An Englishman in New England

It was summer 2002, and I needed the amorphous something that I was told by my college career councellors was prerequisite to prevent my life being summed up as a several hundred thousand dollar failure that ends with me tugging off travelling businessmen in public restrooms at $5 a pop (literally) to feed my various addictions.

I needed work experience, and bad - my resume read like a prank, and elicited the appropriate responses of hyena laughter and ridicule from HR departments from miles around.

I remember how I felt when I finally found one and got 'The Call': the relief, the elation, the planning of future purchases; none of which would have to be funded by handjobs - bonus!

The company I worked for was named after an aquatic god and a spider's home. When I asked about its' origins, hoping for a spirited reply about the company's noble mission and bold vision for the future, I recieved the verbal equivalent of a shrug, and a half-mumbled "Dunno". Then I made the mistake of calling them a web design company; I was sharply rapped across the knuckles, and corrected - they were a web boutique. Apparently 'boutique' in american english meant "Three guys hunched over computers more than 9 hours a day in a draughty shithole of an old townhouse" - I was learning about working life already!

My job was to tap my untrained, yet awesome selling skills to help this small operation get off the ground, and in this whizzbang internet age, what could be more perfectly fitting and efficient for promoting a web boutique than by opening a gigantic CD database of companies, and calling each name, one after a-fucking-nother? Apparently the CEO, with his Harvard MBA, couldn't concieve of anything better, neither could he concieve of the possible use a script or even formal training would be to me. I had a half-day to read the internet bubble-tastic website (which you can find by adding 'com' to said aquatic god and spider's home), and then I was off a-dialing.

But wait, I needed to be able to annotate the names and numbers from this phone book, you know, for record-keeping. Which meant creating a database. Which through several iterations of desperate technical trial, error, and finally failure on my part to export this gigantic database intact from the CD, boiled down to the following conversation:

Me: "So there's really no way to get the names out of there. . .except maybe copying and pasting each name and number individually out of the CD, but that. . .would be. . .cra- why are you looking at me that way?"

Them: "It's that or back to handjob-ville for you"

And so I did it. Approximately 1 month later, I finished. 160 hours solid of mindlessly performing the following command:

CTRL-C, CTRL-V.

CTRL-C, CTRL-V.

CTRL-C, CTRL-V.

It was July.

My office was the only one without air conditioning.

The sweltering heat burned away all memory I had of that month - all that is left of that giant chunk of my life is me, hunched over the screen copying and pasting names and telephone numbers into excel from a database that for an extra $100 could be legally opened up for uses such as telemarketing.

That was my first month of work.

There is much more.