Cogs

Early into the semester, I needed money. There was always the option to pay for rent with an increasing number of loans, but that would just be money that I would need to pay back later. At some point or another, I would need money to function, so I wanted to earn some sooner rather than expect to find some later.

It’s been an arduous application season. Nearly forty sent out on Indeed, over a dozen campus jobs, and several internships and gig jobs here and there over the course of a month. Perhaps it was just my own expectations on the timetable for finding work in a city as opportunistic as DC, or maybe it was the number of job postings where I could check off every single bulleted qualification, only for the listing to go silent or come back with another “try again” game over screen. Then again, I might just be impatient.

Either way, I managed to line up a week with three interviews, beating the biweekly average of half an interview. I hoped I would walk away with one part time job so I’d be covering rent and give my dwindling savings, that received a necessary buffer from the hopefully impending loan forgiveness, a break. The first one went well; I had a good back and forth rapport with the interviewer, and we tentatively talked about my scheduling. No dice. The other candidate they interviewed had more availability. The second interview, the next day, was also very pleasant. Though it didn’t fit as comfortably into my prior experience, it gave me the opportunity to work with children in underprivileged areas. I could give them something to do to keep them away from other places they shouldn’t be, teach them something, maybe. I’m cynical enough to understand that work like this is only a pale of water out of a leaking boat, but that isn’t to say it still can’t be something inherently good.

Rather, I’ve always thought about pursuing a career in education, it’s my second favorite plan after being rich and famous, and this would be my closest opportunity to do so beyond tutoring someone’s research paper as an undergraduate that I haven’t even done in over two years now. Just as I was conducting my interview over my computer, my roommate left for his first day at a nonprofit group, which only furthered my own stress in not yet finding something for myself since he had done it so quickly and seamlessly. They said they’d get back to me from the second interview.

Rent was a week away. I took an Uber to my third interview of the week, not wanting to show up to the last hope of the week in sweaty dress clothes, despite the hole it continued to burn in my wallet. It was a tutoring company in a normal office building. I entered after pacing around a side that didn’t have windows to psych myself out. After waiting for the receptionist to finish her call, I told her I was here for the interview. I was directed to a private room, tiny with a gray and beige tint, where I took the writing and reading portions of the SAT. I knew ahead of time that there was a “diagnostic test” I was supposed to run through, but I didn’t think it would actually be an entire half of a test I hadn’t taken in over four years.

I know this word gets thrown around a lot from people that actually know what it means, but the whole scenario felt very Kafkaesque in my moments of mind wandering test fatigue. It was the sense of the absurdity of a larger system that exists to perpetuate itself with me in it. Here I was taking a test that I had already done several years ago to get a good score to get into a good college to graduate with credentials to get a job to prove myself qualified for the job by taking the same test I had at the start to teach to other students to get a good score. In short, the value of the test was in the test itself to be traded like a currency. What only added to it, in my five by ten foot color deprived room, with the metal flap of an air conditioner clinging against the wall until I finally closed it, were the little bits of a sense of humanity, of other people, which is what attracted me to the tutoring job in the first place. There were scribbles left from students in pens along the bumpy wall like cave paintings. There were all the usual hallmarks.

“No bueno,” said one, the ink fading.

“So bored,” said another, smudged against several other messages.

“You can do it!” It had a gently drawn smiley face next to it.

And then there was, “Ping pong bangin' ur mom,” which was not only the most legible of all the other messages but also clearly the biggest centerpiece of them all.

The only nuggets of human individuality in the room were almost hidden behind the large, gray box desk, and one of those nuggets that peaked out was from a middle schooler claiming not just to have slept with my mother, but every person’s mother that had ever been in that room. I had to chuckle at it as I checked my watch again during the last formulaic section of test.

