Hi Ho Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go

By Clay Dye, Mary Reynolds and Greg Ritter; illustration by Jonathan Fox

Fun! Freedom! Flexibility! Not the usual f-words used by people to describe their dreary, 9-to-5 jobs. The kind of jobs that tens of thousands of fresh-faced college graduates are just dying to get. The kind last year’s graduating class still can’t find. The kind the members of the Class of ’89 wish they didn’t have.

Not surprisingly, many young Richmonders are actually happy in their jobs, mainly because they are working off the beaten path, out of the mainstream. These participants in America’s impersonal labor machine have found that Richmond is bursting with opportunity for the eager and educated, the crafty and creative.

Mainstream media laments the loss of jobs in large corporations: middle-aged middle managers getting the ax and manufacturing jobs relocated to South Carolina or Southeast Asia. But when did you ever say to yourself, “Gee, wouldn’t it be fun to cure tobacco all day?”

Richmond’s traditional economic strongholds—retail and banking—have experienced losses and gains which make for a flat “growth” curve. In other words, Signet Bank’s credit card section booms and creates temporary, $5-an-hour jobs, but large national banks cut high paying jobs in the consolidation process of swallowing up other local banks.

But enough about the mainstream! Everyone knows it’s for the unimaginative. If you want a fun job, you’d better look to the periphery.

Exploitable urban edges include freelance work of all kinds, temporary employment, small businesses and the arts. Do-gooders rejoice—nonprofit agencies created 10 percent of all new jobs nationwide last year. If you crave the mainstream, go for media and advertising.

Temps R Us

There are a few obvious secrets about temporary jobs: Temp jobs bring underemployment to the bright and ambitious unemployed. Temp agencies rake in the bucks. And the temp market in Richmond is a huge growth industry. In fact, temporary employment is one area of Richmond’s economy that is actually expanding.

“Our business has increased 700% in the past four years,” estimates Rita Harris of Remedy Temporary Agency. Manpower, which is the
largest agency in the country, employs over 500,000 people nationwide.

These agencies tout the flexibility of their employment opportunities and high pay for certain jobs. Flexibility means not knowing where you will work until your 7:30 am wake-up call. But occasionally, a temp job may lead to full-time employment.

Just think: instead of being a temporary receptionist, you become a full-time receptionist with little hope of moving into higher paying positions in the near future. How many file clerks and secretaries become vice-presidents?

Reality: Companies use temps because it’s cheaper than hiring permanent employees who selfishly demand health benefits, workers compensation, and horrors, paid holidays. Unless you are brilliant and indispensable—or really kiss some ass—the company is not going to hire you for that permanent job.

Most temp agencies charge companies twice the hourly wage that you, the temp, receive; most agencies do not offer health benefits. Companies must “buy-out” your contract if they want to hire you permanently. This buy-out, your labor, could cost the employer $2,000-7,000.

If you still want a temp job, expect to spend at least two hours at the agency, filling out forms, taking alphabetizing and typing tests, jamming square pegs in round holes (light industrial testing), and being interviewed by perky “employment specialists.”

Our recommendation: become your own temporary agency. Apply directly for jobs at catering businesses or restaurants who need extra staffing for banquets. Remember, it’s outdoor party season!

Some retailers hire temporary staff during the holiday season; mail order companies hire seasonal employees as early as September. Public relations offices in large corporations often hire freelance videographers, photographers for special projects.

If you’ve ever painted a wall, apply for work with private contractors or small renovation companies. All that outdoor work will make you buff enough to model for VCU art classes in the fall.

If you are your own agency, you may earn cash instead of taxable agency paychecks. And you will enjoy real flexibility and that important component of spiritual well-being: self-determination. It made America great.

ackme gallery

If you can’t find a place to do your thing, make your own place. Recently, three Virginia Commonwealth University undergraduate sculpture students made their own art scene.

“We wanted something that was fresher, more exciting,” says Kate Terrell. Terrell and her roommates, Chris Price and Amber Steussy, rented a building on Broad Street and opened ackme gallery (no capital letters—it’s an e. e. cummings kind of thing).

The name of the gallery comes from the first letter of Amber, Chris, and Kate’s names with a “me” tacked on at the end. The “me,” says Terrell, “is the gallery itself, the inside of the gallery. It has an identity of its own.”

Terrell, Price, and Steussy are not alone in this endeavor. It took 15 of their friends laboring, cleaning floors and painting the brick walls to turn an empty building on Broad into a gallery. One of the first shows at ackme gallery consisted of the works of those 15 people that physically and artistically made the gallery a gallery.

