Men in motels

Last year, when I was deeply in search of employment, I was often teased with job possibilities that almost always involved working as a company rep of some sort, with only one constant. Let's call it the 1099 counter culture.

Here is what I found and what I see an awful lot of. Jobs from marketing, delivering all kinds of stuff to digital television installation and all of these jobs did not offer salaries, did not offer benefits, and many offered only cursory training. They hire people as independent contractors, working under the 1099 tax switch. In case you have never 1099er, basically you get paid by piece work, whether that is installing electronics or preparing taxes, you get the pay, but you have to pay your own taxes, have no health insurance or retirement possibilities and no real future.

It's not quite an invisible revolution, but what it does offer for employers is having people out in the field, without the expense of having a fulltime employee. Some of these jobs pay well, some not so much. In a time of deep recession, everyone one of these sorts of jobs that gets posted on Craigslist gets at least 100 applications in most cities. People are hungry to make money and these going nowhere jobs will fit the bill for many desperate people.

I knew the culture was churning out these new jobs because I applied for a few and interviewed for some. I was offered one in June, gave it some time and found every aspect of it to be lacking. It was a technical job, but they sent a moron to train me. We spent two weeks together, or 8 hours, depending on how you look at it. He was dumb and unprepared.

When I was a teenager I went skiing for the first time with some friends. All had skied before and on my first trip up the mountain, an athletic friend said all I needed to do was follow him. So I crashed and rolled and basically bruised my way down the hill. It was the best example of my life of stupid things friends were able to get me to do.

This neanderthal that flew out to train me was even worse. He did not know how to communicate, so he was going to show me "out in the field" how things got done. Expect we only went out in the field three times. I was left to meet with clients without any serious idea of what I was doing. You mix bad training with incompetent management and then top it off with sporadic pay periods and you feel abused from most angles. When I quit all I wanted to do was tell these people every step they took to make a worthless job even more pathetic.

Lately I have been finding myself in hotels around the eastern United States. Tonight I noticed something interesting. As I was walking down a hallway, I could hear voiced inside rooms, men speaking loudly. Some on cell phones, some seeming to host football parties. I did not hear any women's voices. On my way back from the ice machine, a few doors were opening, men on their way to dinner, getting into work trucks and panel vans. These were the men I was becoming. Working for some company, probably as a 1099 employee. No benefits and dragged away from their families, as winter lurks around the corner. Life was about to get funky and yet, as I tuned into conversations and watched the interactions, the men seemed to be kind happy. Smiling, joking and speaking loudly. Maybe it was that they were happy to be working and getting paid no matter what. That, and the idea that, sometimes it's kind of nice to be on the road, focused on a job and not worrying about dinner or if the wife thought she looked fat in her new Wal-Mart pants.