Employable

In my whole life, I have had 3 jobs. The first was a summer camp counselor, where I babysat kids for 18 hours a day. The second and longest-lasting was (and is) teaching piano lessons. The third was accompanying musicals at a theatre. Needless to say, my resume isn’t super conducive to me getting a “normal” job.

But I am bored as shit right now. I’m only teaching one afternoon a week at my new studio. It’s nice to be able to sit around and do nothing or read or play video games or whatever I want all day, but it’s also demoralizing. Sometimes I feel like I’m useless, like I’m taking advantage of Ryan, like I’m not a productive member of society.

So I’ve been applying for jobs here and there. I’m in the enviable position that I don’t NEED a job, so I’ve been pretty picky. I’ve only been applying for jobs I think I’d enjoy, jobs in a field related to one of my hobbies. Working at a bookstore, a makeup store, assisting photographers. But again, my resume is all music, so why would they hire me?

But hey! It’s seasonal now! That’s a good time for seasonal hires! So about a month ago, I applied to Sephora and Ulta, two makeup retailers, both of which have two or three locations around the metro area, for all of their part time & seasonal positions.

Black Friday came and went and I hadn’t heard, so I figured I’d move on. Why would they hire after that?

But I got a call on Sunday to come in for an interview downtown on Monday afternoon. It went well; a small group of 3 of us sitting in the break room, answering questions about why we want to work there, what our past work experiences were like, typical interview questions. I answered almost every question first, and the ones I didn’t were because I bad for answering everything first (I even said that out loud).

On my way home from that interview, I got a call from the suburb mall’s Sephora to come in on Tuesday for an interview. This interview did not go as well: there were 10 or 11 of us, sitting around three tables in the food court, and I’m fairly certain they were more or less picking names at random for who they kept for the second, smaller round of interview questions. I came home last night after that feeling a little down on myself. Because there’s this idea in my mind that working retail is “easy” and if I can’t even get a part time retail job, I must really suck.

But whatever. There were 10 of us, they couldn’t have been making informed decisions. Who cares. Let’s move on.

And this evening I got a call from the downtown location offering me a position.

To be fair: it’s retail, which I don’t think anyone really loves. And it’s seasonal, so I’m only going to be working there for about a month (unless they love me and I get hired full-time). And because I won’t have any time for real training, I’ll just be cleaning and organizing and tidying up. But I’ll have a Sephora name tag and a locker in the break room. I’ll have a real job. That’s a victory.