Working in Paris as a student, pt. 2/3
All aboard the capitalist slave-train! Destination: debt and misery
It was a job that can only be described as a "paid hobby". A sort of cross between selling Herbalife and delivering newspapers. It involved subscribing people to different magazines according to their tastes. We were supposed to go to different places (the Metro exit, etc.) and try to sell people an annual subscription to “Tetu” for example, or “Inrockuptibles”, popular French magazines. This may seem like boring work, but we’ve already established that the nature of the job wasn’t important: it was only about getting paid. So I went to the meeting and sat through 20 minutes of pure drivel by some snake oil salesman trying to convince us this was a great “career opportunity”. I waited patiently and rose my hand at the end to ask about the set salary, without commissions. At this point, I received the most direct answer I have ever been given in my life, as the boss said to me in an ironic tone: “Did I mention salary?”, and then he went off on a rambling dissertation about commissions and some courses they were going to give me that would make me the best salesman in all of Paris. Then he pivoted to his great pyramid system, à la Herbalife, where you could get rich without lifting a finger if you bring people in, and all the rest.
Now, I know I’m out of touch, but I kept on watching this guy talk and talk, but all I could think about was the fact that there was no salary, that they didn't pay for transportation, and that they didn't give per diems for food. I concluded Paris was big enough to look for another job: was it too much to ask for a steady paycheck, no matter how measly?
A few days later, I got a call from a colleague who graduated with me at University - ninth in the class I should point out - who was also in Paris and basically in the same situation, with the only difference that he had decided to take the job as Night Watchman/Cleaner at a Hotel. His work doldrums, although not identical, were quite similar: he recorded some demos for a job where you had to do a Spanish voice over, but they didn't hire him; he sent CV's to sociology companies, but just like me, they didn't contact him either; he worked with children at six Euros an hour but was dying of fatigue and poverty; and of course he also sent the email to the ad in all the Parisian magazines that said “work from home, up to 1500 Euros a month”, with no apparent result.
Well, imagine the pressure you feel when you find out that the ninth of the class, a capable guy, with a truckload of degrees and diplomas, a bright, trilingual, psychologist, ended up working as a night watchman. That's when you start looking for a tree branch to hang yourself on. However, at that moment, they finally started calling me!
I had decided to become a Spanish or English teacher in an academy, because if there was one thing I knew how to do, it was to teach, and that way I could polish my teaching skills. Already in the midst of a job crisis, I opened the yellow pages and sent a cover letter and a résumé to all the academies in the Paris region.
Here, I ran into another problem: it turned out that the academies had open teaching positions, that they were looking for people, and that they liked my profile, but, as life will have it, I wasn’t French. By this I mean that thanks to the strange Gallic laws, a student is only supposed to work “up to 19.54 hours a week”, not a minute more, which means that I lost several positions that offered me 25 hours a week, i.e. 5 hours a day. And when, sitting in front of the boss, I closed the door, turned on the radio and whispered in his ear “but we can figure out under the table payments!”, I received either a puzzled look from the French boss or an invitation to “vacate the premises and never come back”. That's why I say, c’est la vie, my friends... (Continued)
I’m stealing "paid hobby".