We are looking for a slow-paced, day-dreaming, moody worker who does not have it all together, and cannot define themselves in a single sentence.
The atmosphere in our company is relaxed, courteous, clean, casual but introspective. There is jazz or classical music playing, and the bosses trust you to execute work without them losing their temper or becoming unhinged.
Nobody comes to our office on bike, but we love the idea of promoting biking as a way to commute. Please bring a bike to the office (carry it atop your SUV) so we can stress how important it is to bike to work.
There is a promised retirement plan in all our want ads, and a fully paid health plan including coverage for mental health, pregnancy and childcare, and six weeks paid vacation. We think keeping our workers healthy will help them be productive and happier. And that’s what we promise you when you apply here.
The office is located near your home, and if you want to stay home and just go online, that is also a prerogative. Nobody should be forced to come to work everyday if they don’t feel like it, and if they think they can work better at home, that makes sense. Try it after you work here and see how long you end up working here.
In all honesty, our company prefers young workers, preferably ones who just graduated college and have no family responsibilities. That makes it easier for us to pay you less. We do have a 53-year-old woman here but she works nights cleaning our offices.
We also like diversity in race, gender, and looks, as long as you are not over 33 you are welcome in our company.
We are especially eager to promote great causes that help people in need as long as these causes can promote a great image for our company. Breast cancer, dog and cat adoption, and healthy eating are some of our favorite image causes.
You will see our kind of company all around Culver City where a uniquely conforming sameness renders each and every place the province of fresh-faced workers who create internet content, produce internet content, monitor internet content, license internet content, promote internet content, trade internet content, sell internet content, translate international internet, and spin off apps for every type of content found online.
If you think you want to work with us, please click the link below. We are so excited to find amazing people like you!
Simon Simonian, Progressive Art Stained Glass Studio
Peter Scholz, owner, Showcase Cabinets.
Craftsman at Showcase.
Yesterday, The San Fernando Valley Business Journal published an essay by Charles Crumpley, editor and publisher, concerning the scheme (“Option A) by Metro Los Angeles to destroy hundreds of small businesses near Kester and Oxnard for a proposed light rail repair center covering some 33 acres.
I am reprinting here for all to read. In it he castigates the insensitivity and deafness of local government, including Councilwoman Nury Martinez, who has seemingly stood by while hundreds of her constituents face financial ruin, dislocation and the upending of their businesses and economic security. Prostitution and dumping cannot be the only constituencies that matter in City Council District 6.
If Metro is permitted to bulldoze the last vestige of small business in Van Nuys to make way for a Disneyland transportation scheme, already made redundant in the Uber/Lyft era, than we are all doomed.
Metro needs to find another site for its repair yard that does not destroy the lives, dreams, hopes and well-being of hard working entrepreneurs and working men and women in Van Nuys.
Memo to Metro: May We Survive?
By Charles Crumpley
Monday, October 16, 2017
The gulf between local government and the business community was on full display last week at the Van Nuys State Building Auditorium.
That’s where the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority held a meeting Oct. 10 to hear from businesses that stand to be evicted because Metro wants to clear land northeast of Oxnard Street and Kester Avenue to build a train maintenance yard to serve a new rail line.
The message from businesses seems simple and clear: Can’t you find a better place for your maintenance yard? Maybe one that doesn’t oust a train load of businesses – 186 of them, by one count.
The message from bureaucrats also seems simple and straightforward: Yawn.
Whether they know it or not, that’s the memo they sent to businesses. To Metro’s credit, it did hold the so-called informational meeting after it became clear that businesses were growing restive. On the other hand, Metro’s temper at the meeting was vaguely brusque and at times dismissive. To at least some of the businesspeople in attendance, it all came off as if Metro’s imperial overlords had been forced to travel to Van Nuys to sit through another dull meeting in which the plebian supplicants had to beg for their survival. (For more on businesses’ reaction, see the article on page 1.)
Here’s an example. The business group proposed an alternative site for the train yard. It seemed to make sense because it would only displace one business, an auto salvage yard, and a facility with some vacant land that’s owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, better known as the DWP.
But at the meeting last week, Metro Senior Executive Officer Manjeet Ranu announced: “Late this afternoon we got a letter from DWP that says they have specific plans and a construction timeline for use of that property.” So, no deal.
Well, excuse me, but are you seriously saying that DWP’s single plan is more important than the plans of 186 businesses?
Ranu did explain that eminent domain against a government entity like the DWP was difficult, you see.
Well, excuse me again, but isn’t this where we can count on our elected officials to step in and make the DWP yield? Maybe work out some compromise? Surely the DWP’s needs can be met while saving 186 businesses.
Alas, apparently not. The 186 businesses are in Councilwoman Nury Martinez’s district and she did not bother to attend the meeting. No representative from her office was announced at the beginning of the meeting, although her chief of staff said someone from the office later showed up.
The staffer sent me Martinez’s statement, which started by saying the new rail line, which will run from Oxnard Street to Sylmar, is needed and would bring economic revitalization to the area, which no one is arguing. She added this: “Metro indicates there will be some displacement due to the need for a maintenance facility, no matter which option is chosen. I will ensure that Metro continues to have an open and honest dialogue about the support, resources and assistance that will be available to these businesses, so they can plan for their short- and long-term future.”