Several other galleries that operate near ackme have helped it along. 1708 Gallery and Artspace are both within a block of ackme. Also nearby is Gallery 55, another space with a less-than-regular schedule.

There’s no competition between galleries, says Terrell. “We actually really enhance each other. The more galleries there are, the more exciting it is.” Terrell says she’d like to see even more galleries open in that area. All of the galleries often have openings on the same nights, so each gallery stands a chance of benefitting from the draw of the other galleries.

“We hope to get a group of people running the gallery,” says Terrell. Their hope is to eventually turn ackme into a cooperative, similar to the setup 1708 Gallery has. Currently, ackme gallery is only open sporadically—the first Friday of every month when new shows open and whenever one of the three roommates can be there to open it up. “We’d like to keep it open during the week, but we need to find people willing to gallery sit,” Terrell says.

Ackme gallery is currently arranging shows. Most of the people who have been shown at ackme have been VCU students, but they are looking to branch out.

“We hope this is something that continues on after we graduate,” Terrell says. “It might not be the three of us renting it then, but hopefully some other people will be involved by then.”

Underground Carpenter

“I think it’s the wave of the future,” predicts freelance carpenter Abram about self-employment. “You have to incorporate your own personal talents and become a business yourself. You can’t sit around waiting for a big corporation to give you a job.”

After several years battling traffic as a bike messenger in New York City, Abram moved to Richmond where he pursued the carpentry trade. He worked for various contractors, then struck out on his own. He works for cash or barter, “I’m totally invisible.” Invisible to the IRS, but not to his many satisfied customers. In exchange for his labor, he has received massages, food discounts at Fare Share Co-op, and cold hard cash.

He builds theatrical scenery and props and enjoys “fixing up old houses.” In fact, instead of paying rent, Abram works with his contractor-landlord to renovate his own house. That’s right, he pays no rent.

Abram’s flexible schedule allows him to volunteer at Oasis House, a shelter for children, where he teaches arts and crafts. In 1992, he produced videos on social and political activism for public access television. Last year, he took his video camera on the road during his Maine-to-Virginia bicycle ride. He raised $2,000 for the League of American Wheelmen and Richmond’s Freedom House.

Ask yourself: Would your employer give you time off to bike down the East Coast?

Abram may have a video future: “With all these new cable channels opening up, I might start doing more video production.” Sensing opportunity, he continues, “Hey, I could do a documentary on a group of people getting together and putting out a newspaper.”

Weather Wonder

He’s the man so many rely on to get to work in the morning, that oh-so-cheery fellow who knows where all the pile-ups are—Craig Harrison, traffic reporter for WWBT-TV12 News—the only on-air traffic personality in Richmond. Sure, TV6 has a flashing arrow on a computer-generated map, but that doesn’t quite live up to the sharp-dressed guy with the beaming smile and the casual pointing finger.

“The best thing about my job,” Harrison says, “is helping people out with important information to help direct you to bypass the gridlock. It’s better to be traveling than sitting in traffic.”

Harrison takes his traffic seriously. “Traffic, for me, stretches wherever there is trouble.” Channel 12’s broadcast area covers more than Richmond, so if there’s a serious pile-up outside of Charlottesville or as far north as Fredericksburg, it’s Harrison’s mission to get the word out. “We’re dependent on communications with the localities,” he says.

The traffic updates during the Today Show are just a fraction of Harrison’s job. After allaying our rush hour jitters, Harrison steps behind the camera. He has been a photographer for Channel 12 for seven years now. Harrison says he likes the flexibility and variety of being a news photographer. “I get to meet different people and I’m doing different things each day.”

His break into the cutting-edge world of traffic journalism came last May when he became back-up for Beth Meyer, former traffic-guru for WWBT. It was only a month later that Meyer left the station, and Harrison became the final arbiter of traffic information.

Harrison hails from the Northern Neck of Virginia, that peninsula sandwiched between the Potomac and Rappahanock rivers—not exactly a hotbed of traffic tie-ups. He credits his brother with inspiring him to go to college. His brother was the first in the family to go to college, and it showed Harrison that he, too, could make it. Harrison graduate from the Mass Communications program at VCU.

Don’t think that because he’s a TV personality that he has forgotten his social responsibilities. As part of career days, Harrison goes to local middle and high schools and talks to the students about his job. He says he wants to remind the kids that “have a goal, and try to stick to it.”

What does the future hold for Craig Harrison? He says he would like to get in front of the camera more, probably in the weather or sports departments. Come to think of it, he does kind of remind one of a young, ambitious Ben Hamlin…

Occasionally, Harrison’s growing visibility becomes apparent. While standing in line to get a birth certificate for his young daughter, he noticed a lady in line staring at him. He realized he had been recognized. Soon, the woman came over to him and said, “You’re the traffic guy, aren’t you.” Harrison admitted that he was. “You look real big on TV,” she said, “but you’re a little puny guy in real life.” Ahh, the burdens of fame.

