Dear Darling Ones,

A long, long time ago at the dawn of the internet age I worked as a copywriter at a software company. It was my first grown-up job and I took it very seriously as a grown up would. Even with all the seriousness I still found time to update my personal blog seven times a day, illegally download songs from Audio Galaxy, chat with friends both in the office and online, carry on several email flirtations including one with the silent man in the creative department I called Art Guy, and take an hour-long lunch every day.

When I tell you nobody needs to work 40 hours a week in the office, I know of what I speak. Though, to be transparent, whenever we were launching new software I legit worked 60 hours a week writing all the things.

About the time of the second round of major layoffs I figured out corporate America is a heartless soul sucking wasteland, and I took the job a little less seriously. By the time we were acquired by Hell, Inc. and most of the company was let go including the entire creative department sans me, I realized it was mostly shenanigans, foolishness, nerf ball.

I was a bad worker because my boss was in Canada and mostly forgot I existed. Frequently, I had very little to do and because I’m not a dummy I did not call attention to that fact. After all, I was a single woman with a mortgage. I was gonna ride this gravy train until it crashed (which it did, in November of 2007 One summer I left the office every Friday at lunch and went to see a movie. I’d come back after, gather my things, and leave. Nobody ever knew.

This went off the rails. I came to write about my new Slinky and not my years as a cube-dwelling corporate drone, and yet somehow it snuck in there. Probably because whenever I think of Slinkies I think of Seamus and how we spent an entire afternoon conducting a “scientific” study of my Slinkies — Big Slink and Lil Slink. Shortly after the study I got a third Slinky that was raindbow-colored and plastic which we dubbed Brokeback Slink since I often displayed it and Lil Slink intertwined on my desk.

Recently, I explained to my friend EM what it meant when someone treated you like a Slinky. “It’s like the toy, you know. You ignore for months and months until you’re moved for unknown reasons to pick it up and play with it and it’s super fun for like three minutes. Then you put it down and don’t touch it again for a few months. That’s what [EM’S friend] does to you. She ignores you for months pays attention to you for a week and then disappears again.”

Incidentally, Slinkies are the kind of toys that always cause fights between siblings. Nobody will touch the Slinky for months (as mentioned above) and the minute someone does everyone wants the Slinky. You will often hear cries of “But it’s mine” as well as “You weren’t even playing with it.” Other toys in this category: Rubik’s cube and something I have just learned is called Pin Art

So anyway, I recently bought myself a new Slinky because I wanted one and it was $3. All my old ones were destroyed by The Tibbles back in 08. This new Slinky is the best and I play with it so much it makes my hands smell like Slinky and get a little tingly. It’s the perfect toy for idly slinking back and forth while thinking, which is why I kept them on my desk in the first place.

A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing,
Jodi

P.S. As I typed this I was distracted. There was a Caramel Apple sucker stuck to the roof of my mouth and I gave my tongue a real workout trying to dislodge it.

The post It Makes a Slinkety Sound appeared first on I Will Dare.

September, it seems, is full of wormholes.

Thanks to Brett Kavanaugh & the legions of men who think sexually assaulting girls are consequence-free teen shenanigans, I’ve spent a lot of time, in my head, in the 80s.

Today, I find myself in another wormhole. This one is better and finds me in my life circa 2007ish.

Recently, JTo started doing contract work for the company that laid us off back in ought-eight. She called me a few weeks ago to tell me about what a trip it was to work with so many of the people from the olden days. Then she asked if I’d be willing work for them too.

I jumped at the chance. I love working with JTo. And I never minded the work I did back in my cube-dwelling days, it was the corporatey corporateness of Corporate America that killed me.

I’m three days into this new gig and it’s all come back. The rhythm of working with JTo, the lingo, and what needs to be done. It’s been a decade since I’ve done product marketing and messaging, and I thought those muscles would be atrophied. They’re not, and I’m amazed that I really do know stuff.

The post Day 57 of 200: Another Wormhole appeared first on I Will Dare.

Yesterday I was on the phone with JTo, who some of you may remember from my days at Hell, Inc. She was the boss of me for many years, although she was only my actual boss for about two weeks. I took over for Al, the Cutest Girl on Earth, when she went on maternity leave and that made JTo my actual, factual boss. Of course Hell, Inc. decided to close the office right around that time and so anyway I’m here to tell you that it’s been ten years since that happened. Well, ten years since the actual closing of the office. We got five-month notice that we were being laid off.

Remember that? DO YOU? Because I wrote about it every single day all the time when I blogged nonstop before social media took all my minor thoughts and pushed them into the easily-forgotten ether.

HOLY SHIT!

Aside from six months at The Nerdery, it’s been a decade since I held down a real job. This is top of mind because I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone today talking to potential clients, which is weird and fun and kinda feels like a first date where you only ever talk about every person you ever dated and all the things you did with them.

One of the women I talked to today is someone I worked with for a short period of time at Jasc (which became Hell, Inc. after an acquisition). We couldn’t decide how long ago it was but it was way, way more than ten years ago.

At one point during our hour-long conversation she said, “I always remembered you because you’d get this fierce look in your eye when someone was wrong and not listening to you.”

I decided that would make a not-too shabby epitaph. I like the idea of having fierce looks in my eyes.

The other potential client I talked to said she loved my portfolio website and that she could tell exactly what it would be like to work with me just by reading the site. That made me feel pretty good too.

So where am I ten years out of corporate America? I’m still reporting live from my couch where I still put on headphones every morning when I start work and don’t take them off until I’m done with the day even if I’m not even listening to music.

