'How I Went from the Set of New Girl to a Startup Product Manager' by rhortx productmanagement productdevelopment
I gradually woke to the warmth of Harry licking my lips, just frantically enough so I knew he needed to pee. It was three in the morning, cold and quiet. I hooked the leash to his collar and we headed out into the night.
I couldn't claim unemployment since I'd quit. But an actress friend told me a trade secret. Every show is its own job. As long as you have a decent income history, you can work once as an extra then qualify for unemployment after the shoot. That might buy me enough time to find my path. So I signed with Central Casting, a company that provides background workers to shows across the LA area.
Hours later, a background wrangler brought us onto the brightly lit set of a tiki bar, to be arranged in clumps of two to four. Our job was to hold elaborate tropical drinks, not look at the cameras, and pretend to have interesting conversations while the actors spoke their lines. They placed me in a far corner facing an oddly placid woman, and I smiled at her pantomimed repartee as the show's male star mused with his friends about the emotional repercussions of an upcoming pub crawl.
You should remember, 'hallucinogen' is a misnomer. You don't see things that aren't there, you see things that were there the whole time that you've trained yourself not to see. Anything beyond a microdose and preconceptions fall away, all that pigeonholing of reality into conceptual chunks like inartfully translated poetry.
Later, as we head back to the waiting area, an efficient-looking man in a Bluetooth headset taps me on the shoulder, shaking his head, wagging a finger. "We see what you're doing there guy." I'm pretty sure he was referring to the moment in the final shot when our grandmother silently told a joke and the irony of actually laughing at a pretend joke created a humor feedback loop that gave me stomach cramps as I tried so desperately not to laugh out loud that I almost fainted.
We find ourselves in an immense dining room, sitting across from each other at a beautiful meal we're not allowed to eat , while Zoey Deschanel and some handsome Euro-accented fellow with a well-trimmed beard film their dinner scene. We're far enough away to have a real conversation and I grill Susan about her life in Korea. She and her husband taught, explored the world, and are ready for the next stage of their lives.
But then, out of the blue, a call comes through from the human resources manager I used to work with. She wants to know if I'm interested in a hot new social media startup in Downtown LA. All she'll say is their name --The next day an elevator rockets me silently to the Gas Company building's 50th floor. The view out the windows looks like you're landing at LAX.
Eventually, they march out in unison like the East German swim team, and the head of the company makes an entrance, a hefty subcontinental Indian man with a magnetic personality and the voice of James Earl Jones. To be clear, I worked in online direct marketing so I know when someone's blowing smoke up my ass. But this was the first time I actually liked it. Somehow that recommendation from the head of human resources short-circuited the process. No one had ever hired me without looking at my work.
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