Joel & Lewis Interview · Mar 31, 07:52 AM

September 18, 2006

Interview with Louis Martin and Joel Ventura-Business/Pleasure

Young Philosopher: What is work?

J: Something you do to make money.
L: Something you do to pay the bills.

YP: Is it work to help a friend move?

J: When you say work I think of a job. If you’re helping a friend move you’re doing a favor. It’s work but I take work as making money.

YP: What is pleasure?

L: When you’ve accomplished something. Whatever makes you feel good.

J: Pleasure is going to your job and enjoying it.

YP: You enjoy your job?

J: I love my job.

YP: Where do you work?

J: In the mailroom at ICM.
L: I also work in the mailroom.

YP: How do business and pleasure mix?

L: At work you can help someone out and feel good about it at the end of the day. And if you’re not going to work all stressed out everyday you feel good. I used to have this job where every morning I woke up hating the day. It was like the movie Office Space. Everyday was the worst day of my life. I was working in Human Resources and I hated my boss. She would always yell, never have a conversation, just yell. Some days she’d be fine and others she’d be crazy. It was too much to deal with. You should be able to go to work get the job done but not feel antagonized doing it.

YP: Joel, what’s the worst job you’ve ever had?

J: ICM is my first and only job. I started March 11th, 2002 and I’ve been here ever since.

L: I’ve had a few jobs down the line. I worked at KFC. The job itself was pretty awful but the people I worked with were cool.

YP: How important are the people you work with?

L & J: Very important, very.

J: Sometimes you have people who envy you at work. They’ll do the best they can to get you in trouble. If you have good people around you the day goes by quicker and everybody gets their work done.

L: The better you feel at work, the more work you’ll accomplish. At my old job I didn’t want to talk to my boss so if I didn’t know something I’d try to go around her and that would waste time because I could have just asked her to explain it to me. Less work gets done. You want good people around you because; better environment.
But if you’re always joking around nothing will get done. There needs to be a moderate level of fun at work.

YP: What job wouldn’t be any work for you?

J: Baseball.

L: There’s still work involved in baseball. You have to work out.

J: But it’s something you love to do.

L: You might like to play baseball but you might not like going to the gym everyday and everything else you’d have to do to be a pro.

J: I love baseball and I’d love to go to the gym everyday to play baseball.

YP: But you don’t get paid to play baseball. Once you get paid everything changes.

J: It becomes a good job.

L: It’s stressful. You might go into a slump and not be able to get out.

J: That’s in any job though.

YP: What do you think about “sleeping your way to the top?”

L: If you can do it, go for it.

J: It’s selfish but how many people think about you. If a female does that she shouldn’t let anybody know about it, she’ll look like a whore.

YP: What’s the most important thing to you at work?

J: Getting to the top. No one wants to be at the bottom. Everyone wants to own his or her own business and be on top, but not everyone is going to make it.

L: Most people want to be at the top but some people want to be at the bottom because there’s no stress at the bottom.

J: Not me, I want to be at the top, the top of the world?

YP: What are you doing to get to the top of the world, if you aren’t there already?

J: I haven’t made any moves yet; just been thinking a lot.

YP: What more do you want out of the business you’re in, than you already have?

J: More money, so I can save up and buy a house.

L: Money is important but you don’t want to get all this money and hate going to work. You spend most of your day at work.

J: I was raised without much money (very poor), grew up on food stamps, etc. I’m glad it was that way because I know what it was like to be like that and I’ll appreciate money more when I get more.
A lot of people are born rich.

YP: More people are born poor than are born rich but that may not be the case with the people who work where you do. Do you feel like you beat the odds, getting a job at ICM?

J: Of course I did. I got in through someone. You need somebody to get into ICM.

YP: It does no good to send in a resume?

J: No one gets in like that.

YP: Someone can bring you to the door but you had to get yourself in.

J: That’s true and I’ve been there for four and a half years.

YP: What pleasure do you get out of working?

J: Getting to know people, networking. You meet good people, people who treat you good.
L: Everything is not to network for business. You want to make friends and if they can help you, they can help you. I think networking is the best thing especially in an environment like this…people move around so much, and when you need something you’ll have a lot of people you can call.