Well, excuse me, but Martinez is missing the point. Some options for the train yard will have much less “displacement” than others. Focusing on the ones with less displacement is the point here. But I guess you’d have to actually talk to your business constituents to get that. And attend the meeting.
There’s a great gulf between local government and the business community here, and last week’s meeting displayed that.
Government officials see the need for a new train line and therefore a new train maintenance yard and that means some businesses will be evicted and that’s just the way it is. The affected businesses will complain, and part of the job is to yawn through some dull meetings and listen to them whine and patiently explain to them why their alternative proposals won’t work.
Business operators also see a need for a new train line and therefore a new train maintenance yard and that means some businesses will be evicted. But they don’t understand why government can’t be more judicious in selecting a site that is the least disruptive. They don’t understand why government officials can’t seem to see that it is not easy to relocate and could be permanently harmful, even fatal, to the businesses. They don’t understand why elected officials like Nury Martinez fail to come to their defense. They don’t understand why, if their alternative ideas don’t work, the government officials won’t help them come up with ones that do.
Surely there are other sites out there that would be less disruptive. Panorama City actually wants the train yard.
Let’s hope Metro and city officials look harder to come up with a new site that works well for the new train system without wrecking a swath of businesses.
Charles Crumpley is editor and publisher of the Business Journal. He can be reached at ccrumpley@sfvbj.com.
It happened that last week occurred a strange and unexpected event. I had a job interview.
Somewhere on my resume it must have listed numerous documentary production companies I worked at and places where I gathered archival footage for History Channel and A&E, those years I spent researching and “associate producing”, working with editors, producers and executives assembling those forgettable programs exploring the exploits of exorcism, John the Baptist and the Hatfield and the McCoys.
I was about to come back to the wondrous world of TV production.
On that stretch of Cahuenga, where it curves like an IUD towards Hollywood, stands a particularly ugly, mirrored glass office building shaped like an upside down pyramid. This is where the interview took place.
I parked in the garage and a security guard ushered me into a secure elevator that went up to a fourth floor office furnished with white leather sofas and a black receptionist.
The interviewee was a tanned, fit fortysomething Latino production supervisor with two initials for a first name and a last name that rhymes with Fontana. He told me he was impressed with my resume. His company, he assured me, was in a massive rush to acquire new archival materials. They hired for the long term, and he himself had been there 12 years. The hours were everyday, from 8:30am-5pm with one half hour for lunch. Did it all sound good? Yes, I replied, it all sounded good.
I imagined my new life, one with a weekly paycheck and my hours, net pay and gross taxes taken out and how great direct deposit would be. I thought of how it might feel to be around a workplace with workers, people who earned money and went to jobs everyday, and when they were asked at a party what they did, they had ready answers that put them in a respectable and understood category of American life.
I thought I would be just like those two sallow faced, starched shirt, flat-front khaki pants Asian guys who come into Toluca Lake Starbucks everyday at 2pm, right down the street from their job as investment counselors and pick up their pre-ordered cappuccinos from the barista. I would be just like Harry and Ted, those guys who drive a white Toyota sedan and live in Arcadia.
Well the job interview went into its second scene, as I was taken up to a large, high-ceilinged, dark room with many monitors and many men watching a sea of sucking, fucking, breasts, vaginas, and ass holes. It was all online, all over the room, timed by an army of paunchy dudes with Big Gulps on their desks punching keys for eight hours a day. They recorded in data every second and minute, describing exactly, bluntly, in forensic carnality, every second of every sexual moment.
I was introduced to a goateed Indian man, a fat, friendly guy who sat in front of a monitor and explained how they were using Google Docs, but soon would have more sophisticated software. The work was laid out, like the women, right in front of me. He explained that once I got the hang of entering, I would be able to insert my work into the computer and procreate key words for every act. Anal was the big thing, they were looking, he explained for anything anal, and that was the big thing now, anal.
Gone was the warm, soft, moist vagina; that pink wonder of life, welcoming a hard dick inside. The future of men and women, and women and women, and men and men, and men and whatever—- it lead straight up the ass.
Since this was a job interview I pretended to be very interested, but as I looked around the room, seeing men from young to old watching porn and scrutinizing it for quality control and key words, I thought of my life, the past thirty years, the time since I graduated with a BA in English from Boston University and imagined that now I might, now at $12.50 an hour, end up in this enormous toilet of a business, begging to be considered for work that my 18-year-old self would have thought appalling.
Where have you gone Andrew Benjamin Hurvitz your parents in heaven cry for you….
After about 15 minutes the man with the initials told me that I was a strong contender for the opening. He would be calling me, possibly in the next day, to let me know. “Either way I will call you!” he assured me.
He never called, of course, because this is LA, and people here usually do not keep appointments or promises. What is that old saying, that you can grow old and broke on yes?
This is just a small tale of vocational dismalness. As we know, our nation feeds on a diet of broken dreams and only the promise of lies keeps us alive.
Every year I think of suicide or work, and every year neither event pans out, but I think in 2017, something big will happen to me. It’s up to me to make it happen.
Here in Van Nuys 
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