I work full time as a night clerk at a hotel. To supplement this income and to use my insomnia for something productive, I secured a job at a branch of the local library. At times, we have job help, where library staff is available to assist patrons in job hunting, scholarship and internship searches, resume crafting, and basic stuff like interview skills.
Today I helped an older gentleman with what I foolishly believed would be an easy task: applying for a job as a stock person or grocery clerk at a god damn Kroger. After finishing up the usuals of online applications, we encountered what I identified as some variant of a personality sorter. This, I was okay with until I saw we were on page one of seventeen.
Seventeen. Pages. Of radio buttons. For a job at a grocery store. I can’t even process it now, I’m still typing like William Shatner.
My brain shut down completely. The world shrank to a single pixel, the center of a radio button next to Strongly Disagree – I enjoy small talk, and I died.
Oh, nemesis. Personality Sorter. I know you well, so very well. I learned to fake this cottage industry bullshit after hotel chains started using this crap to hire night clerks and I learned INTJ was a four-letter word (excuse me, acronym. Fuck, I am so tired). Hey, Captain Obvious of the USS Human Resources: people who work in the middle of the god damn night by choice are rarely those super extroverted types who want to bask in the heaven that is customer service.
And sitting there, clinically dead in the middle of the library, I realized why so many people who need job help are unemployed. The technology’s outpaced them, and for jobs where the only requirement should be a legal age to work and a nice note from your phys ed teacher.
Yes, the game is different now. I’m not upset at the person who couldn’t keep up. I’m pissed off they had to keep up with something so meaningless. And all for a minimum wage job bagging groceries or facing product overnight. All for a shred of dignity, all for anything because sometimes it isn’t what you’re doing or for how much, but that you’re doing something at all gives a person hope and humanity.
I’m upset because this was just one man approaching his 60s, who never used computers like I did growing up, who is a good guy, who just wants a simple job. There must be thousands.
Sometimes the "make my corner of the world better" mantra doesn’t hold up.