YP: Do you ever find yourself talking to someone and you’re already thinking about what he or she could do for you?

L: I don’t really think like that. But I might feel bad asking someone for a job because I will be a reflection of the person who brings me into HR.

YP: Can you be friends with the people you work with?

J: You can.
L: All the people I hang out with are from work. I’ve been places where I didn’t know anybody and eventually the only people I knew were from work.

J: Where’d you live?
L: Germany.

YP: What were you doing in Germany?

L: Working for 3 1/2 years. It was the human resources job we were talking about.

YP: What do you think Joel? Can you be friends with people you work with?

J: I think so.

YP: The environment at work is weird because you have a boss, you can get in trouble. There are things that affect a relationship that don’t exist outside of work.

L: When you’re friends, your peers at work, and your friend gets promoted to a higher level, it means you can get away with more. You won’t get in trouble because your friend is the boss but you have to learn there’s a line. Work is work. After work is after work.
Where I worked before I had a friend who was at a higher level than I was. We hung out all the time but at work I gave him the respect he deserved as a boss.
At work, I don’t bring up, ‘last night we were drunk…’ there’s no need for that here. I’ll go to his house after work and we’ll chit chat, but not at work. You have to show him the same respect you’d show a regular boss, not just a friend.

YP: How do you think it would affect a relationship if what one of the people did for work was something that the other only did for pleasure? Okay, think about it like this, say you make crossword puzzles for a living and you wife doesn’t but she likes nothing more than doing crossword puzzles.

J: It would get tiring. You don’t want to do your work at home.
L: It would put a lot of stress on the relationship and cause a lot of problems.

YP: Have you ever directly experienced this?

J: No.
L: I was seeing this girl who was a stripper but I didn’t really care about her. I don’t know how I would have felt if I actually cared about her. I wouldn’t want my wife or girlfriend to be a stripper because what if my friend sees her performing?

YP: What do you think about legal business versus illegal business?

J: I don’t agree with it at all because if I’m working my legal job and someone else is working their illegal job I’m paying a whole bunch in taxes and that person is paying nothing in taxes and making a whole bunch of money. I’m here struggling.

L: People get greedy. No matter what they have they want more. That’s just human nature. If you can see a way to get away with it most people will probably do it. And why not, if you’re going to get more money.

YP: What gives you the most pleasure?

J: Sex. I love women; they’re beautiful.

YP: And women love you?

J: Not all the time.
Other than sex. I like dancing and baseball.
L: This weekend I went to see my daughter. Every time I see her, she’s learned so much.

J: What’s your daughter’s name?
L: Alexandra.
J: How old is she?
L: She’ll be two in November. It’s amazing. At that age they’re little sponges. She repeats everything everyone says. It makes you happy to think you made this little person, and she gets bigger and smarter every time I see her. That’s my greatest source of pleasure right there.

YP: How often do you get to see her?

L: Usually every weekend unless something comes up.

YP: Do think you’d get more or less pleasure out of seeing her more.

L: I think it’s more pleasing now because I don’t see her everyday. I’m pretty sure that if I saw her everyday that it would be a routine. And when something becomes routine, it’s not that you don’t like it anymore but it becomes less pleasurable. If you love doing something every week or every couple of weeks and then you start doing it everyday you have more things to worry about. This thing is ruling my life.

YP: Isn’t there a lot of repetition in your work?

L: You know what’s going to happen every day, or every hour.

YP: Is that what makes a relationship work? While certain aspects can be pleasurable the relationship as a whole is work.

J: That is work. A lot of work. I’m in a relationship.
L: I recently got out of a relationship. I think the best part of a relationship is the beginning. When you fall for the person, it’s new to you and you feel on top of the world. Then repetition sets in, you see her every day, you do this everyday, you go to dinner here every Friday, you have sex with the same girl all the time and not that it’s bad but that also becomes work.

J: Also in the beginning you feel so good that you conquered this beautiful person but after you conquer her and you’ve already done everything with her, you want another one. You want more.

