I wanted a job and then I found a job

Listen I could be MORE miserable for sure

I got a job about two months ago. I sell candles now. I also teach people how to make candles, which is actually the bulk of the job. I spend eight hours a day most days of the week smelling fragrances that people are blending and telling them if they are good or not. I know nothing about perfume. I ask people often “but how do you feel about it?” so in some ways perhaps the job would be more accurately called “candle therapist.”

The job is fine. A lot of the time it’s fun, even—in its way. I do a lot of dates, and those are nice. People who enjoy each others company having a nice time together. I work on my tight five: fragrance comedy. I smile a lot, which is deeply unnatural to me. My coworkers think that my mannerisms are funny and somewhat charming, I have resisted the urge to say that the things they find noteworthy about me are the things that have made multiple autistic people ask me “are you autistic?” It doesn’t really matter either way. Customers tell me that I am personable.

I have spent a lot of time in my life observing behaviors and trying to memorize rules. When I was in Japan I remember discussing with Noah that the level of service in retail (nice stores, not like, uniqlo, just to be clear) was extraordinarily high—you felt like you ought to buy something because of the effort that was put into making you feel attended to. I felt, at all times, that if I had a question it would be answered. My needs would be intuited. Someone would always be clearly yet unobtrusively straightening anything that was out of place. So I decided on my first day that I would do my best to emulate the behavior of the staff in medium to high end Japanese retail.

And so I decided to play a part, while I am selling candles. I am the king of candle sales. I am serious and efficient, but always slightly smiling when I am on the sales floor. I would be delighted to take a picture of you and your girlfriend. I can offer my wisdom about how to improve the smell of your candle. I can say, without bragging, that I am incredibly good at my job. I got promoted to assistant manager within a month.

So I am tired. Smiling is deeply unnatural to me: my default has always been a somewhat blank face. But my coworkers think that I am relentlessly positive, so I have convincingly tricked them. When I walk out the door after I close it is such a relief to be able to not smile at anyone. I have started sending voice notes to people because once I leave work there is something comforting about being able to speak in my usual cadence (or lack of cadence.)

In addition to the obvious vast indignities (I was told by my boss that it was “sort of unfair” to ask for hazard pay to scrub human shit off the wall) the smaller ones are what build up. My weekend is Monday and Tuesday, my boss said that there was no way my manager and I would ever get a weekend day off. So it creates distance between me and the people who are still on the sort of trajectory that I thought I was on before my layoff disrupted my life. I was supposed to be in an office, doing a pointless email job.

I have a real job now. Every day I help people create actual tangible items that they take home. I entertain. I assist. I am always sure to point in a fluid gesture, using at least a few fingers (palm facing upwards, of course), lest someone see me pointing, a thing which is supposedly rude. People ask me weird questions about hormone disruptors in candles, while carrying a drink from the barbeque place across the street and I do not say “if you are worried about your health start with that.” In the moment, I barely even think it. The thought comes to me later, as I am locking the warehouse door behind me and I am, once again, a full human being.

How long can I subsume myself into the job? It was an interesting experiment that I began when I thought I had an offer of a clerical role coming, but now I am living my life as the king of candles. My boss asked me the other day if I wanted to go live upstate (in her house) over the summer to sell candles. I told her that I could not live with her, which she thought was funny. My boss is the sort of person who starts businesses. This makes sense, because she has done that, but it takes a specific personality to found something. I am not a founder, and in fact have a deep distrust of most founders. But she is a founder, so deeply accustomed to impressing people with the sheer force of her personality and charisma that she cannot imagine not getting her way.

Her staff are terrified of her. The warehouse staff are all pretending they know much less English than they do so that she doesn’t speak to them. She watches the retail staff on the cameras and texts the manager to cut the hours of people who aren’t selling hard enough. Her 7 year old daughter was playing with her friend and told her “I know you lied to me, I watched you on the camera.” I wanted to tell her, this isn’t how you treat your friends, but I don’t live with the CEO of candles. I was just sick for two weeks straight (one cold, then a day of norovirus from scrubbing human shit off the wall, then another cold) and it wasn’t until the 12th day of sickness that I texted my manager that I was sorry but I couldn’t do it anymore, I needed to take a sick day. I slept for an entire day and the next day tried to go to work. I made it through an hour before my manager sent me home, but not before I begged her not to let the founder cut my hours.

Customers love her. The founder loves making deals with individual customers who are on the sales floor. She’ll offer someone a discount just for talking to her long enough, which people are delighted to do. She’s incredibly charming. She reminded me, immediately, of my first boss in the city, which was how I knew that this job could never last more than a few months. Ron was a delusional sort of man who was running a failing grilled cheese restaurant in Prospect Heights, stealing power from the restaurant next door via an extension cord (yes it did catch on fire, and he fired the electrician who told him that it was because he was stealing power). Ron told me that the restaurant was his start up, and I thought he was insane, but I was a customer first, before I started working there, and as a customer I thought “wow this guy is so charismatic.” I would watch him day after day come in and charm a customer, promising to help with their business plans, making offers that I knew he would never follow through on.

The founder is much better at running a business than Ron, she has Shopify, and W2s, and not just cash that is handed over under a streetlamp three days late, but they have that same magnetic personality. The need to interact with customers, to feel themselves charming someone. It’s why no store managers can last. In her soul, the founder needs to be running a stall in the union square holiday market, where she can see an endless stream of new customers and try to upsell each one individually. Instead, she comes in and second guesses the store manager, making deals and ringing stuff up in insane ways that makes the stocking crazy.

The other day I ran a class for a group from Boston Consulting Group. They were polite enough (didn’t tip though!) while they were talking about their stupid pointless email job and their meaningless fucking slide decks. I made a bitchy joke in my opening monologue about how this would be new for them, because they were making something “real, and not a slide deck” which they laughed at. I wanted them all to fall off the face of the earth.

It’s terrible having a real job. It’s demanding, and degrading. Helping a bunch of indecisive people make candles that they don’t hate, smiling when someone dumps oil into the sink, knowing that I will have to scrape it out of the grout is so much harder than jobs that I have had before. And yet, as I keep applying for jobs in my field, I leave this off my resume. If someone asks what I have been doing I say “the assistant store manager in a boutique start-up,” but I don’t put it on the resume, because I know that it will make it harder for me to get those pointless email jobs that I crave.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. No recipe, sorry, I’m a fraud.