A Day At The Fair

Is it more disheartening to lie to a child, or to lie to yourself? I conducted an incidental pilot study on this question during an overcast afternoon in 2019, when the University of Washington held their Fall Engineering Career Fair. Eager for a half-day escape from my insipid downtown office, I’d volunteered for a presenter’s role without hesitation. I relished the rattle and jerk of midday public transit as I cut out for the attractive campus on Lake Union’s northern end.

When the floodgates opened, however, and the clammy-handed, keen-eyed throng filtered into the event ballroom, a part of me pined for my good old desk. I realized almost immediately that I’d spend the next four hours disguised, falsified, foreign. Posed as a person at ease with their job.

Nine years into my chosen occupation, I’d shed any and all faith in the professional world. But when I saw these enthusiastic students I recalled my own college years, when I was intrigued by vocational engineering and thought that work was something adults did for pleasure, not just financial security. My university professors painted suspiciously amorphous portraits of such a life, leaving unmentioned why they’d fled it for academia. In so many ways I’d been duped – again and again – by that childhood charade. “Find what you love,” went the mantra. “And love what you do.” Easy enough.

The first time I attended a career fair, aged twenty, I rode the Metro North to Harlem’s 125th Street Station and walked a sweltering September half-hour to Columbia’s campus. I was blazered and tied, the whole shebang, and had sweat twice through the outfit by the time I approached my first recruiter. This was the midpoint of my junior year; I lacked any work experience outside of lifeguarding and knew less than nothing about literally anything – who in the hell was going to hire me?

Clearly nobody. After cringeworthy visits to a couple booths I took a directionless stroll through Midtown. Another summer at the pool, I told myself with a shrug. So uncomfortable, so anxiety-ridden was that career fair, I swore never to return to such an event. I kept this promise for nine years, until that dreary afternoon in 2019.

My main issue with collegiate career fairs is this: though working consumes decades of one’s life, career fairs explain almost nothing about what happens at work. The daily routines and reliance on redundancy, CYA, PTO, “water cooler talk,” inscrutable power dynamics. At a career fair, you hear about none of this. In its place we find a terrible, sanity-starved rashness, as palpable at the University of Washington as it was in Upper Manhattan a decade before. Today’s best and brightest are as desperate as ever to dive into the world of white-collar work, that mundane, often repellant place where dreams will invariably regress. The gravity can be chalked up to economics, but I’ll also attribute a vast, manufactured zeitgeist, a relatively recent human imperative, begun by no one and purveyed by practically everyone.

At UW, now a “consummate” thirty-year-old white collar professional, I stood in an ill-fitting black polo with my company’s name printed in white across the left breast. The shirt wasn’t cotton but a rough, uncomfortable synthetic weave. Young engineers, or I guess engineering students, burst through the ballroom double doors like a seasonal stream. In their harried faces I presumed that those teachings once adulterating my worldview – the loving of labor over reflection, of advancement over artistry – had been exacerbated by the social media age.

“What’s your favorite part about your job?” was their most common inquiry.

In reality? A morning coffee break, a holiday, a Friday paycheck. But I saw little use in peddling cynicism. Though these students were naïve, I didn’t find them disagreeable. In their high-spiritedness I saw my former self. And therein dwelt my dilemma.

I’d had inklings, at twenty, sweating through my homely blazer at Broadway and W. 114th, that the professional world wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But did I really need a stranger – one guised in my future intent, no less – to corroborate these concerns? Probably not. I had to join the workforce myself to ascertain its truth.

Our company’s recruiting materials had been mailed directly to the university from out-of-state HR. The plastic shipping crate held a black tablecloth with the company logo in anemic white font, a table-mounted poster, a roll-up display, and various handouts: brochures, stickers, pens, drawstring backpacks. The table-mounted graphic, which snapped together like an old Connector toy, exhibited a checkerboard of photogenic dams, airports, power lines, highways, and sports stadiums (but not my profession’s most common sight, a rain-soaked geologist sniffing dirt at an abandoned gas station). The roll-up display flaunted a life-sized, handsomely hard-hatted, clipboard-toting Scandinavian model, and below him the words: “Where do you see yourself?”

