It was 2012 and I’d been jobless for about a year. At the time, I thought it was viable to sell weed and hang around with friends who were doing a lot of that too. Although it wasn’t my most ambitious year, I was learning my creative process. I started reading more vigorously about craft. I was experimenting with humor and visual design in my work. I considered my blog efforts like “zines,” meant to conjure a specific voice for a specific moment and end. A recruiter reached out to me about a gig as the editor-in-chief for a hip-hop site. Most of my work was about rap music and I thrived using it as source material for essays about the self. I’d been blogging for The Smoking Section, a premiere mixtape hub and news thread, interviewing everyone from Joe Budden to Saul Williams. But I did a lot of that work for free to get my name out there and create a portfolio. The paid work I’d done was in the nonprofit philanthropy world or education.
The site the recruiter wanted me to interview for was a seminal rap outlet well past its heyday. Still, a friend whose writing I truly loved had worked there and it seemed like it could be a launchpad for me too. I went to New Jersey in dress pants and a collared shirt. I didn’t smoke my morning J either. This was real business. My friend exalted my blogging credentials to the agency and they sent me to the site’s owners the next day.
So I traveled to Jersey City on the commuter rail. The founder of the site, a strong-minded Gen X entrepreneur, grilled me about their history. Did I know their origins as a faxed newsletter? Was I around when they were brute-force hacked by a racist forum? She touted herself as a pioneer and told me she liked me but felt protective of her baby. “This site is how I feed my kids.”
That’s when things got strange.
She hired me through the agency but spent the next week telling me how much of a burden it was to pay my salary and the recruitment firm. She told me that if I agreed to a direct deal with her, she could pay me what the go-between was collecting as a finder’s fee. I began work on her site, focusing a lot of effort on new social media presence and burnishing its voice in a crowded field. For a month, as she wrangled out of the deal with the agency, they withheld my pay. I kept quiet, hoping that it would work out for me in the end with a higher wage. I even cut ties with the agency on the promise that she’d have my back. That didn’t happen. One Friday afternoon, she sat me down for a talk.
“Andrew, I’m glad we were able to come to an agreement but it’s a little different when I look at the numbers.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought I wanted to pay you the difference but that won’t work for us. The cost is too high for this work.”
She then offered me even less than the original amount the agency was paying. I sat there, legs tapping the wheels on the rolling chair, chest heaving. Their office was about 88 degrees because of a broken AC so sweat pooled in my lower back. Then, she gave me some callous, ill-timed advice.
“You have to look at these situations like a relationship. Would you get married to a girl you only just met? This is when you should really hesitate before making a deal that doesn’t suit you.”
I left hanging my head. I’d been played like a newcomer at his first Cee-lo hustle, loaded dice and all. The following Monday, I came to the office high and dejected. I invited my younger co-workers out to the Jersey pier for a smoke and came back giggling. I laid out my gripe to them on the company messaging system so they knew not to trust her either. She asked me to leave, saying I smelled like “illegal drugs.” She didn’t want that in her place of business.
On the train ride back to Brooklyn, I told my then-girlfriend what had gone down. She thought I’d been stubborn and should’ve kept the job. But I felt cheated and knew that if I let this person trample my value, I’d only leave myself open to others doing the same. Capitalism is a dirty game and only the losers operate in “good faith” while everyone else steals. They steal time, money, and, worst of all, dignity. That’s the second lesson I learned: don’t lose your dignity in the name of a paycheck.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Andrew Ricketts' work on Medium.