something with the most obvious intent of haste. It was so much haste, I was worried about him. No one should sweat that much when gluing envelopes.
Our floor manager was an Asian women named Cindy, or "Lady Chang" (sorry if that's offensive, it just came to my head at the time). She was always very serious and mono-emotional and had special gloves for handling paper. I swear she must have been a retired spy. Although I was doing the same things as the other temps, she somehow managed to find something wrong with whatever I did. At one point however, it was she that entered the wrong addresses into the label printer so that we had to cover the address area with blank labels. Regardless of the fact that it had been her mistake, it was up to the temps to fix it. And we had to do it just right. She came over three times to comment on my work; my labels were too high up, I needed to make sure they were straight, I should put them on a different way, just... because! I glanced at Richard and he looked at me with an affirming "Yep, she's picking on you" look. I'm not sure what I was doing to induce her wrath, but instead of getting frustrated, I decided to make another goal; make it so she can't help but like me! Hahah!
Meanwhile, the other members of the work room included "Camo Guy" who wore clashing patterns of camouflage every day and spent his time ranting about the machines or the government, "Bob the Builder", an older man who wore a back support belt everyday and managed to hold at least 12 things in it, "Gangsta Man", who always wore his hood up and had a different mustache style and length everyday, and "The Men in Black", two guys working across the room on poster graphics who wore black T-shirts everyday and no underwear... Unfortunately they bent down a lot. Our motley crew was bossed by "Daniel Craig". I'm not kidding, my boss looked like a slightly thinner James Bond. And he was the task master. I think he was even more intimidating just because he looked like Daniel Craig. He always carried his clipboard and each time he came upstairs he had to comment on something. Sometimes he would just linger until he had something to say. At one point, the machine I was working with decided to snag, right when he was there of course, and he jumped right in! Pushing buttons, talking about how we needed to make sure we could keep it going, how it should be working, blah blah blah. I knew how to fix it. I just let him try to make him feel better. I pushed a couple buttons, rearranged the envelopes, and voila! He just looked at me and stammered a bit, "Ahh, yes, good... Well ok then. Good." Daniel Craig exits stage left.
As the week went on, I became more comfortable and felt free to be a little goofy. I made each task a weird challenge or game. I tried different strategies for gluing the envelopes so I could do the greatest number possible at once, I tried wrapping pallets of envelope bundles in under a certain amount of time, or I stacked sealed envelopes in different patterns. Sounds exciting right? I was actually amazed at how well I dealt with the slow pace of time and the monotony of what I was doing. I started listening to NPR on my iPod, which helped, but I think I also tunnel visioned during the day so that I saw each task as the most important thing for that moment.
I noticed that I seemed to be generally more bouncy than the people I was working with, but honestly, if I worked there everyday, all day, for the whole year, I would be a zombie. If I had to always be a temp, whose identity didn't really matter as long as I worked well, I would begin to loose myself. I began see how one's sense of importance could become attached to a part of a process, and how it could eat at your enthusiasm. It was a completely different perspective on what role a job could have in life. Some people do not love their job. Their job is just a means to an end, and nothing else. It enriches their life not through its endeavors, but through its profit. For me, that would be a hard way to live, but people do it. I don't think that lifestyle is wrong or that it means those people's lives are not as meaningful just because they do not live for their work, but it is opposite of the expectations I have for my life. In some way, I must feel that my goal to pursue a career that I will love and value is a "better" choice, or else I wouldn't be trying so hard to do it. However, I do not think that I as a person am "better than".
I remember struggling with these thoughts when I went back home for winter break during my junior year of college. I ran into people I went to high school with who are still living in my hometown or who didn't go to college. I caught myself feeling a bit superior in a way, like what they were choosing to do with their lives was small minded, and that because they weren't challenging themselves or seeing the world that somehow they were maybe a little less significant. Those thoughts shocked and appalled me. When did I become such an elitist? When did staying in your home town and becoming a more woven member of a community which raised you become "less than"? It made me angry that I would feel this way, but I resolved that just because it is not what I want for my life, does not make it insignificant. My life is no more important, and I have no right or desire to look down on anyone. And what do I know? Maybe some of those people I was so quick to judge are following their dreams and are doing something they love and feel is meaningful. Many of them are probably giving back to the community and doing things that a necessary for the town. And most importantly, many of them are probably happy.
Perhaps what I was interpreting initially stemmed from my correlation between high achieving goals and a high sense of self worth. Maybe I thought I was seeing people who didn't think very highly of themselves and therefore weren't striving to achieve all they were capable of. I do think that one's sense of self-importance and capability is a major factor in how one sets goals and how far out of comfort zones one may be willing to go. And honestly, I know through experience that "formal" education of the traditionally valued subjects in school does not always provide the inspiration a person might need. There is no substitute for experience, and I wish all schools had the resources to provide alternative education methods which would encourage leaning in a variety of ways. The only way to really expand your confidence and sense of personal possibility is to to challenge your options and capabilities, but it is not always easy, and unless someone discovers a motivation to do so or has someone to encourage them, it may seem impossible or may not even be a consideration. I understand too that not everyone who can push themselves wants to, and not everyone wants to move away from what they know. It is because of this difference of choice that we have such a variety of people within our culture.
I feel extremely fortunate that I even have a choice to explore new opportunities. When I think of people in the world who fight everyday to just stay alive, I can't help but feel that the freedom to be curious is a luxury. My frustrations with those who, as I see them, have the resources and the ability to challenge themselves but don't comes from this feeling that it is privilege to be able to learn, it is a privilege to have the opportunity to grow, and it is a privilege to experience life and have the chance of joining progress and embracing inevitable change. When I ponder why I want to know and learn so many different things, I instantly think, why not? I hope for sake of the future, and for anyone expecting life to land in their laps, that curiosity can become more contagious and reality more apparent.
The way I see it, everything begins with possibility. Every person has something to offer, something to teach, or some energy to share, and every community, no matter how big or small, needs members to support it. I am the product of a close community. It is because the people who work there, struggle there, thrive there, and live there that I am who I am. And someday, those who stay there will raise a new generation that will also grow in many directions, have different opinions, different goals, and will affect the world in different ways.
By the end of the my week as a temp, I was talking to each person on that floor, laughing and joking with them, even Cindy, and I was able to find some basis for a simple co-worker relationship with all of them. So even though my hands were a mess, my head hurt from the light, and what I was doing ended with sending out packets of information to people I didn't know, I look back at that week with fondness. It was important to me to feel a sense of community around me, so I cultivated it, and was able to make connections with people regardless of the situation. I also made my first friend in Bozeman in the lunchroom, so the time was worthwhile.
My last day, Daniel Craig came up to me and told me I was a great worker and that he wanted to offer me a full-time position. I had to turn him down, because I had just found out that I was offered a different job, but I thanked him anyway and asked him if anyone had ever told him he looked like James Bond. "Why yes actually" he said. "My kids refer to me as Mr. Bond. But thanks!"
