Dialin' for Dollars

He's dabbled in call centers, census work and newspaper-hawking. Now, one New York newcomer opens up about the surprisingly comical side of life at minimum wage.

Illustrations by Bill O’Rourke

Ryan Patrick Bias (that’s me) sits on the toilet at his second new job in Manhattan, pretending to poop to pass the time, and it’s reminding him of the second grade when he was afraid. It wasn’t that he was scared of the numbers necessary to make long division magic. It was that he wanted to go college, but he didn’t know how to get there from where he was.

That’s what I thought about myself when I was thinking about myself when I was pretending to poop. At twenty-two, I had just moved to New York City to be famous, to run away from a stereotypically bad childhood, and to find a job. I found work at a Midtown call center. For the first time since I started looking for a job, phones rang all around me, but I didn’t wanna answer a single one—not until I had something to say.

I wasn’t only thinking about myself. I also spent a lot of time thinking about other people, including Izzy. She was the volunteer employment specialist at the underprivileged youth organ…