What would you do?

Stuck on the Shelf
written by JusHH

Imagine you are just getting out of school and after years of working hard, you are finally ready to get out into the workforce. You prepare your resume for hours – reviewing it with friends, checking online for different formats and making sure that you make that retail job look as professional as possible. Next is the search. You hit up website after website, newspaper after newspaper looking for a job opening in your field. You ask your colleagues if they know of anything and tap whatever contacts that you have. After several weeks of emailing your resume and making inquiries, you get some call backs. All excited you head to the mall to buy a brand new suit and get prepared for your interviews. The next few days are spent rehearsing your answers in front of the mirror. You want to make sure your body language is just right. The day of the interview comes and you are on point: had the right amount of sleep the night before, the right amount of coffee that day and you felt like a million bucks. The questions that were asked, matched the perfect answers that you had prepared. It couldn’t have gone any better, plus this was your dream job. All of those countless hours of hard work and commitment led to this point, to these words…

You’re hired.

Sitting on cloud nine, you call, text, tweet and facebook everyone that you know letting them know that you finally got put on. You finally made it. The feeling cannot be matched. All you can think about is your first day of work and being able to show your skills and get your career started. You already imagine how your new lifestyle will look like, what you will buy and how happy you will be knowing that you are finally comfortable. To handle any relocation or settling expenses, your job gives you a signing bonus to get you started. You’re not exactly rich but it’s more money than you’ve ever seen at one time in your life.

So you spend some. Not all of it, but just enough where you feel a little bit “flossy”. And now you’ve spent it, you know its just a matter of time before that check rolls in and you can buy that car or that house for your mom that you’ve been dying to buy. You can travel to all of those exotic locations that you’ve only seen on TV. Your supervisor gives you your first project and you get to work. With resources that you never even had before, you have even more passion and more drive than before. “All nighters” cannot even begin to describe your work ethic. Feeling like you will not only impress your boss and the company but the entire world, you put your final stamp on your first project. You run it over to your boss’ office and he says:

Hey this is great, we’ll put it out in 6 months and it will hit the ground running. In the meantime, here’s about 1/10 of your salary to hold you over until we launch your project. We can’t pay you your full amount until its out.

6 months turns into 8 months. 8 months turns into one year. During this time your boss keeps telling you that the company has other priorities and that the market isn’t as strong as it used to be so we can’t take the risk on a new project right now. One year turns into 18 months. Now your bills are piling up because you bought too much stuff thinking that you would start to get paid by now. You are so frustrated because you don’t know why things aren’t working out. The people around you keep asking when your project is coming out but you have no answers. You want to quit and find a new job but you don’t want to risk it. 18 months turns into whenever…

How would you feel if your job did that to you? What would you do?

No imagine you were a rapper.

To think that Papoose, Saigon, Crooked I, Joell Ortiz and so many others could sign major deals with top of the line companies and have their projects never see the light of day. Can you imagine the despair, anger and fear that goes into your mind not knowing if you will ever make it – after thinking that you’ve made it! We often joke or briefly brush over the idea of an artist’s album being pushed back, but there is a more human side to being on the shelf.

Just a thought.