HOW I GOT MY JOB (PART I)

Right now, there are 831 unanswered messages in my inbox. Part of the reason I started this blog was to try to answer “frequently asked” questions, thereby tripling my institutional efficiency. It hasn’t exactly worked that way, but I’m going to take another stab at it.

Here goes:

I’m 37; my favorite color is orange; you need to read a lot; I’d say my calves are my best physical feature; Ricky Williams; April, 2002; I think you probably should stop ending stories with quotes; and yeah, dude, I know, my calves are pretty ridiculous.

But the question I get asked the most, by far, is some variation of: How did a loser like you find gainful employment?

Here’s the short answer: I have no idea.

Here’s the longer answer (and if you don’t want to read the following exercise in self-indulgence, I’ll summarize the takeaway points in helpful bullets at the bottom):

I’ve had exactly two jobs in my post-scholastic life. I’ve worked as a sportswriter for the National Post, a newspaper in Toronto, and as a writer for Esquire. Because my mind is a remarkably advanced and ordered machine, I’ll write about my first job first, and my second job later.

Like a lot of high school students, I went to university—Bishop’s University, specifically, on the mighty Massawippi shore—because I was supposed to. I majored in Political Science, because that was my best class in high school. I was lucky to have some very good professors who took an interest in my writing. My real focus was the radio—I managed the campus station, CJMQ, for three years—but I occasionally wrote for the school newspaper, The Campus. Mostly, I wrote editorials and editorials defending my editorials.

Because I didn’t want to get a job when I graduated, I went to graduate school instead. I took Urban Planning at the University of Toronto, where most of the professors—with the notable exceptions of Drs. Waterhouse and Relph—couldn’t have given a shit whether I lived or died. More happily, though, I lived in a bucolic graduate residence called Massey College.

Massey College is like Hogwarts, but with more magic. It’s a little cloistered community of graduate students—only sixty of us—living in a beautiful Ron Thom creation. There was a quad with a fountain and a clock tower; we wore black gowns to dinner, which was almost always delicious; famous people stopped by for no apparent reason. I was awakened one night when Pierre Trudeau accidentally tripped the fire alarm; on another memorable evening, I snorted a large amount of snuff with Karen Kain, the eminent ballerina.

But the most fortuitous part of Massey, for me, was its Headmaster—a man named John Fraser, who, before he earned the best job in Canada, had worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist and editor.

One night, John saw me writing away in my room. I wrote a lot, on most nights, but never with any intention of anyone reading my work. I think, in that way, I might have actually invented blogging. But John convinced me to show him some of my stuff. I slipped two or three pieces I’d written under his office door.

John was very kind about my midnight ramblings and encouraged me to apply for an internship at the Globe and Mail, a national newspaper based in Toronto. Of course, having no clips or any kind of related education, I surprisingly did not receive said internship.

To try to remedy the holes in my application, I wrote a grand total of four stories for the college newspaper, The Varsity, all about music. I can still remember them: blink 182 (Mark Hoppus was my first interview), Mike Watt, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Chantal Kreviazuk (her record label threatened to sue me).

Then, a few weeks before I graduated, John set me up—his influence on my career cannot be overstated—with an interview for what I thought was a junior editor position at a venerable Canadian magazine named Saturday Night. John had once been the editor-in-chief; now it was a man named Ken Whyte, who met me, I’m sure, entirely as a favor to John.

The day of my interview, it was pouring rain. On my way to Ken’s office. I dropped my precious music clips into a puddle. I can’t remember if I ever showed them to him, but believe it or not, I did think it was a good idea to show him the INTRODUCTION TO MY URBAN PLANNING THESIS, which was about hockey arena design. I asked Ken if he wanted a copy of it. He said no.

We then both endured what I’m certain remains the single worst job interview in the history of job interviews. Ken kept talking about “the newspaper”; I kept correcting him, calling it “the magazine.” For about twenty minutes, we both looked at each other quizzically across his desk, and then I left. That really was it. I went back to Massey, called my parents, and told them I was probably going to be an urban planner after all.

A few days later, Ken’s assistant called and told me I was going to be allowed to try out for a job at the newspaper. This was my reply: WHAT NEWSPAPER? IT’S A MAGAZINE! But as it happens, that fall, a new national newspaper was going to launch, helmed by none other than Ken Whyte. There were going to be hundreds of positions to fill. I would spend my summer working at the Toronto Bureau of Southam News, with a small group of young journalists: Ken’s Kids, we were called. If I did a good job, I might get called up to the as-yet-unnamed newspaper when it launched that October.

On my first day at the bureau, I wrote a story about insurance-industry regulation. It ran, all four inches of it—yeah, yeah—in several Southam newspapers. Very proudly, I showed it to my parents. My mom circled three grammatical errors in red pen and handed it back to me.

That summer, I made many more terrible mistakes. I think the most widely read story I wrote was about advances in candy-flavored milk. (I talked to Poison’s Rikki Rockett for that story; he hates milk.) I was mostly terrified every morning and totally depressed every night. It was a literal trial by fire—and I’m not misusing “literal”: the editors there routinely set me on fire.

But magically, as the launch approached for the newspaper that now had a name—National Post—I began receiving phone calls from Martin Newland, the news editor, and Graham Parley, the sports editor.

Because I’m generally oblivious to signals, I decided in my happy head that Martin and Graham were fighting over who got to take me.

Only years later did I discover that Ken, for reasons known only to him, had essentially demanded that I be brought in, and Martin and Graham were fighting over who had to be saddled with this no-hope kid obsessed with dairy and dairy-related stories.

Eventually, Graham agreed to take me, but only because I didn’t count against his hiring quota. (You might think at this point that I’m making this up. It’s all, I’m very sad to report, one-hundred percent true.) I went up to the expansive, shining newsroom and sat around, mostly, eating chicken fingers and waiting for the newspaper to launch.

Funnily enough, one of the pieces that I slipped under John Fraser’s door that fateful night at Massey—it was called “The Back of the Fighter,” about Muhammad Ali—ran in one of the early mockups. But on October 27, 1998, my first real story appeared in print: a kid named Dion Durdle had nearly died after being cut by a skate.

That was it. I had my first byline (a shared one, but still) in a national newspaper. I’d made it. And by it, I mean $15,000 a year. In 1998, I’ll remind you—not 1898.

How can you make it, too?

• Write a lot, but for nobody but yourself
• Meet an influential authority figure who inexplicably decides to champion you to other people of influence
• Interview a founding member of blink 182
• In the meantime, finish your thesis on hockey arena design
• Graduate just when hundreds of jobs in your chosen field (totally unrelated to your education) are about to open up
• Have a terrible job interview and produce no physical evidence in your favor but somehow get hired anyway
• Make sure your first story has lots of grammatical errors in it
• Become so unwanted that you don’t count as a living person on any kind of employment form
• Write about a kid who nearly dies because of a freak sports accident
• Don’t bitch when you’re so broke that you’re living with two other dudes in a crappy apartment that smells like Parmesan cheese, but happily has a bakery downstairs that serves mushroom gravy in a bowl of mashed potatoes in exchange for very little money

Like I told you at the start: I really have no idea.