Long Road to Nowhere: Oren Rosenberg and the Invisible Career

I've decided to re-brand this blog. Instead of my aimless musings about anything that happens across my mind, I've decided to make it about my eternal quest to find a job that pays more than 7 dollars per hour. This came as a result of a suggestion from my mother, who calls me several times a day to remind me that her checkbook is slowly closing like one of those stone slab doors in one of the older Indiana Jones movies (fuck Crystal Skull).

So today I had a wonderful interview. It involved myself and about 60 other individuals of every race, religion, age group, and sexual orientation standing on the back patio waiting for our number to be called like cattle to a slaughter. When my number was called (#7, I got there 20 minutes early) I was the proud recipient of probably the shortest interview all day.

The man that interviewed me was an elderly person of probably Eastern European origin who, though polite, was host to a thinly veiled streak of contempt for me. Me, a recent college grad with no experience is sitting here in the basement of HIS building, next to HIS dusty pool table and HIS second-hand art-deco furniture asking for a job. It's enough to make an elderly immigrant sick.

I have no idea who this man is, or even his first name, but I am going to invent his life story anyway. As a young Jewish child fleeing happy Germany in 1938 with his older sister, he came to the United States with not a nickel in his pocket. His first work was hocking papers on the corner of 53rd St. and 5th Ave. in Manhattan. One day, a wealthy oil magnate walked up to him, threw a dime in his tin jar, and asked his name. The next day he was offered a job at Bell Aircraft, which that year had just gone public.

He started on an assembly line fitting ball-bearing joints to P-59 fighter jets, slowly moving up in the organization until he became VP in charge of Media Relations. During this time, however, he had managed to accrue a few enemies at Bell Aircraft, and was forced into early retirement in 1989 at the age of 55. He used what money he had to buy up property in Los Angeles near the UCLA campus.

And here we are, from VP in charge of Media Relations to having snot-nosed kids write about him in their blogs. Life's a bitch, ain't it?