#GIRLBOSS (5 page)

Shitty Jobs Saved My Life

It was the straying that found the path direct.

—Austin Osman
Spare

The only good thing about being a child model was that I got to skip school.

I
think I may hold some kind of record for Most Shitty Jobs Held Prior to Turning Eighteen. Or if not that, I’d most certainly win the Most Shitty Jobs That Lasted Two Weeks or Less Award. As a kid, I’d dabbled in employment: lemonade stands, a paper route, babysitting, and a brief stint as a child model that ended when I failed to muster the enthusiasm to jump up and down and shout “Pizza Pizza!” at a Little Caesars casting. My high school years were like speed dating, but for jobs. Maybe none of these shitty jobs really
saved
my life, but I do believe that my variety of short-lived failures, or as I prefer to call it, job promiscuity, made me an experienced young adult. When you have an attention span the length of an eyelash, it doesn’t take long to learn what you like and what you don’t. I generally have to throw a ton of shit at the wall before learning what sticks (and no, it is no longer literally shit). To the misfortune of all the employers I’ve left in my wake, it was well worth it.

Evidence of the low point otherwise known as Catholic school.

Before the tale of my litany of shitty jobs began, I attended ten schools in my twelve years of education. Because we moved, because our financial situation changed, because I hated it. By the time I was in third grade, my parents didn’t know what to do with me—I got in trouble for being “off task,” reading a dictionary in the back of the
classroom. Some miracle qualified me to be placed in a rapid-learner program in third grade, which ended up being a joke—we read newspapers on the floor all day and my teacher “didn’t believe in math.” Obviously, this was not the solution, so I was then placed in Catholic school. And guess what? That didn’t work either!

No matter where I went, I was an outsider (and generally led with poop humor, which didn’t make me many friends). I got along as well with the cool kids as I did with the nerds. That spirit of forced tourism, along with my quickly learned survival mechanisms, eventually also made it easy to jump from job to job. Fortunately, the economy was in good shape when I began working at the age of fifteen, which allowed me to get a job, quit, and get hired again very easily. I was never disappointed when a particular job didn’t work out, since I’d already lived an entire life feeling so far out of place that I’d given up hope that any one thing, place, person, or occupation could be my calling.

Misadventures in Job Promiscuity

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

—Douglas Adams

This difficulty in “getting along” lasted throughout my entire youth. As a high school student, every time I heard the school bell ring, I told myself my life was over before it had even
begun. When you’re eating lunch with your über-liberal history teacher instead of hanging with friends, you know it’s time to go. I managed to convince my parents to let me home-school for the last part of my sophomore year. I had a teacher who came over once a month to dole out assignments, but most of my time was spent working. There was a Subway near our house, so I walked over, filled out an application, and became a Sandwich Artist. I wore the green polo shirt and visor with pride, working the day shift and conquering the lunch rush, despite not yet knowing what a lunch rush was.

Part of my job was to wear gloves and massage mayonnaise into the tuna. Sexy! I’d slap the tuna into a bowl and pour out half a gallon of mayonnaise, put gloves on, and massage the mayo in with my hands. Another favorite was the seafood, which arrived in a giant slab of perforated fake crab that I’d break apart with my fingers and go to town on.

I don’t even remember why I quit, but the next job I got was working at a Borders bookstore. I really enjoyed this job. At the time,
Who Moved My Cheese?
was the book that everyone came in asking for. I didn’t know what it was about, and I still don’t. Sadly, my work at Borders did not involve mayo or rubber gloves, but working the information desk was a big step up, as I got to use my brain.

Borders put their staff through a pretty major training program, which, despite my anticorporate leanings at this point in life, I found highly valuable and still do. For example, they taught me to say “yes” instead of “sure”; or “let me check” instead of “I don’t know” when I was helping
customers. A very important tidbit about customer service: just apologize to people. Even if it’s not your fault, they’ve been disappointed by the company you work for and it’s your job to empathize with them. Though you may be paid minimum wage, to the customers you are the face of the entire company. It’s this kind of accountability that gets people raises, promotions, and eventually careers.

