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Robert Price: Smile! It’s only an interview (and a glimpse of the real world)
| Saturday, Jul 12 2008 8:42 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Jul 17 2008 11:33 AM
When I was 17, I flitted from one job to another on the most trivial of pretenses. Fast-food fry cook, furniture delivery man, sprinkler-installation ditch digger.
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It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to work hard. It’s just that I had a 17-year-old’s attention span, and new jobs were so easy to come by.
Jobs aren’t so easy to come by anymore. The economy is in the dumps and adults are snatching up many of the few jobs that are available, often including the part-time work that has always fallen to college students and teens just looking for gas money.
It can be tough sledding for younger job seekers, and six weeks into summer vacation, parents’ pep talks can wear thin.
“A lot of people I know still can’t find jobs,” said Gina Petersen, an 18-year-old Liberty High graduate on her lunch break Friday. “My brother is still looking.”
It took her weeks and lots of shoe leather, but she finally landed a phone bank job for $12 an hour.
“It’s brutal out there,” agreed co-worker Jeff Hardin, a 17-year-old Stockdale High grad. His best advice? “Know people who already work there.”
“And have some patience,” said 18-year-old Ashlee Thomas, a Centennial High grad who exhibited plenty of it during a weeks-long stretch filling out applications at restaurants and retail stores. Now she’s at the phone bank, too.
The lines of job applicants at restaurants can be especially long. Ask Adam Pretzer, who saw his share of them during his interminable search.
Pretzer, an 18-year-old Bakersfield High grad, was content to enjoy a carefree (and low-budget) senior year until the day he watched the gas pump fill his truck with $90 in fuel.
California Pizza Kitchen was his sixth or seventh interview. It was also the most entertaining. It was a group affair, with 10 applicants seated around a single large table — not quite a game show, not quite a beauty pageant, but with elements of both.
After introductions, the manager asked the applicants to, one by one, detail their work experience. One applicant had been a bartender. Another had never worked a day in his life. And so it went, 10 job seekers between the ages of 16 and not quite 30.
Then came the money question: Tell us about a time when you faced a hardship and had to overcome it.
None of the under-30s had exactly suffered hardships of Old Testament severity. The ex-bartender had been forced to cut off a drunk guy once, but the poignancy of the testimony went downhill from there. That is, until the manager turned his attention to the skater punk who’d been quietly waiting his turn.
“Well, there was this one time when I was working on this thing on my car with my dad, and the telephone started ringing. I couldn’t go answer the phone or the hood of the car would have fallen on my dad’s head.”
So what did you do?, the manager asked, his brow appropriately furrowed.
“I let the machine pick it up.”
And what would you do next time, if that were to happen again?
“Well, I guess I’d probably let the machine get it again.”
No one dared crack a smile — if indeed they were even listening — except Pretzer, who couldn’t hold back. Perhaps that is why he was not deemed “a CPK fit.” Fortunately, by the following week he had landed a job at another southwest Bakersfield restaurant — one that interviews applicants one at a time.
It’s hard to say whether pained decorum is more important to desperate job-seekers than reckless honesty.
Surely some managers out there appreciate applicants with a healthy grasp of the absurd, but it’s impossible to know. And, with this being the toughest year on record for teens seeking summer work, according to Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies, the motivation to maintain interview stoicism must be powerful.
If we can take a lesson from Pretzer’s experience, though, it is this: Go ahead and smile if the mood strikes. There’s plenty of opportunity to grimace at the gas pump later — assuming you’ve got enough of a bankroll to fill up.
Reach Robert Price at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.