That being said, this isn’t a novel, and the reality of a situation overtakes a self-perceived theme once you can get out of your own head. I finished the test and waited in the much nicer lobby, walls lined with achievements of past students, for five minutes or so for my interviewer to be ready. She was very nice. We had another pleasant conversation about my experiences and some of her own on how she got to the position at the company. She said she wanted me to have the job and that I’d have an offer letter emailed to me soon. We shook hands, she kindly showed me the exit, and I got into the metro after fiddling around with Google Maps. Reading the letter, the pay was higher than I expected, nearly fifty percent higher than the last two jobs I 4 interviewed for. After crunching the numbers I realized I could completely cover rent with just part time work while my college stipends would cover food. Then, at home that night, the second job of the week I had interviewed for got back to me. I got it. The email wanted to clarify the schedule we wanted to balance with my classes, which would only allow me to work two full days. The pay would not have covered rent. Yet, I found myself in a predicament. Pay or passion? It wasn’t completely clear cut. I had an interest in both, and on paper the tutoring job was what I’d usually prefer, being much closer to my skill set, but I thought of Kafka when I was in their building. That’s never a good sign, but money has no moral, philosophical alignment. I still need it.

My roommate came home while I was sitting on the living room bean bag, the centerpiece of our furniture. I talked to him about it.

“I mean, how ungrateful do I sound? I’m complaining about having two job offers,” I said at the end of my spiel.

“Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. You’re a cog in the machine, but they’re gonna take the tests with or without you, and you are still helping them to do better. It’s kinda how I feel about my job,” he said, sitting on the smaller bean bag we had in the living room, the only other thing to sit on.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

My roommate had gotten a job going door to door, asking people to donate to well meaning causes. What neither of us had realized when he had taken the job was how he was going to be taught to do so as a salesman. Not the best plan for a guy that listens to old union work songs in his room…for fun. This is not completely unexpected since he’s literally going door to door with a pitch to give, but the extent of it was absurd. Single time donations 5 aren’t accepted. They want a reliable revenue stream. Cash isn’t allowed for the same reason. Some of his coworkers had joked about taking those offers as tips. Employees are told to ask for donations to be through specific credit cards once they’ve hooked someone since certain providers are statistically more likely to remain as donors. If someone is willing to donate something, but they don’t meet all the qualifications I’ve listed, employees are expected to steer them towards them anyways. They have a script and weekly quota. Turnover rates are high.

Then again, it’s not like we’re working for sweatshops. Quite the contrary. Despite the pressure my roommate receives to get all his signatures, his supervisors have still offered to go out for drinks and smoke behind the building. They have their own bosses, too. For every hostile homeowner, there’s some pleasant conversation he has down the street eventually on someone’s porch, donation or not. As I complete my tutor training, the methods they teach are not completely dissimilar from the lessons in my teaching composition class. Teach how to understand concepts, not how to solve problems. Vary methods of speaking and instructing the student. Try to get them to think about their own thinking. Why did they come to their answer? And at the end of both our jobs is at least the clear intention to help other people. It’s just that not everyone has a Discover card, and the SAT’s are slowly being phased out after years of criticism. Like my upcoming lessons on textual analysis or my roommates' sparsely intimate moments he has when talking to someone, the human elements always peek through, even if they’re scrawled against a wall.

In high school, I had some excellent teachers that could go blow for blow with any of the professors I’ve had. One of them was my AP European History in tenth grade. There was no illusion she was preparing us for the test, the first and only AP exam students my grade were able to take at the time. Yet, she, and the material she brought, were amazing. She imbued in me plenty of knowledge about the subject and an understanding of how the world works on a larger scale that I still carry with me to this day. I got the highest score possible on the test which, in turn, got me out of a gen-ed course in college, a necessity in helping me finish undergraduate in only three years. She taught me how to write very quickly and efficiently to get me to do well on the paid exam to submit my score on an expensive application to a college that I finished early to get to go to another college that pays me for the opportunity to talk about how I got here. And I really am grateful for it. I got a job now.

Written by: Bryce Thompson