The Hunt

When I was in 7th grade, I made a picture of a long-horned ram in an afterschool art class.  It turned out well:  the medium was this silver paper covered in black wax that you scratched away using a variety of wire brushes.  When your image was revealed in the scratched silver, the effect was sort of like new-age wood carving. The ram won a contest at a hunting/outdoors magazine and I recieved a $50 gift certificate to Capital Sports'nWestern and an utographed copy of the book "Inherit the Hunt."  That was a hefty intro to what I'm up to today - I'm afraid I've inherited the hunt from my mom... the endless Job Hunt. 

Yesterday I started work at M--- Dental Spa, a M---- Avenue practice that believes in putting some new-age silver on an old black & bleak situation - getting your dental work done.  These people give complimentary massages to their patients and try to lighten the waiting room tension with Sir Richard Attenborough's soothing narration of our Planet Earth.   It seems nice enough, until you scratch that surface too far and reveal a tear in the silver paper.  Or dozens of gaping tears.  Or pure chaos. 

It was a miserable first day of work.  (I'm disguising names out of a sense of responsibility, here goes:)  The business is run by a very controlling, very Italian family named Santalinda, and I was asked on my first day what my ethnicity was, as if they were just making sure their suspicions that I'm not Italian were true.  Mr. Santa owns the administrative end of the dental practice, and his son Antoine (who hired me) serves as an ineffective storm-around-the-room micro-manager.   The two Santa daughters, Anna and Alli, wearing their finest Tiffany's chains and fashion booties, trained me yesterday.  They had the combined persona of a 13-year old, one obsessed with flirting and the other obsessed with television stars, although they are 19 or 20 and in college.  Even though I was picking up on the workflow and administrative tasks easily, I could tell that my competency was lost on them, as they spent most of their time bickering over each others' training methods.  I've noticed that the family seems to have a genetic predisposition toward an awful lot of talk noise and very little listening, which could be at the heart of their problematic business strategy.  Hearing them make the phone calls I was being trained to do made it painfully clear that my phonathon training put me miles ahead of them (manners and composure-wise), and my questions about the efficiency of some of the things they seem to be doing in a much more roundabout and complicated way than necessary just caused them to write off my training as being too confusing for me.  I made it through the day, although I briefly thought about walking out after Antoine sent several ALL CAPS red-lettered e-mails (before 11 a.m.!) reiterating the same points he had already discussed with us, as if we couldn't possibly have understood him, being girls and therefore morons.  (The e-mails were followed by another e-mail urging us to respond to him with "UNDERSTOOD" if we "UNDERSTOOD", and this was followed by several conference phone calls from Antoine to break down our sense of self-worth even further.)

Still, I was prepared to go back until one of my best advocates talked some sense into me.  It's hard not having a job right now, and not making any money, but I shouldn't trade one soul-sucking role for another.  I didn't come to New York to take a job I wouldn't take anywhere else, and I have to have faith in myself because if I don't, who will?  The environment at MD Spa was needlessly hectic, tense, and ineffecient.  I couldn't change that if I spent more time there, yet I saw first-hand yesterday that I'd be the person receiving the blunt end of the "FIX IT!" demand as things continued to fall apart around me.  I would feel patronized and inadequate every day, even for doing the job better than they seem to have expected.  The Santas need to come to their senses.  And I need to keep looking.

I called them this morning, and I submitted three applications to post-production facilities.  Not bad for a day's non-work.