Here I am in The Stepford Office, surrounded by trim, stylish 25-year-olds with no sense of humor, irony or knowledge of anything that happened before 1990. There was ONE woman here, Sarah, who was funny and sharp and got me through the day . . . And she just got canned, dammit! She knew it was coming; they’d cut back on the project she works on. She hated it here and her husband works, so she won’t starve while looking for another job.
But dammit, this leaves me with NO ONE at work who gets my jokes or who will double over laughing at the bad writing and brainless articles we have to deal with! The IQ in this office was just cut by half . . .
. . . I gotta go now and log onto hotjobs.com . . .
You just described my mom’s office perfectly. One of the girls didn’t know who Marlon Brando was. She often doesn’t know anything beyond 1990 or 1980. Her great response is, “Well, it was before my time”. As a history buff, it makes my blood boil. What a fucking moron. Just wait until I go to my mom’s work and see her. “Quick, the Civil War…”
What mostly upsets me is that Sarah was the only quick-witted person here. She not only got my jokes, she was capable of topping me! Everyone else just gets a blank, President Bush-like look on their face when I crack wise (“ummm, I think Eve just made a funny, I’d better smile”).
What kind of labor camp are they running there?? Is this the norm in your industry? Thought that three weeks would be a minimum…Lousy coworkers, lousy working conditions. Heh.
OT - This week-end, I came across a photographic retrospective I’m sure you’d just love. It’s about John Rawlings, one of Vogue’s photographers for some thirty years. Stunning, classy (with a capital “C”) photographs, the kind which you do not see anymore. Brilliant in their simplicity, yet the attention to detail is remarkable. There are also several photos of Evelyn Frey, one of the most naturally beautiful women I’ve ever seen. I’ve subsquently read that she had been Rawlings’ mistress, and his love for the subject is more than evident in the photographs. Here’s a link in case you’re interested. Enjoy:
Allowing for the possibility that I’m just weak of mind, I’m having a difficult time figuring out why a magazine targeted at women over forty is staffed by a bunch of 25-year-old sorority girls. Is this a product of the general stupidity of the magazine business? Is Maxim staffed by 60-year-old Ivy grads? Have I perhaps just been given a glimpse into the secret behind the train wreck that is popular culture “for women”? That for every Eve Golden in the offices of More and Redbook and the Oxygen Network, there is a pack of yowling late-stage syphillitic baboons in DKNY hip-huggers?
Could it be that the people who write for Cosmo are really that dumb? The mind reels. Someone wheel me out a divan upon which I may swoon in disillusionment.
Hope you can find someplace where the monkey-to-sparkling-wit ratio is a little lower, Eve.
I guess I’ve been spoiled. I was a federal government civil servant (no witty cracks, please) for close to twenty years up here in Canada, and I can’t recall having had less than three weeks, but you may be correct in stating that ‘in the real world’, two weeks is closer to the norm.
P.S.: Good post, Lux. I especially liked the divan and swooning part.
“I’m having a difficult time figuring out why a magazine targeted at women over forty is staffed by a bunch of 25-year-old sorority girls.”
—Yeah, you figure it out, and tell ME.
Anyone know of a good job-search site? None of the possibilties on hotjobs.com have panned out . . . Not necessarily just publishing, as I have aged myself out of THIS profession. And not just NY, as I’d love to move back to Phila.
Kabbes—Yikes! We get two weeks, and they have to be carefully scheduled one at a time to avoid issue-closings. We USED to get three “personal days,” too, but then they gave us Martin Luther King Day off and took away one of THOSE.
Mostly, I have to get out because I have hit the glass ceiling in this business. If you haven’t made it to the top by my age, the 20-somethings will scramble past you. And it’s not a “top” I wanna make it to anymore . . .
E-Sabbath—Yup, that’s why I work at this dump. I could make more base salary as a freelancer, but I need the benefits. In fact, that’s why MOST people I know have nine-to-five jobs they hate. “It’s not the salary, it’s the benefits.”
But I forgot the important bit.
There are many local search engines. While the ones I know are a bit tech-oriented, if you can use this website, you probably qualify.