Freelancing is like a religion. It takes so much fucking faith, more faith than I thought I could ever have for anything. And it’s tough, because you have to have faith in yourself when you know all your superpowers are stupid and nobody ever painted you on the ceiling of anything much less the Sistine chapel.

Currently, I’m struggling with finding a worklife/writing life balance and when I say struggling I mean failing miserably because lately all I do is work and I make zero time for writing. However, for the first time in for-fucking-ever I have more than two nickels to rub together. I can pay my mortgage and buy groceries in the same week, which is really nice.

I try not to complain too much about too much work to do, because I much prefer it to the alternative. I’m hoping after this month I can get back to a daily writing routine, which seems to work best for me. I’m eager to re-write THE BEAST because it’s woefully dated now in a post-Trump, post-#METOO era.

I have other things I hope to make time to tell you about, like CSA Supper Club and my new Dutch Oven and all the books I’ve read and that Phoebe Bridgers album and how I saw like 6 out 9 of the Best Picture Oscar nominees.

Soon, darling ones, soon.

The post Leaving the Cube: 10 Years After Corporate America appeared first on I Will Dare.

As many of you know in November the Canadian company that bought Jasc back in 2004 decided it was going to close the Minneapolis office, which is why I lost my job. Last night we had one last hooha to say thank you and goodbye to the office that housed so many of our working hours for nearly a decade.

It was like journeying back to 1999 all over again. The turnout for the get-together was amazing. I think, at one point, there were eighty people there. This is astounding because Jasc was a company that employed about 120 people at its largest. By the time the office closing was announced in November I think the Minneapolis office had dwindled down to fifty or so.

The party was fun and odd, and all the things you look for in a party. Since I am currently unemployed and this copywriting gig has been my only real grown-up job, I learned a lot from my former coworkers last night. For instance, I found out that it’s unusual for people to have such a sentimental attachment to their former place of employment. Especially to have such a fond memory of the place that you go back to say goodbye even though you haven’t worked there for six or more years.

They also told me that the mix of chemistry, that combination of passion and talent is highly unique and it’s not something you find very often at work. If I had a dollar for each time someone said “oh god, I miss working with you” to me or someone near me, I’d be able to take the Internet out for lunch.

I also found out that when you get a group of people together that worked together for so long that you automatically fall back into the old roles you had the last time you were together. It’s like a family, kind of. It was funny because the software developers hung together, like they always do. Marketing sat around and made fun of everyone and each other, like they always do, and IT sat around and gave us disdainful looks, like they always do. It’s as though nothing had changed, though everything had.

At one point last night, Al, the cutest girl on Earth™, BFK, Michelle, and I were seated around a table eating like we had on about 1000 free-lunch Fridays back when we all worked in Customer Service. I looked at them and said, “I keep waiting for Jodie to come over and tell us to hurry it up because there’s a five-minute hold time on the phones.”

It was a party that was so fun that even during the middle of it, I’d lean over to whomever I was sitting next to and say, “This is so awesome.” And really the whole evening was one of those quintessential ‘you had to be there’ type of things. It was good though and it was nice to get a pretty ribbon to put on what will probably become known in Supergenius lexicon as the software years.

The post Just another software company, the closure appeared first on I Will Dare.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Providing creative and innovative solutions for the amusement and development of the Supergenius’ happiness
• Researching and submitting Supergenius work to various clients and literary magazines
• Nagging the Supergenius to do the things she really ought to be doing
• Advising the Supergenius on strategic things and to facilitate in industry-leading stuff
• Fetching Eurydice from wherever she might be, generally in Ruby or the Fortress of Solitude
• Analyzing and documenting any romantic or platonic relationship activity that might be worthy of analysis and documentation
• Collaborating with an internal team of multiple personalities to evaluate and communicate the best solutions for the Supergenius and the world
• Handling correspondence between the Supergenius and her fan
• Preparing for and attending daily viewings of Dawson’s Creek
• Implementing and performing dances when the mood hits
• Wrangling cookies
• Coordinating and conducting new hire orientation and training
• Special projects

Qualified candidates must have the following:

• 2 – 5 years of relevant experience
• Proficient at discussing the genius of Liz Phair, Mary Gaitskill, and Bret Michaels
• Extremely tolerant of whining and procrastination
• Strong ability to prioritize and meet quickly changing moods
• A profound knowledge about the intricacies of The Replacements
• Strong follow-up and an ability call the Supergenius on her bullshit
• Self-motivated
• Likes a challenge and takes initiative
• Good taste in music and literature a plus

Take a look at what you can expect when you join our moderately successful, entirely unmotivated, and slightly slackalactic team:

• Outstanding work environment at the lovely and modern Supergenius HQ
• Inspiring leadership
• 2 hour in-depth training program
• Career advancement opportunities

Our goal is to reward our employees for their hard work through a comprehensive compensation package that includes:

• All the cookies you can eat
• Ongoing, comprehensive training
• Flexible hours and afternoon naps
• Free Diet Coke with lime
• Assigned, on-site parking right next to the building
• Ability to work in your pajamas

Supergenius, Inc. is an acknowledged leader in a high profile, emerging field that is so emerging it still doesn’t have a name. Energy and inventiveness combined with high-tolerance and quick wit is much more important than most anything else. In other words, this position is a perfect fit for an “up-and-comer” who is looking to be a key contributor to a high-growth organization.

If it sounds like Supergenius, Inc. might be the place to waste your time and invest your passionate approach to kicking ass, attach your credentials (please include cover letter, resume, and two cookies), and send that treasure to:
jodichromeysupergenius@gmail.com

The post JOB: Assistant to the Supergenius appeared first on I Will Dare.