Here. We. Go.

At the request of my mother; I am not remotely in the path of the myriad Australian natural disasters. Rest assured.


The past week has been laid- back, to say the least. Because I was still unemployed I spent my days reading ("About a Boy" and now "The Best American Sports Writing of 2008") and then I would take the bus into the city and meet up with Cate for lunch. We would usually finish lunch around 1:30, she'd go back to work and I would have 2.5-3 hours to kill. These afternoons spent roaming the central business district of Perth were pretty fun, although, there really are just two or three long streets of shops to explore and within that number, there's a limited number of shops I would even want to enter. In the evenings, Cate and I have been spending out time running, cooking dinner (limiting our eating out, really and truly), and watching television shows... on DVD, haha.

This lifestyle has been pretty relaxing, and it has definitely been nice to have some time off work since I went straight from the Boys and Girls Club to The Container Store before I got to Australia, but it was/ is time to get back to work; Taylormade Sports agreed. I found this company on a job-seeking-website and they billed the position as a combination of sports marketing and retail which led me to believe that I would be working in some sort of Australian Sports Authority-esque environment, which is actually a pretty exciting prospect. The company gave me a call and we set up an interview for last Thursday. I arrived at the office building, which had an eerily similar feel to the set-up of the "sports marketing" job I got and then rejected immediately after I graduated from Columbia. I was even talking to Cate on the phone as I sat outside the place telling her that the layout of the office park that the interview was taking place in reminded me of that horrible experience, but she reassured me and I realized that, surely, Taylormade Sports would be a legitimate place for me to work.

As I walked into the actual office of Taylormade Sports, my fears reached new levels as the layout/ atmosphere ( two supposedly attractive female receptionists in their early twenties sitting in an alcove of sorts; neither of them actually appeared to be working as facebook, myspace, and/or some sort of internet chat program was displayed on their screens; their top 40 pop music station was playing way too loud for an office where any sort of meaningful work could possibly be done; blah blah blah...) nearly identically reflected that of my previous foray into this field; but again, I left these irrational comparisons at the wayside of my mind and focused on the interview. I impressed my interviewer (and owner of the company) enough that he invited me back for a second round interview, which would be more of an experience with some members of the company out in the real world (just like the aforementioned job I had to refuse).

So... the first interview was on Thursday. On Friday, I came into the city to have lunch with Cate, then we got a drink to celebrate the weekend. A few hours later we went to a friend's house for dinner, great food and company. On a related note, it is very interesting to be confronted with sheer naive ignorance. Let me say that this family was very outgoing and personable, as am I, so I think they perceived a comfort level that might not quite have been there for me; or maybe they are just SO outspoken that they would have said what they said at any rate. The middle daughter of the family, 20, asked to no one in particular (which was odd since I was sitting at the table), "why are they called Afro- Americans? I thought an Afro was a hairstyle?" A legitimate question, especially since no one calls us Afro- Americans anymore, for that very reason, haha. The father commented on the, "particular largeness of the Afro- Americans playing in the Super Bowl." I guess he missed all the particularly large white men also playing in the game, but I guess people see what they want to see. And finally, my favorite; the mother. She certainly takes the cake, but she is definitely one to say whatever is on her mind. The second thing she said to me after our introduction was, "Oh my! Do you work out?" At the protest of her daughter who saw how such a comment might make me a teensy bit uncomfortable, she retorted, "What? Look at him, he obviously does!" That was cute. Later in the evening a discussion broke out about the mother's lack of understanding of 50 Cent's "Candy Shop." Again, much to the chagrin of her daughters, she protested that, as a girl, she would go to the candy shop and get lollipops all the time. I politely told her that I was pretty sure that Fitty had something else in mind when he wrote that song and she replied, "So! You DO understand that ghetto slang! You knew what he was talking about! Say something from tha' hood! Talk ghetto!"

As is often the case in situations like these, I am reminded of a Dave Chappelle stand-up act. Once, Dave had just finished performing in the south and he went a Ponderosa-style restaurant where you order at the front and they bring your food to you at your table. He was looking up at the menu and prepared to order while still deciding saying, "I'll have..." And the white cashier interrupted him by interjecting, "The chicken!" Dave's response, "What the %$#@?" The clerk's retort, "Look here buddy, it's no secret around here that blacks... and chickens, are very fond of one another." Dave continued in his mind thinking, "Wow, that was really racist. I'm not even mad, just stunned that someone could be so blatantly racist." These are the things that churn through my mind in real life situations, haha. Hm, that's pretty interesting, three of the most blatantly racist things to ever happen in my life have a) all been in the last 2 years b) twice involved white Australian women asking me to speak ebonics and c) not happened in the US or involved white Americans at all (the third involved an Indian cab driver in Toronto)

