Job-Hunting at a Professional Level.

A question on the Coffee Bean employment application: “What makes you simply the best?”

My answer: “The ability to determine that this is the vaguest question in the world. Also, I can fly.”

I’m currently unemployed.

So goes the recession. I’ve been trying to drag myself out of the 10% unemployment rate in Los Angeles for a while, now. At first, I was looking to find employment in my field—on a TV show, ideally. Preferably in the writers’ room, working as a writer’s assistant. (For those who care, yes, those apostrophe placements are apparently accurate. I’m not sure why it works that way.)

In Hollywood, a writer’s assistant job is the Holy Grail for us aspiring TV writers. You’re a secretary, basically. You sit in the writers’ room and take notes. It has the disadvantage of, well, having to sit and take notes all day. But the advantage is hobnobbing with the writers. And maybe accidentally sneaking a joke or two of yours in there. And maybe the writers try to figure out where it came from, and maybe you say it was yours, and then maybe they hire you on full time. And then you become the showrunner, maybe, and then maybe Lifetime makes a movie about you and the breakneck speed with which you conquered Hollywood.

So there can be pros and cons. Unfortunately, those jobs aren’t only incredibly rare; they’re stab-your-neighbor competitive. I was barely able to find any job openings, let alone get an interview.

So I expanded my search to your typical Hollywood job. You know the classic image of a lowly assistant fetching coffee for his boss? I’d love one of those jobs. Answering phones, making coffee, organizing the file cabinet and so forth. Simple stuff, but in Hollywood, assistants are like stem cells—they can become anything. Lots of (basically every) producer, writer and director started as an assistant. And so, once again, these jobs are highly competitive. 

But I didn’t have any luck there, so I started looking at unpaid internships. Unpaid internships are the unpaid internships of Hollywood. You’re basically the same thing as an assistant, except with less responsibilities and no money. They are—you guessed it!— extremely competitive. There can be hundreds of applicants for the same non-paying job.

Now, I’ve gotten a few of these internships along the way. Each has been a great learning experience, but it turns out my landlord still wants rent every month. So I moved on to the Big Box stores. Target, Best Buy, Starbucks, Coffee Bean, etc.

The problem with applying to these places is that they make you fill out a long, boring questionnaire that’s designed to filter out the riff-raff. All the questions basically boil down to “will you steal from us?” but phrased in different ways. For example:

“While at work, you hear a fellow employee speaking disparagingly of your manager. This behavior:

a)     Is to be expected.

b)    Should be discouraged.

c)     Is a good opportunity to bond with your co-workers.

d)    Occurs in the workplace.

And so forth. There’s rarely a good answer, and I’m notoriously bad at these tests anyway. (The technical term is “red-flagged. Guess how I know that.)

The next step, unfortunately, is finding creative ways to make money. Thinking “out-of-the-box” in “new, creative ways.” Unfortunately, the only sort of ideas I seem to be able to come up with are “moderately illegal” and may land me in jail for “insurance fraud” and other “miscellaneous illegalities.”

I'd like avoid that. So, uh…let me know if you hear of any jobs, will ya?