Like many transplanted hopefuls, I moved to New York on a whim with little to no idea how I would afford to eat or live. I rolled up in a U-Haul full of naïveté and second-hand furniture with a (more or less worthless) media production degree and three continuous years of employment as a live audio-visual technician under my belt. I grew to despise that job and I was committed to moving away from the event production industry into something more closely related to my degree. I assumed that, given the sheer size of the city and its many indigenous industries, I’d have no trouble at all landing a job at the kind of place where the break room is stocked with craft beer, employees use exercise balls as office chairs, and 20-somethings with silly media degrees are valued commodities. Those stars in my eyes made it pretty hard to see just how ill-informed I was. Over the first two months, I spent more hours in a week searching for a job than most people spend actually doing theirs. I trudged through hundreds of listings, most of which I was cruelly under-qualified for, even at entry level. After at least 100 applications and only three fruitless interviews, I began to grow hopeless. The crushing reality of my mediocrity started setting in, along with the all too common fear that I might have to pack up and leave, or worse, call my parents. The vicious circle of “I can’t get a job because I don’t have the experience because I can’t get a job because I don’t have the experience…” began to grow tight around my neck, strangling my willpower and leading to many nights teetering on the edge of a panic attack. Having a mere bachelor’s degree made me commonplace, and with no restaurant experience, I didn’t even feel qualified enough to bus tables. All of my relevant work experience was in an industry that I’d hoped to get away from, and my attempts to spin it to apply to jobs, ones that don't have the potential to give me a second hernia, seemed to be failing.
Then, like a sketchy albatross come to guide my lost ship, I received an email in response to an application I’d submitted via Ol’ Reliable, aka Craigslist. It was a sales assistant job at a small audio-visual equipment rental company in Midtown at $12 an hour under the table. One quick interview later and I had the job. It wasn’t great, and I’d betrayed my own standard by crawling back to the A/V industry, but at least this time I had a desk instead of a box truck. (For privacy’s sake, the names of the company and its employees will be changed.) I was hired by Peter, a brusque, overweight Russian man who owned both the AV company (we’ll call it LRS) and the computer repair business with whom we shared an office. While Peter was the head honcho, I was to work directly with Ivan and two very different men both named Nikolai on the LRS team. As you may have gathered, I was the only person in this office that was not born in Russia, which created an immediate and inconvenient communication barrier. I can work with this, I thought. The inventory was small and limited, and each piece of equipment seemed to be the absolute cheapest available make and model. Still, I thought, I can work with this. Despite some reservations, I concluded that everything was on the level. I desperately needed the money, and two days after the interview I got started.
My desk shared a wall with my boss, Ivan, a short, tan man in his early thirties who practically bathed in Bod Man cologne and was constantly, inexplicably sweaty. Ivan liked to duck out to the hidden balcony in the fire exit to smoke weed two or three times a day and, judging by the fact that his pupils went through more phases than the moon, also had a nagging cocaine habit. Ivan often arrived late and always in tow was a Chihuahua named Wally, usually dressed in a tiny blue turtleneck sweater. Wally basically lived under Ivan’s desk, often spending the night there alone with a bowl of shredded deli ham and a pee pad. Wally had a fun habit of barking at supersonic frequencies at absolutely anyone who entered the office. He only understood commands in Russian and never listened to a thing I said. Across the room from Ivan and I were the two Nikolais. Nikolai #1 was a part-time accountant in his forties with graying hair and a palpable impatience for everyone and everything in the office. I never once saw him smile. Nikolai #2 was 19 and had been living and working in the U.S. illegally for about two months. He spoke almost no English aside from the sentence or two that it took to offer me one of the half-dozen oatmeal cookies he ate for breakfast every day. They told me his job was to edit and update the website which, considering that everything on there was written in Google Translate English, seemed counterproductive.