As a teenager and into my early twenties, I thought that I would never embrace capitalism, much less be a public champion for it. I was certain that I’d live my years out trying to make a career as a photographer, getting by holding jobs because I had to, not because I wanted to. I’m not that cynical anymore. I’ve learned that it’s typically the larger companies out there that provide the template for employees to chart a path for themselves and continue to develop in their respective fields as well as in their management skills. At Nasty Gal today, we have a little something we call “Our Philosophy” that’s posted around the office. We employ an amazing Human Resources and Benefits team to ensure that our practices are fair and that our employees are well taken care of. Before Nasty Gal, I hardly knew what HR stood for (high rise, as in jeans? Or HR, the lead singer from Bad Brains?), and a philosophy was something that I would have fully rolled my eyes at. But when a company is on a trajectory as crazy as Nasty Gal’s, and becomes as big as Nasty Gal, these kinds of things are more than just corporate mumbo jumbo—they’re integral to having a positive company culture.

My stint at Borders, even though I liked it, only lasted
about six months. After that, I practiced more job promiscuity at the local factory outlet mall, working at a couple of different shoe stores (both specialized in orthopedic shoes) and at another bookstore. Then I worked at a dry cleaner’s,
where I sat alone, in the back, scrubbing ring-around-the collar out of men’s shirts and separating them by starch level.

The fact that I quit my job at Borders in no way diminishes how much I learned from it.

I worked at a restaurant for about a day, and that I really hated. I wasn’t exactly a people person, and that’s what working in a restaurant is: people, nonstop people. I wondered, if I was going to make the same amount of money no matter what I did, then what should I choose to do? To be a bumbling server (I say that only because I was a major bumbler), get stressed out over spilled milk, or sit here in this dimly lit Dexter shoes? I’d rather work at Dexter and read a book. Even though I always worked hard as an employee, all of these jobs still only used about 15 percent of my brain (max) and each job I loved eventually grew boring. It felt a bit like
Groundhog Day
—every day was the same, no matter how much I’d done the day before. And with no Bill Murray? No thanks. At this point in my litany of shitty jobs, I’d never reaped what I’d sown, and that, I eventually learned, is the only way I can stay engaged.

Fight the Boredom

To be, in a word, unborable. . . . It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

—David Foster Wallace

This was the phase of my life where I chose jobs because they were really easy. The last job I had before Nasty Gal,
I was a campus safety host in the lobby of the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I quite literally did nothing, and that was the entire reason I took the job. Hell no would I be making a difference or earning my keep! I wanted to be a cheaper version of a security guard, dick around on MySpace, and periodically yell, “Hey, you need to sign in!” As soon as my shift began, I was waiting for it to end. I realize how lame this sounds now. And guess what? It was lame. It makes me sad to remember how apathetic I was. I hope that I made some of these mistakes so that you, dear hardworking #GIRLBOSS in the making, won’t have to.

What I know now is that nothing is universally boring—what’s boring to you could be totally engaging to someone else. If you’re bored and hating it, it’s a big sign that you’re most likely just in the wrong place. There are some folks who just straight up hate work, no matter what kind of work it is. This book just isn’t for those people. Unless you’re born the child of a billionaire, work is something we all have to do. So hell, make it something you enjoy, because bored is not a #GIRLBOSS’s natural state. At all.

Unless you’re powered by an ungodly amount of spite, it’s pretty impossible to succeed while doing something that you genuinely hate. Personally, I am horrible at public relations. There’s a whole art to PR that’s being you on demand and saying the right thing at the right time, and that I’ve never mastered. A good publicist has to be capable of selling while still being genuine and building relationships. Kaitlyn, Nasty Gal’s PR director, loves her job, and she’s great at it. She’s a total extrovert and loves people, so she thrives on being in constant contact with everyone all the time. I jokingly refer to the financial side of the business as “the boring stuff,” but that’s only because it’s boring to me. Our CFO loves to look at graphs and spreadsheets and all sorts of acronyms that I am only just beginning to understand. That’s fantastic, because if there weren’t people who found finance or international logistics fascinating, none of us at Nasty Gal would have a job.

Using my love for photography to explore the oppressive nature of time.

My biggest weakness as an employee (and also as a friend) was my incurable inability to be on time. Time may be the one thing in the world I can’t negotiate, no matter how
hard I’ve tried. It plagues me to this day. I was always grumpy about the fact that I had to take twenty minutes out of my personal life to get to work, considering those twenty minutes were unpaid. To squeeze every last moment of “my” life (as I felt they owned me during work hours), I’d leave as late as possible for work, ensuring I was pretty much always late. Sometimes being late is unavoidable (aka shit happens), but being repeatedly, predictably late is a wonderful way to let your boss know that you just don’t care about your job. No one wants to hire, or continue to employ, someone who blatantly doesn’t care.