The Job Placement Guy Screwed Me Over

I graduated quite early from college and then failed to land a job for something like 6+ months.

At the time, I had believed that the entire purpose of college was simply having that diploma that said I was qualified to work.

As it turns out, employers want workers with past experience. They are also willing to settle for graduation-bound students that have not yet graduated, because they can pay them low (or zero) wages in the form of an “internship”.

But if you have a degree and no experience, you’re out of luck.

I spent most of my time in college focusing on music instead of getting an internship. Like nearly all musicians, that got me nowhere professionally. Once I was out of college, I was in a tough spot. While all my friends who had had internships would soon (once graduated) get nice corporate jobs downtown, I got nothing.

I furiously pumped out resume after resume, hoping something would stick. It didn’t.

Then one day a man reached out, telling me he could get me a job. The way he explained it made it sound like he was interviewing me, like he was a recruiter for other companies.

I was too naïve to realize I was just a potential client to him.

But I was desperate and dumb, so I went with it. Before long, he had a couple of prospects lined up. One doing B2B sales with Ricoh, the printer company. The other was with Menards as a “Manager Trainee,” which he described as like an internship. He said I’d learn how to run a whole store, and then have my pick of any position after that, even potentially at corporate.

He pushed me hard to the Menards position and claimed that I would be a great fit there. I now realize that it was probably just the easiest one for him to place me in so he could get his payday.

I didn’t even understand how payment worked. The way he had originally explained things, it sounded like almost all positions had the same payment agreement, where a small portion of my paycheck would go to him for the first handful of months as long as I worked there.

That seemed reasonable.

I believe he touched on an alternate agreement which didn’t seem common, where you’d pay a large portion of your yearly salary up-front.

Of course, this turned out to be the latter.

In my first week of working, he questioned how I would be paying the $3000 I owed him, and I was totally blindsided.

After all, how could an unemployed kid fresh out of college and deep in debt possibly have $3000 on-hand?

I genuinely question how he can even make a living because he really didn’t make it clear that this is what would be happening until long after I was already working there.

I’m sure that was intentional. It would be hard to back out once you’ve already started working.

But how do most people pay him?

Obviously I didn’t have the money, and there’s no way a bank would have given me a loan. But I’m fortunate to have a strong family network, and I took out a loan from my brother to pay for it. A loan which I wouldn’t be able to fully pay off until just a couple years ago.

As it turns out, the job was not how he had described it. You basically are just being trained to manage a department in a Menards store, as the name implies. While he had said that you could just turn down offers to work at other stores as much as you wanted, that wasn’t quite true. If you turned down enough, you would lose your position.

And I should have exploited that, like he exploited me. He misrepresented the position. If I lost it prematurely due to his misrepresentation, I believe I would have been entitled to a refund.

Right before that happened, though, I got a job doing social media marketing at a small website design company, and the rest is history.

Obviously I learned a lot from all of this, namely that I never, ever want to work retail. And to understand the fee structure of any service.

But I only recently had the thought: what if I would have gone with the Ricoh position?

Since it’s a sales job that’s likely mostly commission, I imagine it is much less of a sure-thing than the Menards job. He probably wouldn’t be compensated nearly as highly, which is why he pushed me away from it.

And I had a bad taste in my mouth from a sales job I did in high school, so I wasn’t exactly eager to get back into doing that.

But ultimately, developing sales skills and working B2B would have been much more closely aligned with what I do now. It also would have enabled me to really work with a variety of different industries.

All else being equal, I think it would have been a much better opportunity for me. Whereas Menards is pretty much a dead-end for every single person that works there and doesn’t carry the name “Menard”, Ricoh probably would have had plenty of opportunities for advancement within the company, and even elsewhere.

So to that “job placement” guy: you should be ashamed. Preying on desperate college grads. Misrepresenting yourself and your services, pushing them towards your most profitable option, and then locking them into paying you without explaining how it works is a pretty shameful way to operate a “business”.

The only silver lining is that I accidentally forgot completely about our first meeting and completely blew you off. The fact that you still wanted to meet with me should have been a red flag.