I found the slogan impractical. If there’s a singular horror to career fairs, it’s uncertainty. Our company name wasn’t general lexicon and this motto failed to illuminate our line of work. As a result, the booth received relatively few visitors. Fine by me.

Our career fair neighbors were well-known colossi: Facebook, Boeing, Ali Baba, Alaska Airlines. In the past twelve months, these corporations had squandered election security, run jets into the ground, censored democratic protests, and emitted irreversible carbon tonnage – schemes yielding long lines of hopeful employees. Mayhap applicants thought themselves a salve, capable of “change from within.” Maybe they didn’t care about commercial malpractice. Probably, like all the rest of us, they just wanted a decent salary. Responding to a shaggy-haired student with world-saving ambition, desirous of a position in tidal energy, I was forced to admit, “We don’t really do that. You might be able to angle your way into renewable energy, but not at our office.”

“So what do you do?” he asked.

I thought about it, probably for too long. Then I said, “I work on old industrial sites that’ve had chemicals spilled on them, and I figure out ways to clean them up.” (This answer sidesteps unfathomable gray areas having to do with environmental legislation and late capitalism.)

“Oh,” he said.

“And I spend time in the office, too,” I continued, “writing reports, working with data.”

Again, “Oh.”

About this data: when historical documents or handwritten fieldnotes rolled into our projects teams via PDF – this happened weekly – younger consultants digitized the tables via hours  (many, many hours) of monotonous numerical entry. I’m sure programmers could do it better, but none of us knew how to code, and more importantly, the practice was a fount of billable hours. During my first month of engineering work, when I was 21, one of these tasks required a full week of nine-hour days: copying chemical parameters from 1980’s scan-ins to Microsoft Excel, re-building the table format, and then double-checking the whole thing for accuracy. That assignment, given to me without apology by a mid-career superior, kickstarted the blight of my professional aspiration.

“Right,” said the engineering student. “So, you’re in the office sometimes and outside sometimes.”

“Rain or sun,” I confirmed. “Does that sound like something you’d be interested in?”

“I guess so.” He smiled. “What’s the office culture like?”

Office culture? The office “culture” was as bland as the organization at large. Think mid-day dentist’s office but with utilization pegged at 95 percent and no nitrous oxide.

“It’s… okay,” was as far as I could stretch the fib. But the meaningless deception produced an unexpected effect. When I said it, I half-believed myself. Was our office culture really “okay?” Why else would I say that it was?

“There’s quite a few young people around,” I continued, floating up above my corporeal body, “and we tend to know each other.” This was true, in a technical sense, though the knowing often went name-deep. “We have a committee that organizes happy hours and after-work events. Occasionally a Mariners game.” (I recalled a painfully obsequious lecture we received on representing the company in public, delivered prior to said baseball excursion.)

“The office has an open floor plan,” I droned, “so there’s a bit of talking during the day.” Leaving unmentioned how it felt to spend weeks in severe, paradoxical isolation, mere feet from someone you didn’t dislike but certainly didn’t like; how corporate plainly expected, via the collective pressure of visual contact, a limit on dicking around; how our Seattle office was in one measly week crunched from three high-rise floors down to two, squishing us like sardines into a new seating plan so that our third floor could be leased out – only nine months later the third floor was still empty, with me suffocating in the middle seat of a three-person row.

By 3:45, inundated with my own half-truths and rationalizations, I grew frustrated and confused. What was I even doing here? As the crowd thinned out I leaned onto our table and stared out the ballroom’s windows at the snow-flecked Cascades, their peaks hidden in high clouds.

Eventually I packed up the tablecloth, the pens and brochures, the roll-up poster, the checkerboard display. The lot of them fit into plastic luggage that looked like a baritone saxophone case, which would be mailed off to the company’s next event – in Des Moines, or Galveston, or Tampa Bay.

“Where do you see yourself?”

For our troubles, each presenter received two drink tickets for a post-reception down the hall. Over bruschetta, pale ale, and bottom-shelf cabernet, the dean of undergraduate engineering delivered a heartfelt speech thanking us for our service. And then we did what professionals do best. We got inebriated and whined about our jobs.