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Comment by mmanfrin | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how the Container Store fits in to this story, other than the fact that she was denied a job. Also, I disagree with this:

  Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land
  a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed.

Being an author does not qualify you to work in Loss Prevention. It may, as gdilla pointed out in another comment, even make you overqualified for the position.

I sympathize with the author, and I think there is a compelling story here about healthcare, but the title undermines it severely by making it about how she failed one attempt to get an entry-level job; and it almost feels like a form of blackmail: The Container Store now has to deal with this widely-shared article about how they didn't give a poor, cancer-having mother a small little job.

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The Container Store didn't come off badly in this article. She spent paragraphs talking about how much she liked their products. This article was about how easy it is to fall completely through the cracks, and realize you are actually looking at death and starvation, and there's no safety net, through no fault of your own. The author figured her last lifeboat was she could always get a McJob (which is most people's belief) if things ever went really wrong, and then she learned that she couldn't even get that, and the ones she could, wouldn't give her benefits / enough money to pay her medical bills. Most people don't really realize what its like to be in that situation, and realize that you are now fighting for your life in a system that doesn't care.

I agree that the Container Store (meaning the company, the physical store, the people who work there) doesn't fit into the story very well. I think that for the author, the Container Store is a symbol of order and control in the author's otherwise chaotic and out of control life. Containers allow people to organize their things, so, to the author, the Container Store symbolizes taking control of and organizing one's life; placing each piece of it into the right "bin". The author feels like their life is out of control and the rejection from the Container Store thus reflects that symbolically. The author should have expanded further on what the Container Store means to her, but I think I have a reasonable interpretation.

Agreed. Harvard grad isn't going to cut it. If she had worked a little harder and gotten into Stanford, then she might have gotten the job and be considered worthy of receiving health care. The credentials and education required for loss prevention are staggering and I'm sure they only hire the top 1% of grads, and she's probably only in the top 2%. The rest of the countries population can eat cake.

I agree. Given the fact that she mentioned multiple times trying to sell a novel and a tv pilot, I doubt that this was an earnest attempt to get a job, but rather an earnest attempt to get fodder for an overly-complicated article about being rejected from a menial job at the expense of somebody else (The Container Store).

For all we know, they rejected her to give somebody who didn't have a Harvard degree a chance to earn some income.

I don't think it was about the article. It was an attempt to get a job with health insurance because she messed up her health insurance situation after she lost her previous job.

It may be technically true that "she messed up her health insurance", but note how easy it was to do that while believing she was doing the right thing. Using some programming parlance, the system did a terrible job of "making invalid states unrepresentable".

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