Those of you who are regular visitors to this page know how I feel about My Life in the Factory of Boxes, my future there, or lack thereof, but because I don’t want to be unfair, I should at least acknowledge that while Funky Little Company (a division of LuthorCorp) and I may not have a future, we do have a past, and I can’t say I’m not grateful for it.
To those of you who read last night’s mini-rant and wondered, 11 years in packaging? why, Jen, why?, the answer is pretty banal. Once upon a time I had a job in publishing, at a startup children’s nonfiction house. I worked as the sales assistant and events coordinator, trying to get our books into schools and libraries that had no interest in talking to us. My boss insisted that within five years we would be as big as Random House; to this day, I regret not asking him just how long he thought it took for Random House to become Random House. I went into this job thinking that I had finally found my entry point into the work I wanted to do for the rest of my life; I left after four months, fed up with the chaos that comes from no one having the slightest idea what they were doing. The week before I gave my notice, I signed up with a temp agency. The Monday after my last day at the publishing company, I was sitting in the lobby of my agency, a standby temp, waiting for an assignment. I sat there for a week, then was assigned to a three-week position as a receptionist at a Red Cross-run emergency shelter for homeless families, located in what I would still argue is the most dangerous neighborhood in New York City. I sat at that ugly green desk in that ugly green building every day, my mind reeling at the circumstances in which these families found themselves. At the end of that assignment, I found myself in a series of faceless midtown offices, doing mindless data entry, bored senseless but thankful to not have to work the Red Cross switchboard anymore. One day, I went into the agency for standby, and was asked if I wanted to go work in the purchasing department at a cosmetics company for a week. The week turned into two weeks, which turned into three months, which turned into a permanent position that lasted for five years, when I left to go to culinary school. I thought that would be the last I would see of the packaging industry, but within three months of graduation I was back, having discovered that entry-level restaurant work would not begin to cover the rent, not even with Lloyd’s salary. I was hired by Funky Little Company, a supplier of Cosmetics Company, as the executive assistant to the vice president of sales, who, before his promotion, used to sell cartons to me and my boss at Cosmetics Company. This sales vp is now my current boss’s boss, and I know that it is partly thanks to him that I was able to go study eggs in Arkansas for a month. I am thankful that I was lucky enough to work for this guy for as long as I have, and I will be forever grateful to him for helping me when I was in a tough spot, but it is still time for me to quit cutting bait and start fishing.
For as long as we have been alive, both apart and together, Lloyd and I have been writers, poor and unpublished writers, but writers nonetheless. This meant that as part of our established courtship rituals (which is a coy way of saying we shacked up within weeks of meeting each other), we would go to work all day, then come home and write, side by side. We still do this, but the nature of the work has changed a lot. Lloyd and I met at work. In 1990, we went to work at Now-Defunct Book Division of Now-Ailing West-Coast-Based Record Store Chain. In the summer of 1991, I moved from Book Division’s New York store to the new store they were opening in Philadelphia, on South Street, where I would be the children’s book buyer as well as a floor supervisor and the store manager’s administrative assistant. In the spring of 1992, Lloyd moved from Book Division’s Bellevue, Washington store to the Philadelphia store to take over shipping and receiving. Lloyd had a plan: he had worked in fulfillment at a small publishing company in Seattle, followed by a wholesaler outside of the city. He wanted to sell books, first for Book Division, then, eventually, hopefully, for his own store. Now, of course, the bookselling landscape has changed: Book Division is gone, the independent landscape is shrinking, starting up a new shop is expensive, going to work in someone else’s shop probably won’t pay enough to keep you in rent. Now Lloyd works in a completely different industry, one into which he fell via temping, where he fights the good fight, comes home and rants for a bit, then settles down with quiet good cheer to write. Given the choice, I know he’d rather be selling books, but I also know that he appreciates the regular paycheck, too, and that he doesn’t miss the panic we used to feel about whether we could make our expenses in a given month.
Unlike Lloyd, I didn’t have a plan. Or rather, I did, but somehow the plan stood dazed and dumb by the side of the road while Circumstance blew by it, much in the way that Wile E. Coyote looks discombobulated when the Roadrunner passes him. Once I figured out that the glamorous life of a freelance writer would not pay enough to keep me in boxed macaroni and cheese, I decided that I would take the path of thousands of wiggy bookworms who preceded me, and would head directly to grad school, where I would get my masters by the time I was 22, my Ph.D. by the time I was 25, and I would spend the rest of my career either molding eager young minds at a small school like the one from which I graduated (and from which I would receive a wage only slightly better than that of a McDonald’s cashier), or attempting to mold apathetic young minds who were only taking my class because they were stuck with me at a big faceless state school. Too bad that I was so keen on not venturing too far from home, because Princeton (which I knew would be a stretch), NYU, Fordham, Tulane and UVA all said thanks but no thanks. I decided to work for a year after college, and try again. I ended up at the newspaper in the town where I grew up, a newspaper of which I made cruel and relentless fun while I was growing up, a newspaper that paid me back for my smart mouth by sending me to county commissioners’ meetings and township supervisors’ meetings and craft fairs and Chamber of Commerce dinners and donkey basketball games and the Wayne County Fair, where I took pictures of award-winning pickles and pigs so big you would swear that they were weaned on Miracle Gro. I lasted for about a year, until I became one of the 15 people on this little paper fired by the editor-in-chief, who would be fired himself the following year. Because I had to prove I was looking for work to collect unemployment, I would go through the New York Times’ Help Wanted section and send letters for the most fascinating, unlikely jobs I could find. I know my dad’s heart nearly stopped when I told him that the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama was looking for researchers.
“Aren’t these the people who fight the Klan?” said Dad.
“Dad, they do good work for the betterment of society.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “Can you do good work for the betterment of society without worrying about your office being bombed?”
I promised him I would try to find work where the odds of bombing would be fairly low. I ended up in the special sales department of Viking Penguin in the summer of 1989, nearly five months after Viking published The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, four months after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa on Rushdie. Sorry, Dad.