RevSpork

My love letter to Borders #144

It's about 1am as I begin typing this blog post.  A few hours before, the Borders I labored at for nearly five years shut down for good.  I dropped by a few weeks back, staring at all the giant liquidation sale signs that seemed to take up more room than what was left of the merchandise. 

The signs are the worst part.  No matter what kind of retail establishment is closing down, the liquidators use the same glaring yellow and red signs to announce their presence.  It's the beginning of the end of the store and the jobs of everyone there, and I can't walk into one of those places without feeling like a vulture.

I've had a store shot down from under me before; I even blogged about it.  For a retail employee, there is nothing more depressing, more defeating.  Even though I knew the store's closing wasn't my fault, I couldn't help but feel in the back of my head that I could have done more to save the store, to save my co-workers' jobs.  And I didn't even like most of my co-workers at that job, but it didn't matter.  No matter cliched it seemed, we were all a team... a team that lost.

There are a lot of bad retail gigs out there, but by and large, Borders wasn't one of them.  There were two great things about Borders: you could borrow books for a couple of weeks, and you were surrounded by employees who were passionate about literature or music or movies.  In a way, Borders was Geek Heaven: I could chat up with one co-worker about the Rolling Stones, another about Quentin Tarantino, and still another about Philip Roth in less than an hour.  Moreover, those partisans would happily pass along that love of whatever it was to other employees or customers. 

The employees didn't kill Borders.  No matter how small their paychecks or bad treatment they received from the occasional cranky customer, they were the lifeblood of the company. 

No, what killed Borders were the idiocy of the suits.  In the 1990s, Borders was riding high.  The company was stable; their stock was solid; there was nowhere to go but up.  Or, in Borders' case, down.  Faced with the rise of amazon.com, Borders apparently decided an online store was too hard and literally said to amazon, "Here, you do it for us."  They opened dozens of stores with huge music sections in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when the music industry had taken a nosedive.  Their computerized inventory system was woefully inadequate (they had no real-time inventory, so if you had one copy of a book and it sold, you wouldn't know until the next day).  They also made it difficult for managers, who were more knowledgeable of local selling trends, to order extra stock of popular titles.  (For instance, when the movie "Garden State" opened in theaters, the soundtrack was a huge surprise hit, but corporate allotted us a whopping two copies to sell, and it took almost two weeks for them to respond to the demand.  I could name other examples, but it's late.) 

Worst of all were the revolving door of corporate heads, none of whom worked in the book industry, let alone a bookstore.  They saw what we sold as just another bunch of widgets and gradually tore down Borders' attributes.  We were well-known for wide selections of books and music, so they drastically cut our inventory.  We had a reputation of knowledgeable employees, so they decimated payroll.  (In 1999, the Borders I worked at had a maximum payroll of over 1700 employee hours.  Five years later, when I was hired, payroll was down to around 1100.  When I left in 2008, our store had maybe 700 employee hours to use, and I'm sure it was far lower by the time Borders filed for Chapter 11.)  Result?  Morale collapsed, as did customer service.  (If you had been to a Borders in the last year or so, you would have heard phones left to ring forever; nobody was available to answer them.)  And although these developments may not have had a huge impact on our drop in sales, it definitely alienated loyal customers who'd sooner get a lobotomy than order books online. 

So Borders is dying.  And my Borders is dead.  The weird thing is, there are two ghost Borders in Evanston now, only a few blocks apart.  The old store moved to its present site in 2003, and the owners of the old building never were able to get another client to take over the space.  So now Evanston can boast two abandoned properties that were once Borders, empty endcaps spaces, maybe some other remnants of what the building once housed. 

Some folks scoff at the end of Borders, claiming (with some accuracy) that the superstore killed off a lot of indie bookstores.  To those folks I say: maybe, but screw you anyway.  Sure, the indies boasted a lot of personality, great customer service, and were pillars of their neighborhood.  But they didn't hire a lot of people.  And unless they were huge indie bookstores like Powell's, they didn't offer many benefits to their full-time employees - if they hired full-time employees. Before the decline of the company, Borders offered some decent benefits to their full-timers: medical and dental, life insurance, stock options.  Working at an indie bookstore gave you a bit of cachet among your friends (and some serious nerd cred), but Borders offered another possibility: a long-term job and a stable paycheck. 

