All day yesterday I was out looking for a job. It's cool because I'm 16 now so I know that when I apply for one I actually have a chance of getting it. Kinda. You see, the applications are like totally designed to make you as a teenager look like a totally undesirable employee. There's this whole section on the back of the application for previous employment that usually says something like "this section must be filled out ENTIRELY." (Volunteer stuff "doesn't count.")Which is fine, if you're older and have had years of other jobs. But when you're 16 and just starting out, how are you supposed to have something to put in the previous employment box when no one will hire you? And round and round we go...
Almost every store I applied to also had a favorite phrase: "We're not hiring now, but we're always taking applications!" Always said it a way-to-cheerful voice. Translation: "You can spend half an hour filling this out but we're just going to throw it away anyway!" The most annoying part is, all the teenage jobs have been taken by adults due to the decrease in job availability I suppose. Nowadays, you walk into a McDonald's and you see 50 year olds behind the counter. You walk into Hollister and you see some old lady rearranged clothes on the rack. Come on...in teen clothing stores ESPECIALLY the employees are supposed to add to the appeal of the brand! And a 40 year old wearing clothes from Hot Topic does the exact opposite. It is what it is I guess.
Anyway, I finally found a store in the mall that was hiring, and the lady gave me an application to go fill out and bring it back. Of course, neither me nor my dad had a pen on us, so we set out on a quest to find a store that sold one. I suggested the dollar store on the lower level. We went down the escalator and into the store. The first thing that warned me away from this place was the smell. It stunk...like nothing identifiable. That was the worst part. The shelves were half bare and on this one place along the wall there were bags of strange foreign food (probably where the smell was coming from.) Eventually we found the pens. They were right where you would expect them to be! Next to the cleaning stuff and across from the weird smelling food. I approached the counter and after a few minutes I discerned that the woman was saying it cost a dollar ten.
I paid and sat down in a chair right across from the dollar store. I opened the pack of ten pens and clicked the first one. I wrote my name in the first box and...the pen ran out of ink. I stared at it for a second, scribbled on the back of one of my applications, and still nothing. I thought maybe it was just one bad pen so I took out the next one and filled in my birthday. Then THAT pen ran out of ink. Ten pens later, only about half of the application was done. I brought the pens over to my dad and he opened one up. Half an inch up the tube the ink is in had been pinched. There was a minuscule amount of ink in each pen. Just enough to write a few words.
We set up a system. My dad would take the pen apart and blow inside of it and then place it on the table in a line. I would snatch the first one in the line up, write a few words, and the grab the next one. The foreign people that run the dollar store and the knockoff clothing store next door were standing out in the hallway, almost like they were mocking us. They could clearly see our plight. This is probably their favorite part of owning that store. They cant make any money off it (because everything they sell is crap) so they like to watch unsuspecting people buy a product, try to use it, and then start to cry because it quickly breaks or stops working or self-destructs in their hands. I would never buy anything from their clothing store after this experience. It's probably designed to randomly tear itself apart after a few minutes of wearing it. I'm sure the bottoms of the purses randomly fall out and the shoes dissolve as soon as they come in contact with water. Or hot pavement. All I know is, the mall must be doing pretty bad for them to be able to rent a store there.
Finally, like an hour later, I finished the ONE application. I scooped up the broken pens, imagined throwing the sorry remains in their faces, but instead just dropped them in the trash. I didn't even get my dollar's worth.
By the end of the day, I completed 4 applications. Hopefully I'll get a call soon! Then I'd be able to rent a space in the mall and quickly put those evil dollar store owners out of business...muahahaha.
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