Karen Burns - The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl: Real-Life Career Advice You Can Actually Use

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Table of Contents

Front Matter

Who the heck is Working Girl and where does she get off handing out career advice?

WORKING GIRL HAS HAD 59 JOBS OVER 40 YEARS IN 22 CITIES AND 4 COUNTRIES.

Working Girl got fired from only one of those jobs (and it wasnt her fault).

Working Girl has made a lot of mistakes. So you dont have to!

Heres the kind of stuff Working Girl (one person) has done:

dug ditches in communist Czechoslovakia

worked 19-hour shifts at Dunkin Donuts (while also attending high school)

got paid $50 an hour just for being American

typed the same letter 535 times

taught French generals how to lisp (not on purpose)

modeled plus-sized bustiers

got paid only $5 for 3 months of work (one of the mistakes)

Are you looking for a job? Do you have a job you hate? Are you afraid to quit your job and look for something better? Have you, God forbid, never had a job?

Take heart. Chin up. Its going to be okayWorking Girl is here to help. As you read this book, youll laugh, learn, and feel a whole lot better about tackling the bewildering, weird, and wonderful world of work.

How to Read This Book

WORKING GIRL HOPES YOU ARE NOT READING THIS PAGE. She hopes you went straight to Moonlighting (page 72), or Perverts at Work (page 150), or Friends (page 196), or Great Expectations (page 51). Because this is the kind of book you open in the middle, read a chapter or two, say Hmmmm, flip backward (or forward), read another few chapters, put it down, come back later, and read some more.

If you do decide to start at page one and keep going, youll see that the 59 chapters correspond to Working Girls 59 jobs and are arranged in three sections:

Clueless. Simple yet important lessons learned the hard way.

Confident. The basics (interviews, rsums, clothes, salary, networks, etc.).

Carefree. Secrets to total job bliss.

Each and every chapter tells an excruciatingly true job tale and offers advice based on that tale. The chapters are not in chronological order by job. That would be boring. Besides, we can be confident when were 18. Turn clueless at 25. Discover carefree at 33. Slip back to clueless for a spell. Then get confident again. Working Girl did. You will, too.

Have fun.

CLUELESS

Stress Test

CONTRARY TO WHAT YOU MIGHT THINK, the jobs with the highest stress levels are the ones with the least amount of responsibility and pay.

An illustration: When Working Girl was 12 she earned $1.25 an hour cleaning house for Mr. and Mrs. Fox, a sweet 80-something couple living next door. Every Tuesday afternoon she vacuumed, dusted, scrubbed, windexed, swept, and polished their one-bedroom apartment.

Youd think this job wouldve been simple. But there was one big problem: As far as Working Girl could tell, Mr. and Mrs. Foxs apartment was never dirty.

It looked the same after shed cleaned it as before.

Each week, your eager-to-please-yet-still-clueless heroine rearranged knickknacks to show she had dusted, grooved the carpet with vacuum cleaner marks to show she had vacuumed, and switched the position of pillows to show she had fluffed. Is that what Mr. and Mrs. Fox wanted? Working Girl never really knew. They never commented one way or another. And of course, back then, WG was too wussy to ask.

Yup, despite her tender years, Working Girl had achieved Level 6 on the Work Stress-O-Meter (see right). How did this happen? Because:

Stress Comes from Feeling Powerless

You may have a challenging, demanding, busy, even at times overwhelming job, but if you have a sense of power over it, you will be able to handle the stress.

Where does this sense of power come from? At a minimum, you need to:

enjoy the work

feel able to do, or learn to do, the work

be given the resources you need

be able to see results, and

be recognized for those results.

work stress-o-meter

Yeah, its also nice to get a good salary, work with people you like, set your own hours, and have a bit of job security.

But the five points above are the essential formula for a happy work life.

Easier said than done, you say.

Read on, dear fellow working girls, and learn how to get happy and love your job.

JOB SURVIVAL TIP

Susan, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT

I work at a computer all day. When I just cant stand the stress of sitting there another minute, I go to the ladies room and do fifty jumping jacks. It gets my blood flowing again. People wonder why I always come out of the bathroom all pink and breathless!

Miss Manners

YOUR BOSS NEVER SAYS PLEASE. Customers call you Hey You. Co-workers interrupt you while youre on the phone, borrow your supplies without asking, and steal your lunch out of the fridge. What do you do? You deploy the secret weapon of every working girl: etiquette.

Etiquette?

Yup. Etiquette is more than just the social graces. Its a powerful tool. It can be used to control people and situations.

Example: In high school Working Girl had a part-time job minding the cigarette counter at the corner drugstore.

The worst part? The leathery 50-something men with yellowed fingers who came in every night for their Marlboros or Lucky Strikes. They reeked, they winked, they leered, and they called her Babe. If she hadnt been standing behind a chest-high countertop, they would have pinched her, too.

Working Girl was sorta scared of these men but tolerated them until one evening enough was finally enough, and she got up the nerve to try something new. Two minutes into her shift, the first customer shuffled up.

She took a deep breath, lifted her chin, looked him in the eye, and said in a loud-but-pleasant voice, Good evening, sir. May I help you, sir?

The customer wore a mullet and a T-shirt that read, IM WITH STUPID. He was clearly a winker and a Babeer, and had probably never been addressed as sir in his entire life.

Uh, he said.

Working Girl would have bet a weeks pay hed been just about to mumble Apackamarlborosbabe. Instead he removed the cigarette from his mouth and said, May I have a pack of Marlboros, please, miss? No Babe. No wink.

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