My job entailed making and receiving calls from potential customers, figuring out which pieces of gear they’d need for their event based on their budget and needs, and forwarding that information to Ivan and the two technicians. At least, that’s what the Craigslist ad said. Within my first two weeks, both technicians were fired. Not for being constantly high while driving the company van around the city on deliveries as they liked to do, but laziness, paired with Peter’s thinly veiled racism. Peter’s logic was that since I have experience with being a tech for larger scale events, I could take on their responsibilities and do it better. No problem, he said. Maybe not for him, but for me, there certainly was a problem. Two weeks in, I was doing the job of three people while also picking up the slack from Ivan. He and Peter were lifelong friends, and it was crystal clear from the start that this was the only reason Ivan was allowed to work there. As one might expect when two friends attempt to run a business together, there were arguments. As one might not expect, these arguments occurred daily within three feet of my desk, in Russian, and at a volume I’d conservatively refer to as full-tilt yelling. It's never a good feeling to hear your name dropped in an argument conducted in a language you don't know. These fights happened because Ivan was not very good at his job, which was essentially the same as mine except he brought a certain sidewalk salesman style of wheeling-and-dealing to the table. He once told me that if a client sounded rich on the phone, I should give them higher prices so we could get more money from them. For the record, I did not obey this request.
Over the eight weeks that I worked for LRS, my albatross metamorphosed from a sign of good fortune into a bad omen. It became more and more apparent that Ivan and Peter did not know how to properly run an equipment rental business. Thankfully by this time they hired a new technician, but he was placed under my supervision. I was still an assistant at $12 an hour, and now on top of everything else I had an employee twice my age to manage. That was only half of the problem. Nearly everything in our inventory was in some stage of disrepair, and the way around this was usually with both a figurative and literal duct tape solution. Not wanting to return to application purgatory, I continued to need their money as bad as they did. Nikolai #1 indicated in no uncertain terms that the business was losing money fast. The long term solution would be to invest in more and better gear to bring up the price and quality of our services, but I had to fight just for Peter to replace broken mic cables. Their solution was to take absolutely any job they possibly could, double-booking and stretching us so thin that in several instances, we actually had no way to provide the equipment that people had reserved on the day they needed it. Desperate trips to B&H Photo were made, deposits were returned, and angry calls were placed to yours truly. Ivan actively avoided answering the phone.
The last merciful straw came on a Tuesday. Ivan was late, but had apparently dropped Wally off earlier that morning. When he finally did show up around noon, he was accompanied by a pretty but confused looking Puerto Rican woman. I asked Ivan who she was, and he explained that she was a friend’s cousin and he wanted her to meet Wally, information he delivered with a creepy wink. Considering that she spoke absolutely no English or Russian, and he no Spanish, I strained to figure out exactly how that conversation went down. Before I could reach a conclusion, Ivan and the girl were gone. For the next five hours, Ivan was incommunicado. Work began to pile up and I had a hundred questions that needed answering. 45 minutes before the end of the work day they returned, disheveled and clearly strung out. I later learned that she indeed was somebody’s cousin, but she was also a prostitute. He’d brought her upstairs to meet the dog as some sort of half-baked cover so Peter wouldn’t suspect anything when he went AWOL. The logic there is still lost on me. Their day had been spent in a nearby hotel doing coke and having gross sex. My brain cramped trying to wrap itself around this graduate-level class in irresponsibility, and the next day I put in my two weeks’ notice. I did not serve those two weeks because by some fortunate twist of fate, I was quickly rescued by a fantastic job offer elsewhere. Peter tried to convince me to stay, saying he’d pay me more than the other offer plus benefits. I declined because not only did I have no interest in being a part of their side show, I had seen Nikolai #1’s numbers. I knew they could not afford to keep me, let alone give me an absurdly steep raise. Like a rat on a sinking galleon, I abandoned ship, and to this day I have no idea if or how they managed to stay afloat.
New York is a difficult place for the directionless, and putting down roots can be like trying to plant roses in a parking lot. Your first job here has a significant chance of being terrible as you seek your place, either in this city or in this life. You may get discouraged and frustrated. You may feel like moving here was a mistake, and that you only amount to one of the many anonymous job applications that are thrown away before they’re read. You may think you’ll never get where you want to go with your career and it will tie your stomach in knots. But not getting that dream job right away is never the end. I learned that here, you are not your work. Don't be afraid to take that crappy job to pay the rent. Be a starving artist. Muster the courage to go up at that open mic. Take a class. Make an account on Meetup.com and follow through. Talk to a stranger at a bar. Reply to a Craigslist personal for Pete's sake if that’s what you’re into. If ever there was a place on earth to have no idea what the hell you want to do with yourself, New York is it. Stick with it. You may wind up on a path you never expected to find yourself on, and it may be the best thing that ever happened to you. At the very least, you’ll have a story to tell.