ANYway. Saturday rolled around and Cate and I prepared a delicious feast of bacon and eggs. Just as we were sitting down to eat, the doorbell rang and guess who it was! The Jehovah's Witnesses! I'm going to keep THIS story short, but basically, these guys using the same Bible as protestant Christians came to the Taylor at 9am on a Saturday morning picking and choosing verses to support their outlandish claims. What they failed to do was, I don't know, read the verses in context? All I can say is that I hope our chat with them gave them some things to think about because they really would pluck three verses from the middle of a chapter to support a given point, but LITERALLY would not have read the verses before or after it to contextualize what they were saying; or maybe they did and were in denial about them? But, after we talked to them for a good 30-45 minutes, we finished breakfast and then walked around for a bit before Cate's basketball game (they lost, but she starred!). We then went our separate ways as I joined some friends from church to watch a professional Aussie Rules Football (AFL or footy, there will be more about this in a later post) game while Cate joined friends from work to say goodbye to a coworker. We reconvened late that night to catch a bit of the England/ Italy rugby match that was being broadcast live in a few pubs at midnight. Sunday. Beach. Church. Coffee/Tea/ Cake.

Monday, Monday, Monday! At last, the day of the interview had arrived (sorry for leaving you get-jordan-a-job people hanging for three paragraphs) and I prepared myself to dazzle my potential employers. I walked into the office and my heart dropped out of my chest and onto the floor, SMACK! It was 7:50am on Monday morning and the company from which I was hoping to secure employment was having a dance party to motivate their employees. Those of you to whom I have told the story will recall that this was EXACTLY how they started the day at the horrible job that I did not take back in St. Louis. At this point I was mired in the deepest denial, I think I was telling myself that these things must all be coincidences, they could not possibly be related. Maybe even worse than all of that, all the guys who worked in the office were somehow exact replicas of sleazy New Jersey guys who use way too much hair gel, have orange tans, diamond stud earrings, and workout too hard (basically, just imagine the guy from the "My New Haircut" youtube video, if you haven't already seen it, I might not recommend it because of some coarse language, but I cannot control what you do on the internet...). Thankfully, I was teamed up with a guy who seemed pretty normal. He asked me if I drove and I told him that I did, so then he asked me if I could drive us to the site where we would set up, I told him I could (for those of you who do not know, nearly this exact same thing happened with the freakishly similar job before. Granted, in St. Louis, I was asked to drive because my interviewer's car broke down, whereas, yesterday I was asked to drive because I would need to drive back to the office by myself while they stayed at the site for the rest of the day). We arrived at the mall and set up our post. Keep in mind that this is a sports marketing job, and to be fair, we were dealing with sports and marketing, but not in the way that a rational person might think. Their task, and mine if I were to be hired, was to sell raffle tickets in a cross promotion with a local AFL team. Proceeds from the ten dollar raffle tickets went to youth sports foundations (and to us as the marketing company of course) and there are some pretty swanky prizes. My interviewer goes to different malls, airports, sporting events, and grocery store from day to day and sells the same raffle tickets. But here's the huge double whammy. He, and all the other associates at Taylormade Sports, sell the tickets between 9am-5:30pm, when most people are at work, (but then again, malls close at 5:30pm everyday but Thursday when they close at 8pm or 9pm for late night shopping). The second half of the whammy is that my interviewer, his assistant, pretty much everyone else in the company, and myself if hired all work on commission. 20% of each ticket goes into my pocket as commission... and that's my only salary. At this point I was internally beside myself because I could not believe that I had managed to get myself into nearly the same situation, but at least I would not be selling car wax at gas stations this time! Almost immediately after I had that thought, my interviewer took out a booklet with the company's structure/ business plan. They are a part of an international corporation called The Cobra Group (TCG). TCG has several different arms, one is Allsport, Taylormade Sports falls under that umbrella. As I was looking through the description of TCG, for the second time in two hours my heart stopped beating. None of the "coincidences" that I had been dismissing existed at all, they were not accidents. One of the five arms of TCG was "Fastwax," the EXACT company that I was given a job with nearly nine months ago! How could I have been so stupid?

I was freaking out pretty hard at this point, but I had to finish up the day. I went back to the office, had a little chat, was offered a position with Taylormade Sports, but told him that I would need some time to think about it. Thus commenced the longest several hours of deliberation. Clearly, this was a crappy job, but equally as obvious was the fact that I didn't exactly have people knocking down my door to hire me. So after all of this thinking through the different scenarios, Cate and I came to the conclusion that I should take the job for a few weeks, frantically look for a legitimate position, and by legitimate I mean one with at least an hourly wage, preferably a salary, but beggars with Ivy League degrees can't be choosers.

So there you have it. I have a job and I start bright and early tomorrow morning. 7:30am with a techno dance party; yes, this is actually my life. I'm off to enjoy my last day of freedom.

Peace