And folks, quit bitching about the big corporate bookstores killing off the indies in the 90s: If Borders and Barnes & Noble hadn't decimated the indies, amazon.com and Wal-Mart would have done the job a few years down the road.  It's sad but true.

I offer the following blessing: I wish all past and present Borders employees who endured cranky customers and psychotic homeless people; who walked the customer to the shelf and handed the item to them; who could recommend a great Civil War history book (or knew a coworker who could); who read stories to kids; who volunteered at 4am to build the holiday displays; who shelved in alphabetical order; who went along with seemingly contradictory orders from above; who brewed a damned good cup of coffee; who worked the insanely wonderful midnight Harry Potter release parties; who straightened up the CDs at 11pm; who put out the new product late Monday night or early Tuesday morning; who made working at a bookstore - even an evil corporate bookstore - fun: the best of fortunes in the future.

Job hunting again

Today marked the first time in two weeks that I applied for new work.  I currently have two very part-time jobs, and I'm looking for either a third part-time gig or a full-time job.  The pickings are still slim - I wonder how many possible jobs I've missed because I've stopped looking daily. 

It's a tough call - I work only 25 hours a week, and I certainly have the time to rev up the computer at home when I'm not working and peruse the job sites.  Thing is, looking for work is insanely boring, especially when you've done it for months.  Working part-time makes the experience even less desirable, because the situation isn't as drastic.  You're not losing money hand over fist anymore - it's more of a slow financial leak.  You're not thinking, "I can't pay the rent next month!"  It's more like "Well, I can pay the rent - I just need to delay paying the phone bill, maybe cut down on groceries, stretch out the meds, and I can hack it."  It seems like so much of an accomplishment that you managed to cover your expenses for a whole month, looking for work gets shunted aside.  And the part-time work is a mixed blessing: it's good to have some money coming in.  On the other hand, you don't want to lose those part-time jobs, so you devote a full-time job's worth of emotional and mental energies to succeeding at those jobs, whether you're working twenty or fifty hours a week.  Besides, one of those jobs might become a full-time gig.  Or maybe one of the full-timers will leave, giving you a first crack at that position.   Can't screw up, or act unenthused.  So when you get home, the last thing you want to do is look for more work.  You want to watch TV, or turn on the wii, or get some sleep.  Or it's time to take care of the kids, the chores, make sure your spouse knows you still exist.  Either way, it's not time to log onto monster.com and dig for gold. 

Besides, let's face it: looking for work is work.  You might play more video games, or take a longer lunch break, but looking for a job saps your energy just as readily as actual labor.  And there's no paycheck at the end of a week of looking for work: you're working for free.  There's still a reward available - a job - but unlike the paycheck, it's not guaranteed.  Looking for a job is essentially a job with potential rewards, not actual.  After a few weeks of nothing more than an unsuccessful interview and ink smudges from filling out dozens of applications, you're ready for a vacation.  An unpaid vacation, of course, and you can't afford to go anywhere beyond the local Target, but what the hey - at least you can devote more time to video games. 

Nothin' nothin' nothin' to do

I'm at work right now, and as usual I have little to nothing to do.  I will probably leave early due to lack of students.  It's still the dead season; although a new crop of students have arrived, I don't get my claws into them for about another month.  In other words, another day packed with oodles of ennui.

I remember a time, not so long ago, when I went to work and actually worked.  I miss that.  I believe that constant activity at work leads to a more active home life, and I believe that because the negative is certainly true.  I find that the less I do at work, the less I do at home.  That doesn't make sense to me at first: I thought we all carried a finite amount of energy, which we expend either at work or at home. 

On a typical Monday, for example, we put in eight or more hours at work at the office, factory, retail store, etc, then we get home, where we have just enough leftover energy to make dinner, watch some TV, and hit the hay.  But that's just not so.  Since my hours were cut, I've found that idleness at work leads to idleness at home; my daily energy shrank.  It would seem to explain why I've been less active looking for work than I was in February, when looking for work was my job.  I can't figure it all out any other way; the less I have to do at work, the less I want to do at home, which leads to not just idleness at work, but the desire to remain idle.  Excess idleness feeds upon itself until you find yourself doing nothing more than the basic human activities for survival.  

