Artwork by Viv Le
Welcome to Anonymous Job Confessions where writers peel back the curtain from their day jobs. This is a space for talking about bad (or misguided) bosses, cringeworthy clients or customers, out of touch board members and more. We’re speaking on work crushes, failure, pettiness, success against all odds (and also redefining success because we’re queer and we can do that), doing something not because you are passionate about it but because groceries don’t buy themselves and all things surviving in late-stage capitalism. Honestly, if there’s a perfect thing to read when you’re on your break, this might be it.
Until 2020, I had never been at a full-time job for longer than one year. I’m a Sagittarius with a Virgo rising, which means I get bored quickly, while also holding high ambitions of climbing some job ladder that exists in my mind. I have now been in the industry that I intend to work in forever (if they’ll let me) since 2017, but 2019 was the first time I planned to stay in any single job for the long haul. On the way to that job, I’ve had many side quests into various jobs, with a special few that only lasted long enough to get oriented before leaving again!
American Eagle (July 2011)
This was my very first job! I had applied for a bunch of retail jobs my senior year of high school, for gas money and going out cash. I worked there for one week before I got a job offer at a smaller boutique that paid better and offered more hours. I spent my three shifts there untangling the necklace display and hearing “Call Your Girlfriend” piped over the PA system about three times every hour.
University Call Center (September 2012)
Enticed by the bonus structure and the opportunity to be promoted to shift lead in like, two weeks, I signed up for a job at the call center my first few weeks of freshman year. I quickly realized the reason that you could be promoted so quickly is because so few people stuck around. There’s only so much being sent to voicemail an impressionable 18-year-old can take. I think I just never signed up for new shifts, quiet quitting before that was the topic du jour!
Abercrombie Corporate Headquarters – Merchandising (October 2016)
This one is a doozy. My theater degree didn’t exactly lend itself to knowing what I wanted to do after graduation, and everyone seemed to suddenly hold lifelong dreams of becoming a consultant. I applied for a merchandising role at Abercrombie and Fitch, and after a few video interviews and a sell weekend at their headquarters, I was all set to head to Columbus, OH after graduation. It was kind of a dream come true for a girl who’d been far too poor growing up to afford A&F tees, even from resale stores.
The first six weeks were eight hour days of listening to orientation presentations. To this day, I maintain that’s an incredibly uninspired and ineffective way to train a cohort of people fresh out of college. I also didn’t know yet that I had ADHD, but I did, and because I found this “training” patronizing, I slept through a lot of it.
On my third day, I woke up an hour late, in my apartment which was an hour away from the office. I drove in anyway, calling my HR manager on the way in. When I arrived, she told me she thought it was best “for the team” if I didn’t go to orientation that day. I was confused, because it meant missing even more of the training than I already had (which was just the first planned session of the day), but I did as I was told.
The next day I was back for another absolutely boring day and yes, I DID fall asleep! At the end of the day, my HR manager asked to talk, and I knew what was coming. It’s the only job I’ve ever been fired from, but it (in combination with having attended Midwest A-Camp in 2016) also spurred me to move to LA, which would eventually lead me to the career I’ve now built for myself!
I do have to stop myself from rolling my eyes every time someone on Twitter tweets about how trendy Abercrombie & Fitch is, now (but I also do still have some clothes bought for the interview that I wear frequently, unfortunately).
TMZ – Show Production Assistant (November 2016)
After I got fired from A&F, I turned my attention toward moving to LA, even if only temporarily. Did I still have a lease on an apartment in Ohio? Yes! Did I have only one paycheck to my name and a load of credit card debt from moving across the country? Sure did! But I’d just spent a few days at A-Camp listening to comedians like B Nichols perform and thinking, “some day when I’m done at A&F I will move to LA.” Well, the day had just come a bit sooner!
I did a video interview to get hired at TMZ, and the only thing I remember from the interview was being shown photos of celebrities and having to say who they were. I aced it, even adding details about recent celeb gossip when relevant. The only person I couldn’t name was Iman Shupert, but when told he was married to Teyana Taylor, I gushed about how much I’d loved her recent music video – which I feel earned me a few points back.
The crazy thing about TMZ is that they really do film it right in the center of the office, it’s not a set. My main responsibilities for the time I worked there were cleaning the snack cabinet, and restocking all the beverage fridges. If you proved you could be trusted with that, you could get the opportunity to stock Harvey Levin’s fridge! He had a very specific number of cans of each beverage that had to be in his fridge at all times.
Fred Segal – Sales Associate (November 2016)
TMZ wasn’t a regular enough schedule for me, and so I continued to apply for jobs in LA. With my high school boutique experience, I was able to get a job at Fred Segal on Melrose (yes, the place that Cher’s missing blouse in Clueless is from). This was a standard retail job, but with clothes running upwards of triple digits. Once I realized most girls made their commissions off regular clients who would come in and drop thousands of dollars in one go, I knew I had to look elsewhere. I wasn’t ready to commit to that type of investment.
Production Company – Assistant (September 2018)
Eventually, after Fred Segal, I got a job at a talent agency which led to a job at a TV studio, which I LOVED. I’d been working there about a year with no promotion in sight, and I was ready for a change. When I got the opportunity to interview for a president at a high-end production company, I jumped at the chance. My closest work mentor at the time advised against it, telling me that it was better to stay at the studio where I was still learning and growing, and becoming an integral part of the team, even though I was working for lower level executives there. Thinking I knew better, I took the production company job against her advice.
