The Asshole Experiment & the Asshole Reality

When I decided to do this, I swore I’d do everything in my power to keep this blog anonymous, and I promised myself that I’d never start off a blog post with a disclaimer of any kind. I’m completely breaking the disclaimer rule today, and I’m likely giving away enough info to shatter the anonymity as well. So here goes the disclaimer:

If you read this entire post, you’re going to read things that you’ll likely find absolutely disgusting. I make no apologies for that. I’ve done my best to keep myself and others anonymous, but if you do figure it out, do all of us a favour and keep it to yourself.

First, I’ll just come flat out and say it. That awesome job I had? Yeah, “had” is the key word. It’s gone and I was laid off. As it turns out, you should never, ever believe a major corporation when they promise you the world (or just a job in Marketing) if you “perform.” They’re lying. What they really want is for you to ruin your body and mind, destroy yourself really, in order to achieve their goals, only to cut you loose when you’ve exceeded expectations. You don’t matter to them, not even a little bit. Expect to be used, abused, and tossed into the trash bin when they’re done with you. Note: if you’re not familiar with foreshadowing, you should look it up now…

So my job is gone, and I’m slightly bitter. I really did kill myself to get the results I got, and I went about it in a way that was building a sustainable, long-term, profit-oriented and profit-generating brand. Short-term results were exactly what they wanted, yet when it came time to figure it all out, they “ran out of budget.” Riiiiight. $4 billion or so in market cap and they “ran out of budget.” In any case, after seeing the direction they decided to take over the direction I had my project headed in, I can’t say I’m shocked. If anything, I’m happy to no longer be there (ahhhh, anonymity is nice sometimes) but sad because I miss my job. Still, no time like a Friday to start trying to feel better. So I went out to a local bar/club with a couple of friends. There are 3 main categories of bars/clubs in Vancouver:

1-    Undeservedly Expensive and pretentious: Think Bar None. They’re not actually any good, the drinks aren’t any better than anywhere else, the crowd’s good looking but the word “shallow” has too much depth to describe it, and they’re not that much fun to be at.

2-    Undeservedly medium-priced, less pretentious, trashier: Think Caprice, amongst many. They’re terrible, the drinks are watered down, the crowd’s uglier and no one is older than 22, “idiotic” only begins to describe it, you’re basically partying in a warehouse with ½ of Surrey and the entire population of trashy people that live in North Vancouver. Located on Granville Street, more often than not. Unexpected positive: it’s surprisingly unpretentious, at least by Vancouver standards

3-    Wildly varying in price, ULTRA pretentious, super-“hip”: Yes, we’re talking about East Van bars like Narrow Lounge, The Waldorf, etc. Your beer will cost anywhere between $3-$15, mixed drinks are about the same, the crowd is HIDEOUS looking (and looking this trashy doesn’t come cheap…), the bar itself was likely designed by the same people who design those hedge mazes (yes, I’m talking about the Waldorf in particular), facial hair is acceptable, and don’t bother talking to anyone because you’re not cool enough.

I’ve left out a 4^th category, “Bars/clubs that don’t suck,” because I’m not interested in publicizing them. I can’t risk having people I don’t like starting to frequent them.

Anyways, we ended up picking a bar from category #2, and headed out. I absolutely refuse to wait in any kind of bar/club entrance line up, because I think it’s a fucking moronic thing to do and it rains here, so we make friends with the steroid-monkeys and plastic-barbie looking people at the door and get in for free, immediately, no cover. Drink in hand, we sit at a table and consider our options. We quickly realize our options are all terrible, so we hatched a plan…

I’ve never understood why women at bars flock to assholes like moths to a light, but they do. Or at least that’s how it seems to work. We decide to find out, by acting like complete assholes and seeing how things went for us. If it worked, we figured we’d get a ton of phone numbers. If it didn’t, well, realistically it was no loss at all. So we did it. I’ll spare you the details, but had any of us actually been interested in any woman at this particular bar, it’s safe to say it would have worked out for us. We were drowning in phone numbers by the end of the night. The worse we got, the easier it was. It was pathetic, I felt terrible, but at the end of the night, as I made my way home, I had my answer: being an asshole seems to work.