Video Overload

“We can do better than this,” said four guys from Richmond after visiting a video game store in Northern Virginia. Scott and his friends created Total Access Games seven months ago; the product: used video games. After pooling funds and personal game collections, the group placed ads to buy more old games from other people. “Video games are not old until you play them,” explains Scott. Now every Saturday and Sunday, Total Access Games does business at the Henrico County Minimall, 4000 Mechanicsville Turnpike.

“We recently hooked up with a national [new game] distributor,” says Scott. “ We want to eventually open our own store, selling both new and used games.”

But there’s more to Scott than video games. In addition to working his full-time job at Carriage House Textbooks, he works for VCU police as escort dispatcher three nights each month. And he does tarot card readings. “Other people saw me doing it for friends, and they wanted a reading too, “ he explains doubt how he started in the mystical business. He’s thinking of combining tarot readings with herbal medicine sales at his own booth at the Minimall. “I do some herbal sampling now,’ says Scott. Aphrodisiacs are his most popular herbal combination; and using a recipe form a book, he makes a mixture to relieve menstrual cramps.

Scott came to Richmond from Baltimore where “There’s more of an underground economy.” In Baltimore, Scott worked as a security manager for a large hotel and made jewelry on the side. According to him, “Everyone in Baltimore is an artist.”

The Long Haul

Debra Hill thought her degree from the University of Virginia would get her somewhere. Her B.A. in psychology landed her at Woolworth’s, where she stocked shelves. “I wasn’t even qualified to be a cashier,” she says. She spent long months stuffing Chia pets onto shelves.
“For four years I had worked at the UVa. Shelter for Abused Women,” says Hill. “I thought that experience would help me get a good job; it didn’t.”

Hill finally landed a social services job. She wound up at a private agency that placed children in residential group homes with surrogate parents. It could have been a good job, Hill concedes, but the agency was mismanaged and things sometimes got out of hand with the kids. One of Hill’s coworkers was tied up by her charges, who made off with her car. Hill left soon afterward.

After forays into other careers such as selling insurance, Hill realized—as do many young professionals who discover just how slow the “fast track” really is—that she needed more education. She came to VCU as a temp (before temp work became the chic national trend), hoping to get an inside track for a permanent job at the university. A full-time job at VCU, she realized, usually translates into free classes.
Her dream was soon realized, and Hill began work in the master’s program in public administration.

Has the long road paid off for Hill? “If I had to do it again, I’d still volunteer to work in a women’s clinic, because that taught me a lot about life. But I’d minor in psych and get a degree in something more useful.”

Designing Destiny

Lisa Cumbie has often been mistaken for a Communist, mainly because of the name of her design studio—Design Manifesto. The questions about her political leanings were so prevalent when she first opened her business that she began adding “An American Print Communications Agency for Fun and Profit” to her company’s name.

All politics aside, Design Manifesto is making a name for itself as one of the hipper design firms in this conservatively designed city of ours. Her clients have included Central Fidelity, Hand Workshop, the American Heart Association, Virginia Power, and others.

Describing Design Manifesto’s work, Cumbie says, “We do hot, funky design, but we know how to take conservative people in this city and pull them into the design world.” She says the key to Design Manifesto’s success has been offering the clients more design choices and pushing the envelope. “We serve their communications purposes, but we rarely take the safe route.”

The firm rarely encounters resistance from clients. “They’re conservative because they don’t know any better. We give them more choices.”

Want to check out Design Manifesto’s work? Visit Mongrel (formerly Cards Cards Cards) in Carytown. When Cards Cards Cards busted out the walls to the empty storefront next door, Cumbie’s firm redesigned the whole identity for the business, from the logo to those nifty yellow drink huggies to the price tags to the front of the building. Print design is just one of Design Manifesto’s mediums. Recently, they’ve been branching out into murals, exhibitions, garment design, and even trophy design.

Cumbie entered the design world not just by the back door, but by running up the alley and climbing over the fence first. Originally an Art Education major at Longwood College, Cumbie changed her major to Fine Arts shortly before graduating. “I didn’t want to be a teacher with an attitude.” After college she bluffed her way into a job as a paste-up artist at a small newspaper. “It was the only thing I could find that had the word ‘artist’ in the job.”

