I subscribe to a lot of emails to save 10% on things I won’t actually buy. This means I also unsubscribe to a lot of emails. I was doing this one day when a message appeared in my inbox from the founder of a small food company. I’d recently applied for a marketing job there. I’d been a florist, a smoothie artist, a field biologist, a bartender, and an events assistant. All temporary jobs. But I wanted to do something meaningful that lasted forever. To not be so easily replaced by a robot with arm joints or an intern. Working in marketing seemed perfect. According to my inbox, every company in the world needed someone to write and send emails. That person could be me.
I stayed up all night interview prepping because I wasn’t about to lose out on my first opportunity for full-time work. I was going to come so prepared it could come across as frightening.
I met the founder in a Scandinavia-inspired cafe. She was beautiful in an intimidating sort of way, and though only a few years older than me, she had the confidence of a grown woman, something I kept forgetting I was as well. She asked me how familiar I was with their company and in return I told her everything there was to know about their products. They sold food made out of cricket protein, their main product being chips in three flavors: cheddar, sriracha, and barbecue. I told her insects were the most sustainable source of protein in the world, and that if we ate more bugs and less beef, chicken, and even tofu, we could save the planet because crickets require less resources to raise and they don’t burp greenhouse gasses. She raised her eyebrows at me. I had never been so bold in my life.
The interview went on and at some point we were laughing and walking a few blocks to their “food lab” to meet the rest of the team. There were only two other people. Also the food lab was just one of their apartments. But I left feeling like I’d just met my future best friends and if the feeling wasn’t mutual I might never recover.
The feeling was mutual. They hired me immediately to create marketing materials for very little money. The next morning and every morning after, I speed-walked the two miles from my apartment to the office. I’d show up shiny and red with a sweaty back, and spend the first minutes of every day in the bathroom, shirtless, whipping my blouse back and forth to make it dry. I had to look pulled together because everyone else at the company did. The women had blow-dried hair and the man wore designer glasses. In reality, those glasses were knock-offs and being blow-dried is a pretty normal state for one’s hair to be in. But I didn’t know that.
Our office was on the third floor of a FiDi building packed with other startups, a falafel place, and a bunch of squatters. It consisted of a few ergonomic chairs tucked into a ping pong table. We didn’t have our own bathroom so we shared the one in the hallway with everyone who lived or worked on that floor, and our window looked out over a zone where people were legally allowed to take drugs. But the founder told me that our office didn’t matter. Our mission along with my emails and cheeky Instagram posts were gonna change the world. All I had to do was come to the office early each day, ready to stay late. I absorbed all her words like the thirsty little sponge I was.
At lunch I usually shoveled something like a Greek salad with Craisins into my gullet while keeping my eyes glued to my computer. We came out with a cookie mix and, six months after, we launched protein powders that came in ice cream flavors. My eyes were shrivelling into my skull but my life had purpose.
We barely had any sales and so we all had to take a pay cut. It didn’t seem right. Some of the richest people in the world lived a mile away from our office. They had Google signing bonuses, unlimited vacation packages, 401(k)s, and insurance. But then some of the poorest were right outside the window. Where did I exist in all that?
I started to feel off about it all. One day, I went into the bathroom to pee, and there was a man showering in there with his little green bird. But a little bird had no business living in this building, being forced to shower with a man who kept it on a string around his neck. I sat in that stall and started to hyperventilate. Did the bird feel trapped or was I just projecting?
Our sales got worse. The founder took us to lunch at a fast casual Vietnamese restaurant to presumably make us all feel better, but instead she told us she was leaving to work at an AI startup. I nearly choked on a cube of tofu. Wasn’t this company her baby? Her life’s mission?
She said that for the last four years she’d made half as much as me, which was difficult to comprehend, considering I lived in a converted living room and mostly subsisted on frozen pot pies and strawberry cricket protein. She said the other woman with blow-dried hair was going to take over. I looked between the two of them and where I hoped to find a charismatic sparkle I only saw weariness. I looked at my other coworker. He was staring deep into the depths of his La Croix, as if that’s where all his strength lived. I realized I’d have to generate my own charisma from now on, and so I did the next boldest thing I ever did. I quit, and became what people referred to as “funemployed.” I tried to explain the concept to my dad, but he couldn’t grasp the idea of unemployment being fun. This was a man who fell asleep on the couch each night with his work boots still on. I, however, thought it was great until I walked into a Whole Foods and remembered I had almost no money.
I started freelancing. The thousands of hours I’d spent convincing people to eat bugs made me really good at persuasion — a highly valued skill in the marketing world. So now I work at home. I prop my computer up on a stack of books so my screen is aligned with my eyes. This keeps my neck from snapping under the weight of my head. I write emails for different companies. Save 20% for 24 hours! Get access to exclusive membership benefits! Millions of people read them and it’s a job I do so well, my employers have yet to prove that AI can do it better.
It’s all temporary work, but there’s something about having an end date written into a contract that brings me peace of mind instead of anxiety now. It’s a promise to do my best for a limited time only, and then move on.
Meghan Proulx is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Wigleaf, The Offing, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y, and more. She was ranked as a Top Humor Writer on Medium, and won a Silver Anthem Award.