I Should Start Tracking Business/Tech Ideas

I had a conversation with a friend lately that met up with an old college buddy. He learned that this friend of his had basically started and sold two tech startups and is now functionally retired.

And it made me fairly envious.

I always envied those guys that build new things and are out there with endless possibilities. They grind away at something just for the chance that it pays off and they get a huge payout.

And for him, it worked.

Obviously we tend to romanticize these types of things and clearly it does not work out for everyone.

But I’ve established a company that will keep me employed and making money with plenty of time leftover to work on other projects, if I should choose them.

So I have the time, the income, and the job to work on something else without making any money on it for quite some time.

I also have ideas all the time. I’m constantly looking for ways in which technology has failed us so far, or could help us in seemingly obvious ways that haven’t been done yet.

So why not start tracking those ideas?

I think if I have an idea that’s decent, I should write it down and start putting some thought into it. If it’s a good enough idea, I should absolutely start doing some research into what it would take to bring it to life and whether or not it really has a future and/or market.

My main plan is certainly not to try to hit it big with something like this, but I’d certainly love to have it as a possibility. And since I’m ideally suited to actually act on one of these ideas, why wouldn’t I do it?

The Goal isn’t to Live Outside Your Comfort Zone; The Goal is to Expand It

This seems really obvious to me now and also like something tons of other people have thought of, but I’ve never really heard it explained this way.

You hear about how going outside of your comfort zone leads to growth, or how pain is where you learn and grow.

Based on how people talk about it, you’d think that they are advocating going as far out of your comfort zone as possible, and staying there forever.

This is clearly not sustainable. And may actually explain the burnouts and crashes that many of these “high-performers” or extremists suffer.

I think the real goal is to regularly be going a bit outside of your comfort zone, and then having your comfort zone expand to meet you.

For example, the first couple times I traveled abroad, it was kind of terrifying. There are so many unknowns, both about the locations and about myself.

But as time passed, I became more comfortable in those places and in the knowledge that I’m always going to be able to figure things out for myself.

And that’s my comfort zone growing.

Traveling alone internationally and spending months living abroad no longer scares me much and isn’t outside of my comfort zone at all.

I think that if you consistently seek opportunities to go a bit outside your existing comfort zone, of the course of years you will find yourself with very little that scares you or makes you uncomfortable.

And for me, that’s a bit of the goal!

I want to learn about the world and myself. I want to experience new things all the time. And while my goal isn’t to eliminate anything that might make me uncomfortable, I do enjoy the idea that I could be totally comfortable with the vast majority of events and experiences that exist in the world.

Social Media Sites are Designed to be Echo Chambers

I am certainly far from the first one to think of this, but it really is true. Social media sites are actually designed to be echo chambers.

It’s a problem that maybe was just never considered from the inception of social media, or perhaps if I were more cynical I’d say it was actually planned.

If you design a system that works hard to make people anxious and addicted to it, and then slowly show them more and more content that re-affirms their existing fears worst beliefs, you create an echo chamber.

The shocking part is just how vulnerable people are to this. All they need to do is simply be exposed to a stupid idea that resonates with them, and that’s all it takes. They click more and more of the same types of content that all peddle the same idiotic BS, and they only interact with other susceptible simpletons like themselves, and pretty soon they start getting more and more extreme in their views.

And there is no way to really shake them out of it. They are going to continue being presented with the same ridiculous views. And since those are the only views they encounter, they believe that they must be correct.

After all, everybody is saying it, and nobody is disputing it.

The pandemic likely made things much worse, since people were stuck at home on social media. It was just overall a bad situation.

I don’t use very many social media channels and of the ones I have, I don’t typically interact much, so I can’t truly say what they are doing about this or how things have changed.

From my limited time and experience on Facebook, it appears that what they’ve done to combat this effect is to mostly just show you niche hobby content or mindless entertainment.

I guess they figure that they are best off if their users maximize their time spent on the platform consuming pointless entertainment, rather than becoming extremists pushing for civil war and undermining the stability of the country in which the platform is based.

Which makes sense.

I just hope that these companies do enough to change things, and that they do it fast enough to avoid major problems in our country and in the world. It seems that people are getting dumber each day and the world order less stable, so time really is of the essence.