Breakfast on the Sidewalk

HOT. Hot. Hot-hot-hot-hot. It has been HOT! Yes, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. And bacon and hash browns too, I'm sure. Today, we're getting a break, and it only hit 89° on the patio. Still, I turned on the air conditioner around 3 o'clock: Hopefullly, it will be off by 7 and we'll be able to open up and let the evening breeze do the cooling.

The hottest day was yesterday and, wouldn't you know it, I had a job interview for 2 p.m. Better, the job was down in Vernon, one of the grubbiest, most forgotten areas of Los Angeles. It's all huge, impersonal, industrial buildings and pre-World War II little brick structures with uncertain usages (abandoned, flop houses, crack houses; criminal storefronts; who knows?) The few people on the streets looked depressed and defeated.

The position I interviewed for was designing catalogues for a huge lighting corporation (the creative equivalent of working the drive-up window at Arby's). The building was dismal. The furniture was old, the leather upholstery wearing through on the conference room chairs. I was isolated therein and given several "tests" on customer services skills and accuracy. I felt like a rat being goaded through a maze I had rapidly decreasing interest in completing.

After 45 minutes, my interviewer entered. She was a zaftig 20-something who was leaving and had been saddled with the task of finding candidates for her replacement. She was nice and congenial. The interview went well. Then she said, "One last thing: I want you to build this table in InDesign," and handed me a printout.

I explained I had never built a table in InDesign and she balked. "How would you do this?" I explained an alternate way of building it without a table, and she spent five minutes telling me how it wouldn't work.

"I thought you said you knew InDesign," she said with a slight accusatory tone in her voice. "I do," I replied, "and if you show me how you want this put together, I'll be doing it in 10 minutes: Just because I've never built a table in the program doesn't mean I can't."

Freaking little upstart.

I was designing professionally when she was a blastula straining to divide in her mother's womb. I had a solid working knowledge of color theory when she was filling diapers for a living. I've spent my career learning graphic design programs, expanding with each new version release: nine versions of Photoshop, 13 of Illustrator, six of InDesign, not to mention Quark, PageMaker, FreeHand and a half-dozen others that no longer exist.

Why, when youth looks at maturity, does it see incipient idiocy and incompetence, fragility and mental impotence? This woman didn't know the first thing about web design, sitting there in her 18-34 prime demographic, and her head obviously started spinning when I explaining the emergence of HTML5 and CSS3, their inconsistent browser support and what will be happening in web design over the next five years. (Isn't that cute; the old guy's babbling. Give him a cookie.)

She saw my portfolio; it should be obvious what I'm capable of doing. Or maybe I just found all those magazines and papers while dumpster diving in Hollywood and I'm making up the rest of it.

All said and done, things turned out well: I'm not going to have to make an hour-and-a-half commute surrounded by tractor-trailers to do work I would hate for less money than I'm worth. Also, I came home, fired up InDesign, and generated that damn table of hers in about 20 minutes, anchored objects in prestyled boxes, nested type styles and the lot.

Jobs seem to be popping up all over. Pasadena City College just advertised for a graphic designer and, of course, I applied (it's only a mile and a half from the house). The application period closed last Friday, so I assume they're reviewing things this week, and I hope I get called.

I think my chances are good, since they were only accepting applications through the mail, just like in the olden days. You had to download their application form, then include it with a cover letter and a resume. I think cover letters put me ahead in the game, since I'm a good writer and can organize and execute a comprehensive cover letter that informs as well as impresses.

Also, Variety is once again looking for a graphic designer. If you will recall, I interviewed with them last November/December and was passed over for what reasons I know not. In any case, I suppose things could be different now, someone could have had a change of heart, so I sent my resume over there once again, but I won't get too upset if I don't hear from anyone.

All these jobs makes things very schizophrenic: part of the time I'm working on putting together the studio, part of the time I'm prepping applications and resumes and cover letters for jobs. Which will win out, do you think?