Saturday, June 6, 2009

Beating the pavement

Well I got here to Portland about two weeks ago. The first day I tried to go to work at the canvassing job, they wouldn't let me because I hadn't memorized the "rap" for environment Oregon that they were supposed to email me and didn't. They told me to come back Monday so I was like yeah whatever. I went to Seattle for the weekend and met up with Dave Reed, Shaffer, and Brian at Folklife. A lot of the musicians had dreads...strange. Afterward, Shaffer and Brian showed me around northern Seattle. It is a great city.

On Monday I tried to go back to work but it was a holiday so once again they wouldn't let me work. Stoopid. I finally started on Tuesday. It was indeed "soul crushing" as my friend Milo had described. It sucked knowing how much of that money I was raising was going straight to me. The only way to rationalize the work was to think about all the petitioning I was doing. Even still, on the days when I didn't make very much, I was getting paid more money than I had raised. I needed money though so I stuck with it and searched for jobs at night. Ming arrived on Saturday with her dad and we celebrated her birthday over the course of the weekend.

On Tuesday, I was on my 6th day of canvassing and I knew I was going to quit. I had gone to forty houses and had only raised $10 even though the quota is $105. It seemed like a pretty low income neighborhood and here I was bothering all of these people for money. I found the nearest bus station and left. Ming and I went back to the office later that night to notify our boss that we were quitting.

Every day since then, we have been going to downtown Portland dropping of resumes and picking up applications. As of today, we have applied to exactly 100 places, most of which are restaurants. Only a few admit that they are hiring but hopefully we'll at least get a few interviews. Until we get a job, we're not drinking or going out to eat. When we finally do get hired, we'll go out to Burgerville (they have two kinds of veggie burgers!) and buy a bottle of something good.

3 comments:

  1. im so jealous you got to hang out with shaffer and brian! ugh!

    wait, how much of the money goes to us? and do i need to bring anything on monday for our sleepover?

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  3. omg! I was in Seattle the same weekend you were for folklife! I even went by the folklife center a few times. And I didn't know you were there. Good luck with the job search!

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