Ethically, the experiment was highly questionable. I’m not dating for a year so I had no use for the numbers, none of us are actually assholes so we were lying to people, we couldn’t call anyone whose number we did get because they’d be expecting someone completely different, and experimenting with people when they don’t know what you’re up to is insanely wrong. We might have gotten someone’s hopes up, “Oh I hope he calls! Maybe he’ll text me!” but I needed an answer. I once had someone tell me to only ask questions when I was ready to deal with the answer, and frankly I wish I’d remembered that piece of advice at the time. Ignorance really can be bliss.

Moving on to Saturday night. I head out for drinks with a few different friends, some of which are female. Not a big deal, or it shouldn’t have been. Two of them are recent university grads and unable to find jobs even remotely related to what they studied (no they don’t have arts degrees, so don’t even fucking start). I knew things weren’t great for them, but I had no idea how bad they were. One of them told me a story of a friend that was in roughly the same situation. This friend had been offered a second interview for a bartending position. Sounds legitimate, right? The bar in question is apparently a “new gentleman’s club” in the Vancouver area. Sounds slightly sketchy, but hey, a job’s a job and this one would likely pay well.

Remember that thing about foreshadowing? Well, here it comes…

This woman had been told, in no uncertain terms, that her second interview for a bartending position would consist of her having sex with the guy who was interviewing her. So, late on a Saturday night, she was at that second job interview…

We’ll pause here to let that settle in.

Look, I get it. We all make choices and those choices, along with their consequences, are ours to live with. The thing is that outside factors beyond our control sometimes cloud our ability to make rational, intelligent decisions. Our circumstances change the frame of reference through which we understand and assess options, sometimes significantly.  Poor children living in low-income neighbourhoods with bad schools and a distinct lack of positive role models are more likely to choose to join gangs, for example. The circumstances don’t excuse the choice, but they do help to explain it. So how does a smart, good-looking, university-educated woman in her mid-twenties end up deciding to have sex to get hired? I don’t know, but I’ll assume that the money being offered played a factor. It’s perhaps more likely that her financial situation made her think that she had no other option. I could go on about it for pages, but there’s no need because we all know that no one who isn’t feeling coerced in some way will make that decision. I hadn’t felt as sad as I did while heading home late Saturday night in a long time. I sat there wondering what, if anything, I could have done to help, what anyone could have done, and thought about how bad things must really be for someone like her to make that kind of choice. I didn’t find any answers to those questions.

On the other hand, I did find some answers as to what kind of person would use people in this kind of way. It’s simple: an asshole. A predator. Not the kind of guy who acts like a dick on a Friday night just to see if women really are attracted to losers, but a disgusting, sleazy, filthy asshole. The kind of guy who’d put you through this kind of abuse, only to turn around and tell you that there was never a job open to begin with. The kind of asshole who’d film you having sex with him without your knowledge or consent and put it up on a porn site without paying you.

As a group, young people don’t have it all that good right now. I know of over 6 people who’ve been laid off in the last couple of months, not counting myself, all from excellent career-starter positions. I know university grads (various programs) that can’t find jobs that are even remotely related to their field of study. I suppose we all should have gone to trade schools (note the dripping sarcasm there) but then I know far too many tradespeople who can’t find jobs as well. Every open position gets hundreds of applications, so applying to anything is now about as pointless as casino gambling, which I’ve always thought of as a tax on idiocy. It really does feel hopeless some days. But until this weekend, I never thought I’d know anyone who’d totally given up all hope.

Maybe you’re over the age of 40 and had no idea that the young people you’re not employing or hiring and maybe even laying off as part of “cuts” are actually suffering this badly. Well, we are. Maybe you feel bad after having finally clued in, so here’s an appeal:

If you’re a bar owner or manager and have an establishment in Vancouver, and you need a server or bartender, fire me an email with details at soloinvancouver AT gmail DOT com and I’ll send that info to my friends so their friend doesn’t have to work for some asshole who clearly doesn’t respect human beings.

Alternatively, if you need someone with extensive experience in web content, promotions, marketing, brand strategy, activations and guerilla marketing, relationship building, social media campaigns, and so on, fire me an email at the same address and I’ll find a way to send you a resume that lists my experience and qualifications without destroying my anonymity. We can take it from there after that.