From there she moved to a small ad firm as an artist, but soon after arriving the art director left and Cumbie found herself promoted to art director. Not really knowing what to do as an art director, she practiced at night at home by picking companies out of the phonebook and designing for them. No one ever saw that work, but she says it’s where her skills were honed.

She worked at a couple of other firms before opening Design Manifesto. She says one of the keys to her success is that “I have never done work with people whose ethics I don’t believe in.” In fact, when she became art director for the first time, the company’s biggest account was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. She made a deal with the firm—if she could find another account of equivalent value, they would drop the Moral Majority. She did, and they booted Falwell and Company. Just as well—Falwell probably would not like working for a bunch of Communists.

College Media Kingpin

Look at a piece of modern art. It’s just a splash of paint and some corn flakes. Anyone can do that, you tell a friend. Your friend, an abstract aficionado, lets you know that it’s not the talent, but the idea that matters.

C. Mason Gates didn’t reinvent the magazine format for his publication, nor did he develop the notion of informational bulletin boards as sales tools. But he had the idea that colleges held an untapped supply of advertising victims.

That idea, coupled with his desire to never have a boring desk job, he began Gates Publishing and Design Group in 1991. He was 26 and had a staff of one—himself.

Today, Gates Communications LP employs three full-time staffers dedicated to serving the college market. They produce Gates Magazine, a full-color magazine designed to spend those college kids’ discretionary dollars. Gates also produces the Campus Voice, “wall magazines” located at high-trafficked corners of campuses around the country. Gates Magazine distributes 50,000 copies to Virginia universities and the company is looking at national distribution.

Gates is pleased with his success and the generally relaxed office environment he has created. One of his goals was to create a job that was the antithesis of his summer jobs where workers prayed for the end of the work day.

“I prefer to have my job and personal life integrated rather than polarized into distinct entities, like the lives of so many people in my parents’ generation.”

But the integration of the personal and professional worlds makes for long work days. Gates says he often sleeps on the office floor after working until 11 p.m., but compensates by squeezing a few games of pool into his afternoon.

A Career in Art?

“I was raised to take my place in the Black Bourgeoisie,“ says Janine Bell, sitting comfortable in her office/art gallery/gift shop/performance space eating cookies. Black Bourgeoisie probably isn’t what pops into the minds of Richmond matrons as Bell strolls to her Franklin Street studio in her African-inspired prints and below-the-waist dredlocks. But Bell isn’t some whacked radical, she’s something Richmond has too few of—a true original.

Bell is president of the Elegba Folklore Society, a cultural and arts promotions and programming organization. Some of the events Elegba coordinates are the Kwanzaa festival at the Richmond Centre, the popular Jackson Ward Down Home Family Reunion festival in August and last year’s Unity Walk.

Bell started putting together festivals and events while growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the 70s.

It was there that she also hosted a weekly teen talk show—predating Ricki and Jane by two decades. “We talked about sex education on the air and got into a lot of trouble. It was a controversial topic in North Carolina in the 1970s.”

As a member of the black student movement at the University of North Carolina, Bell continued organizing cultural events. At the time, UNC was only 5 percent black. While Bell enjoyed arts programming, she considered it too fun to ever possibly be a career. “I didn’t have the guidance at the time to major in some sort of communications area. Besides, I thought a career had to be ‘serious.’”

So Bell majored in psychology and went on to complete the coursework for a master’s degree in urban planning at UNC. By then, the go-go 80s were about to beckon and the Black Bourgeoisie was calling. Bell moved to Washington, DC, and took a job as an urban planner for the federal government, continuing her work with arts groups on the side.

A second job in urban planning took Bell to Petersburg, where she met the members of Richmond’s African dance group, Ezibu Muntu. Bell began to take dance lessons, eventually jumping from urban planning into the arts world. In the late 80s, she began working full-time as Ezibu Muntu’s manager and as the manager for the Last Stop Gallery in Shockoe Bottom.

By 1990, Bell was ready to strike out on her own, forming not one, but two firms. New Visions at Linden Row was a public relations firm specializing in arts promotion, while Capital City Promotions was a not-for-profit arts programming organization. Both were successful, but Bell folded them into the Elegba Folklore Society in 1993.

The official union of Bell’s mainstream public relations firm and arts group is more than symbolic. It represents a significant turning point on the journey that many young Americans embark—to find oneself. Bell has succeeded in pursuing her interests in arts and culture, while simultaneously forging a career as a promoter and community builder. Through it all, she keeps discovering more about herself.

“Most people are comfortable wedging themselves into some niche society provides,” she says.

“Acceptance for me means that people understand that I am a blended person, a contemporary American of African heritage. I am who I am and I don’t need to ‘fit in’ to belong.”