YP: Is work similar to that?

J: Definitely. You conquer something, you want more.
L: When you conquer your first mission at work. You finish that report or whatever, you feel good about yourself, like, ‘Wow. I did that.’ And then you do it every day and you’re like, “Okay.’ And then it becomes so routine that six months down the line, that thing that six months ago you conquered, you don’t really care about.

YP: What’s a “labor of love?”

J: Something you do for no charge that you’d only do for your loved ones.

L: People do crazy stuff for people they don’t even know. People volunteer for the love of people. When 9/11 happened a lot of people volunteered for the Salvation Army. My brother went down to ground zero for five days helping people out.
You might not normally go to a homeless shelter and give people food, you don’t want to waste your time but some people do that, volunteer their time. That’s for the love of unfortunate people, for the love of helping others.
When you’re in love with someone you’ll do anything for that person. But a lot of times you’ll do big things and forget about the little things.

YP: When is the last time you performed a labor of love? Maybe you didn’t even know what you were doing at the time but looking back you realize that you surprised yourself with what you were capable of doing.

L: When I change my daughter’s diapers.
I was in the Army and we used to do 24-hour shifts. My friend asked me, “Can you cover my shift?” I had just come off of a 24-hour shift. He needed to do something, I don’t remember what it was but it was really important to him, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”
I don’t know if I love him, but he’s my friend.

YP: What kind of work was it you did for 24 hours at a time?

L: Security. People had to sign in to get into the building. It’s just sitting there but it’s 24 hours that you have to stay awake and I had just done it when he asked me.

YP: What kept you going?

L: I was there with the sergeant. I fell asleep two times. My eyes were closing and sometimes there was nothing I could do. He kept getting me coffee but it wasn’t working. I got through it.

YP: What’s up in your world Joel?

J: I went to the Dominican Republic with my girlfriend. We went to the place where all the resorts are, a tourist attraction. It’s about six hours away from my family. One day we took a drive to see my family. One of my aunt’s has no money and no man to support her and she has two kids.
She was making a house but she didn’t have enough money so only half of it has a roof. The other half isn’t even done yet and they’re living there. Concrete walls. So, I left them two hundred dollars. I normally wouldn’t do that for anybody.

YP: Were you weighing how much you needed the money versus how much you thought they needed the money?

J: I needed the money but over here I have a full roof over my head and I have a job. I’m going to make more money. Meanwhile, they’re struggling to finish their house. They live in a third world country; it’s hard to do things over there, so I just left them the money.

YP: How did it feel?

J: It felt good. It’s sad but I felt good leaving the money.

L: Sometimes pleasure can also be selfish. A lot of times when people do things they think about themselves. You help somebody and it makes you feel good. It’s not selfless go give money to people.

J: I disagree. It makes you feel good but it also makes them feel good. If it makes them feel bad and it makes you feel good then it’s being selfish. If you both feel good then you’re doing a good deed.

L: I’m not saying that you’re doing a good deed.

J: I’m not saying that you’re talking about me.
If your intention is to get something back, then that’s being greedy. A lot of people do things just because they know they’ll get a kick back in their taxes; that’s being greedy. If you give expecting to receive that’s selfish.

L: But once you’ve gotten pleasure out of something, you’ve received.

YP: Can pleasure simply be a byproduct?

L: Everything you do, comes back to you.

J: If I’m a millionaire and I give 100 million dollars to a charity but I’m expecting something back in my taxes, I’m greedy.

L: Everything you do comes back to you, whatever you do it for and whatever happens, you do what you want to do.

L: You shouldn’t mix ‘em but you do mix ‘em; there’s nothing you can do about it.

Joel takes a big sniff of his Hennessey.

YP: What does that smell make you think about?

J: I think about the past, when I was drunk at a club. It can make me sick but I love it. Hennessey.

YP: When is the first time you tasted Hennessey?

J: About two years ago.

YP: Who’d you have it with?

J: My friend Lewis (a different Lewis).
I was tired of drinking like 80 beers to get drunk so we started drinking Hennessey. I drank a bottle alone one time.

— Albin

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