This is dangerous.  I need to get off my butt.  Hopefully I'll regain some of my old energy when I get back from North Carolina next week.  One can hope, but hoping isn't much of an activity.

Gimme a break

I'm at work this morning.  There's very little going on.  I just finished my round of chatting it up with the students and coaching them into getting their work done.  It's nominally easy, this job.  A typical day consists of sitting in front of a computer, occasionally assisting students either in lecture or in lab.  I've gotten to where I can help the student with just about any class they're working on...when they're working.  They putter around the internet quite frequently, much to my distress.  Problem is, I have so little to do between helping students, I end up doing the same thing.  It has developed into a nasty little habit, especially since I've independently finished every online class offered nearly two months ago.  I do spend some time on assignments, such as writing up labs, but those have become few and far between.  Left to my own devices, I inevitably end up puttering around with the rest of the students.  It's a habit I have to break. 

As a lifelong member of the ADD Fun Club, maintaining focus has always been a challenge for me.  This morning, for example, I finished (and passed) the assessment for advanced MS Excel.  Unlike some folks, I find certain aspects of Excel anything but boring, and I like playing around with the program.  Once one gets into the real nitty-gritty of Excel, however, the fascination evaporates.  XML, for example, is about as exciting as a soccer match between snails.  With subject matter like that, I get bored and antsy quickly, so an online game makes for a nice halftime break.  Problem is, that halftime break has a tendency to expand into an hour-long break.  

I've had some successes during this gig based on hard work.  I passed my certification exam in MS Word 2003 last week and just received my certificate in the mail.  Passing the assessment this morning is just the first part of my preparation for the MS Ezcel certification, which I hope to take in a couple of weeks.  Depending on how much longer my assignment lasts, I also plan to pick up certifications in PowerPoint and (could it be possible?) Access.  However, these little achievements won't happen unless I get off my figurative butt and stop playing games. 

From now on, if you see me online, you have my permission to harass me and tell me to get my ass back to work.  I'll appreciate it.

While you were out...

However, I've managed to get some cleaning done around the house.  Yesterday, for instance, I washed four loads of dishes.  And today - wow, man - I cleaned the oven.  You naysayers out there may feel the right to taunt me - he cleaned an oven; big deal! - but really, an oven is damned hard to clean, especially since we have owned the oven for a year without so much as dusting its insides.  And this is the first time I've ever cleaned an oven.  Yes, in my thirty-ninth year, I cleaned an oven for the first time, industrial oven cleaner and all.  As I scrubbed away at the bottom of the broiler pan, I realized why the self-cleaning oven was such a cool invention.  Dirty oven?  No problem: crank that mother to a thousand degrees and carbonize every bit of organic matter in there.  No muss, no fuss.  In my oven, there's still some baked-in bits o' black in there, but I'll save it for another time.  The oven cleaner might be lemony-fresh scent, but we're talking oven cleaner here; something tells me industrial chemicals that smell OK are probably just as bad as the evil ol' odor stuff.

Next up: cleaning the stove.  I might wait until tomorrow for that one, depending on if I work or not.

That's right: I don't know if I'm working or not tomorrow.  The technical school assignment I signed up for was a six-to-eight week gig.  Friday marked the end of my eighth week.  This week is spring break, when all the students and most employees are off, but after that everyone is back...including me?  I don't know.  The instructors don't know.  In fact, when I talked to my boss about the matter over a week ago, *she* didn't know either.  I was to find out this week if I was to be retained after this week.  Fair enough.  But what about this week?  I was supposed to find out last week, but unfortunately my boss was gone the entire week due to a family emergency.  She wasn't going to check her e-mail, and I'll be damned if I, a temp worker, call the boss during a family emergency as to when I work this week.  So I'm stuck.  I don't blame anyone, least of all my boss, but it's difficult to plan one's week if one doesn't know his job status. 

One of the instructors advised that I should just go in anyway tomorrow.  If I'm told I'm not needed, I'll go home and resume my nap or stove-cleaning or whatever.  If so, I'll work.  No muss, no fuss, right?

Man, everything's all topsy-turvy since Tori left.