I always joke that having an assistant for too many years of your life rots your brain a little bit. How can it not? With total access to someone whose job it is to do literally anything they ask, execs (especially higher-level and longtime execs) lose sight of what is a reasonable request, how to react when (impossible) expectations aren’t met, and honestly just basic human tone when asking for something. The production company executive was no different, which was a bummer because I really did like her…when we were talking about anything other than work. But I was there to talk to her literally about work, all day everyday, and I was honestly pretty immediately overwhelmed by learning the ins and outs of such a particular and important person.
Quickly, I started to feel incredibly anxious about work. I remember one morning, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic through West Hollywood, thinking “how minor of a car accident could I get into and still get off work for a few days?” Another day, I spent the morning puking in my bathroom because I was so anxious about work. She didn’t yell at me once, but there were enough off-handed comments (“urgency doesn’t seem to be a priority in my office at the moment” she had said on the phone to the head of a major TV network, while I was listening to the call) and enough disappointed sighs that I could feel it building, hanging over me in an ever-growing cloud.
I knew it was time to leave when she asked me to upgrade her flight from economy to business using her miles, on an oversold flight from New York to LA. I spent all day on the phone with the airline trying to guarantee an upgrade but there was no way to do it. She was waitlisted. The next day she got the check-in link emailed to her and texted me “Why am I getting the option to check in to row 39.” This kicked off two hours of texts back and forth about how I had messed up this flight (I couldn’t have done anything differently), how she wasn’t going to fly economy after weeks in New York (we could have booked a first class ticket in the first place!), and how you would never fly United out of JFK because Newark is the United hub (…unfortunately this knowledge has come in handy while booking travel for other bosses since). I cried on the staircase in the office. Another assistant in the department who was also looking for a new job (and, critically, a new boss) consoled me.
The next week I went into the exec’s office and told her that I’d be happy to stick it out for as long as she wanted, but ultimately I didn’t feel the job was a good fit for me. This was not even a lie, as I’d also realized in this short time frame that I actually did want to work at a studio, namely the one I had just left. She asked me to be on her desk for another week. I received a final paycheck, and I left relatively gracefully. She later reached out to me to report that my new boss had called her for a reference, that she’d only had nice things to say, and she was happy that I was doing well.
Television Studio – Temp Assistant (November 2019)
After leaving the production company, I had no job and no leads on next steps. It’s pretty standard to stay at assistant jobs for at least a year, and I had just started at the production company! Luckily, the studio I had worked at before was hiring a new assistant in a different department. The catch was that for the time being, it was being paid as a temp role, with no benefits or vacation time. Thinking that it would eventually become a full-time role, I took it, but kept interviewing for other roles in the meantime. I eventually got offered a full-time job at a different network, and when I accepted, the exec I had been working for at the studio (let’s call him Jeremy) was furious. When I told Jeremy that I had taken another job, working for a head of a department, in the department I hoped to someday be an exec in, for a full-time role, I expected that he would begrudgingly understand. Instead, he asked what it would take to get me to stay, and when I told him my decision was final, he said that I’d have to explain it to two more executives: his boss and his boss’s boss.
I sat with his boss first, a woman who hadn’t liked me since 2017 when I’d accidentally left her off a meeting invite (I hadn’t been told she was joining!). She told me that she was disappointed in my leaving, because she felt I had real potential and could leave my mark on the department. (I had worked there about two weeks, and mostly all I’d done so far was the daily New York Times crossword). She even offered to pay me more, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to match the offer I’d received. I sat around all day waiting to be called into the head of the department’s office for a similar conversation, though hilariously once I told him what job I’d been offered he basically said “Oh, I understand completely. We’re sorry to see you go. Good luck!”
Over a year later, I began working for a chairman at the company that Jeremy worked at. I had been contacted by HR directly to apply for the job, and it was a guaranteed fast-track to promotion. It was like being asked to interview for Miranda Priestly’s desk, except the chairman was actually, wildly, nice. I heard that Jeremy was again furious, saying “Well great, just my luck that someday we’ll all be working for her.”
I worked at American Eagle too!
I technically worked at Aerie, the bra and underwear side. the corporate surveillance at A&E is so cloying and stressful. This was how A&E worked in 2013 when I worked there:
1. Before your shift you have a “pregame” (their word) with the manager where you write down your sales goals (for the day) on a little pink card, including # of bras, # memberships and # of CREDIT CARDS (more on that later) pushed on customers.
2. When your shift ends, you have an “afterparty” (also their word) where you write down on the other half of the card what you actually sold. Then you had to give yourself a grade for the shift, to the manager’s face, based on what you sold.
3. They CONSTANTLY pushed credit cards on customers. I remember being instructed that people who didn’t speak English well or older people would be great targets for the credit card scheme. They told us to tell people opening the card wouldn’t affect your credit (which, they clarified, was a lie, but it was “only a little ding”).
In the 6 months that I worked there I never once “sold” a credit card, but I did see countless strangers’ boobs and have some surreal overnight shifts restocking the entire floor and cutting up perfectly good bras and underwear that were returned.
HAHXCUSE WHAT?!! I learned today that A&E is wildly more evil than I knew. Sad angry face.
^hahxcuse ME what
Love this new column!
Love this column! If you ever do an open thread version, I have a few choice jobs I could write about.
I also worked at a university call center, calling alums to ask for donations. I made it through one semester, but knew I had to quit once I started having anxiety attacks two hours before my shift.