The mixed blessing

I'm two weeks into my temp gig, and it's going fairly well.  The students and the instructors seem to like me, and I'm okay with them.  I've sharpened my Excel and Word skills, learned MS Project and Visio, and am beginning to learn Access for the first time in nearly ten years.  I've never been good with database programs, so it's extremely important for me to nail it down.  Access is used in a lot of office gigs, and if I want to boost my chances of landing an office gig, I had better master it, or at least the rudiments. 

In order to keep up with the two- and three-week classes, I've taken many of the courses myself while I'm working or between my shifts.  As a result, I've managed to "finish" courses in basic MS Office and a customer service class since I started.  Next week I plan to take on e-commerce and communications.  I find it bizarre that I'm barreling through entire courses in mere days, soaking up as much knowledge as possible before the temp assignment ends.  My brain hasn't gotten this much of a workout since my college years.

The flip side, unfortunately, is the strange and lonely world of the split shift.  I assist students and instructors from 9am-1:30pm and 5:45-9:30pm during the week (except Fridays, when I only work the morning shift).  Between these shifts, I'm pretty much let loose in the lab.  Returning home is an option, but the commute is 45 minutes a pop; I'd have barely ninety minutes of home time before I have to return to work.  Better to grab lunch, work on courses, and putter about until the evening class begins.  This keeps me at the school for a mind-blowing 13½ hours, and out of the apartment for fifteen. 

During those four days a week, I see Tori when she's leaving for work or going to bed.  And she doesn't like this a bit.  Moreover, I don't have an office, thus no office phone, and I don't have a cell phone, so we're limited to e-mails for a majority of the day.  I explain to her that we'll have all weekend to each other, and that it's only a temp gig, but we've gotten spoiled over the last half a year with my being home every day when she returns from work.  As terrible a househusband as I am, Tori loves playing the Hugh Beaumont to my Barbara Billingsley, knowing I'll be home, offering to whip up a hot cocoa or tea when she comes in from the cold.  So that part has been tough. 

So there you have it: a decent temp gig with a huge opportunity to reenter the workforce with far more computer experience, versus spending much less time with Tori during the week.  I'm sure we can come to a compromise: I'll still go to work, but I'll wear heels and pearls. 

The job

It's okay, I guess.  For the next several weeks, however, I will be denied the happy medium.  For seven months, I spent most of my waking time at home.  Starting Monday, I will leave for work at 8am, and be at home around 10:30pm.  I'll be a lab assistant from 9a-1:30p and 5:45-9:30p M-Th and 9a-1:30pm Fridays.  Since I work in Skokie, it would be a waste of time (and transit money) to go home for ninety minutes and then back to work, so I'll stay at work and busy myself with...stuff.  Like plucking my ear hair, listening to podcasts, teaching myself MS applications, etc.  In a word, this sucks, especially since the computers at Computer Systems Institute block Facebook (I found myself smiling when I noticed some of the students were using a MySpace unblocker page today while "working").  I'll cope, however. 

In less than three days I managed to teach myself MS Visio, and starting today I'm teaching myself MS Project to assist students with their assignments next week.  Note I had not the foggiest idea what these programs were four days ago.  Over the next few weeks I'll basically be paid to learn Quickbooks and Access, two programs very much in demand in the office environment.  In other words, if the worst happens and I'm not retained after the initial assignment, I'll walk out with a *lot* more on my resume than a mere two-line entry.

This also means, of course, my blog and lj will be quieter for the next couple of months.  All I can ask you guys to do is starting blogging more yourself.  We're all beginning to dry up: fewer posts, fewer comments - we can balance facebook and blogging, ya know.  Gimme something to read.  I *like* you folks: that's why I read your work.

I finally have a gig

My temp agency got me a gig.  It had been four months since I had first signed on, and I hadn't gotten a peep from them.  I'd check in every week, leaving a voice mail message saying I was available, and then I'd repeat the next week.  Eons passed.  Then on Wednesday, I got a call.  The Computer Systems Institute, a little corporate-run training school, was looking for a part-time instructor assistant for their classroom.  4-8 weeks, low pay, no problem.  I said sure. 

On Thursday morning I had a successful phone interview; that evening the in-person interview went similarly well.  I got the call this afternoon: I have myself a job.  I start Monday.  This afternoon, I picked up some computer texts, and I'll be spending a goodly amount of time this weekend poring through them.

There's some snags about the gig.  For one, I'll be assisting students in MS Office and Quickbooks.  I'm an ace in Excel and Word, but know only the rudiments of Powerpoint, almost nothing in Access, and I've never played with Quickbooks in my life.  Adding a tad bit of complication to this is that although Tori and I have MS Office on our computer, it doesn't include Access, and it's a newer edition than the software the school trains students on.  This shouldn't be a huge problem; the differences between the 2003 and 2007 editions are mostly visual.  But it is a bit of a pain.  Complicating the issue is that my temp agency has online MS Office and Quickbooks training, which I could take advantage of this weekend.  Version?  2000.  Another snag is schedule.  Although I only work weekdays from 9-1:30pm, that means my volunteering at Open Books is temporarily interrupted, since I work with them Thursday mornings.  However, they have a lot of programs I can get involved in, so I'll see what I can do for them. 

There's a lot of good things about the gig, too.  For one, it's a gig.  Over six months without a job was beginning to hit me hard.  I hadn't been looking for work as much as I had in previous months.  Knowing I have a job, even a temp job, is a huge relief.  And it provides evidence to me that I can present myself in an interview well.  I also get to improve my tutoring skills, which is nice.  Finally, the best part is the opportunity to sharpen my MS Office skills and learn Quickbooks, a mainstay at a lot of businesses.  If the worst-case scenario kicks in and it doesn't work out at the Institute, I still walk out of there with vastly improved computer skills.  It's a great opportunity. 

So I start Monday.  The irony, of course, is that Tori has the holiday off, so for the first time in a long, long time, she has the apartment to herself while I'm at work.  I just know she's going to celebrate by watching Maury.

Who's up for insomnia? I sure am!

I'm beginning to think I'm allergic to a regular sleep schedule.  After alternating days of three and thirteen hours of sleep, I've been taking melatonin the past four days, and the results: one night where I actually fell asleep and stayed asleep.  The first two nights I popped the 'tonin, knocked out, and woke up two hours later and could not fall back asleep.  Tonight has been a total loss, sleepwise.  And of course this is the first time in several days I need to wake up early, in this case 7:30am. 

I have a dental appointment in the morning, and after that I'll get my haircut, so I can look less caveman-like for my delightful job interview in the sticks on Thursday, a job I might actually have to turn down (depending on which position the company may offer me) because the idea of a 2 1/2 hour commute to work (yes, 2 1/2 hours just in one direction) could lead me to commit civil unrest after less than a week on the job.  Of those five hours, three would be on a bus.  The only time I've spent three hours of my day on a bus was taking the Peoria Charter from O'Hare back to college.  And that was far more tolerable because there were only three stops the entire way, and it was a far more scenic route than Golf Road from Evanston to Schaumburg.  Let's face it: once you've been to Schaumburg, the only reason to return is Ikea's Swedish meatballs. 

Bah.  It's pushing 2:30am.  Perhaps I should try passing out again.  Wish me luck.  Maybe tomorrow I'll walk to the CVS to see if there's any other knockout drops I could try.  I hear hemlock's a pretty good sleep aid.

An impatient man

There's something about waiting for word on a job that ups the suspense so much, you can't do anything else.  Everything stops.  Will the Reverend get a job?  Stay tuned. 

I was told last week, after my second interview, that I'd get word of whether I got the job...this week.  It's Thursday now, and I'm losing my mind.  I've hardly looked for work all week, haven't done many chores, ignored the cats...it's as if any movement, any sign of doing something, any lack of waiting, might prevent me from getting The Phone Call, or will somehow jinx the whole thing. 

This attitude, of course, is stupid.  Interview or no interview, job prospect or no, I should keep going.  There's no guarantee that an interview, even a second interview, will get me the gig.  Since I quit my Borders gig six months ago, I've had five interviews - all of which netted me zilch.  This fact, more than anything, should get me off my ass and throw myself back into looking for work, but somehow I can't quite do it. 

I'm not a waiting person.  I'm not a patient man.  I've never been able to sit still.  So why does waiting for a simple phone call stop me cold?  Why does waiting for a simple phone call or e-mail keep me in bed, or squidding on the computer, or dawdling around the apartment?  What the hell is wrong with me?

I just want to know.  That's all I ask.