Daniel Rubin: Sidewalk job seeker finds work

Two weeks ago, aspiring sportswriter Kevin Smiley was parked at 16th and Market, resting a "Looking For Work" sign on the arms of his wheelchair.

Last week, the 2008 Temple grad was weighing two job possibilities.

And next week, he is to begin a paid internship at Comcast, where he'll work as an editorial assistant on the Comcast.net home page.

"It's a good start for me," he said the other day. "It's a way to get my foot in the door."

He'd been out of work since graduation in May 2008. His parents had been helping him with the rent for his Center City apartment. He was born with spina bifida and uses a wheelchair to get around, which he found easy in Philadelphia. He dreaded the thought of having to move back to less-accessible Lancaster.

At his mother's suggestion, he set up outside the Radian building along 16th Street five mornings in a row, handing out resumés, and found people to be surprisingly good-natured. One passerby handed his resumé to Chelsea Badeau, an editor at Comcast, who was looking for interns.

Smiley interviewed Sept. 4 and was a little surprised to be given a news-judgment test where he was asked which videos and pictures he'd choose to illustrate different articles.

"I think I did pretty well," he told me afterward.

"He had a really good interview," said Jenn Khoury, a Comcast spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, Marc Rayfield, who runs the CBS radio stations in Philadelphia, had read my column about Smiley and invited the 23-year-old in for a chat.

Rayfield had a part-time job in mind for Smiley, as a desk or production assistant or sound-board operator.

By e-mail, Rayfield said he'd been moved by the courage it took Smiley, a former wheelchair racer and basketball player, to camp on the sidewalk and advertise his hunger for a job.

"Young people typically do the same thing. They don't think outside of the box," Rayfield wrote. "I respect Kevin's creativity, perseverance and willingness to stop at nothing to get a job. He caught my attention, and kids who aren't scared to push a little harder make it in media today."

Smiley told Rayfield he was leaning toward the full-time Comcast position, which lasts until March. He didn't want me to print what he'll be making at Comcast, other than to say the pay is "pretty nice."

"I'm not too greedy," he said. "My parents have been paying the rent. This will help a lot."

Etheljean Deal is so angry she could split an infinitive.

The English teacher at Gateway Regional High School in Deptford considers herself a stickler when it comes to grammar, always correcting her students' misuse of the words lay and lie.

On a recent trip across the river she found herself in the PATCO station at 13th and Locust, fuming at a sign that listed assorted forbidden activities:

"No laying, sitting, sleeping on the floor."

For those who slept through English class, no laying would actually ban sex, an activity best performed elsewhere and one potentially distracting to the subway operators.

What is the point of insisting that her students be right, Deal asks by e-mail, when the world around them is wrong?

In fact, PATCO meant no loitering. That's what the new signs they've ordered will say.

Ed Kasuba, spokesman for the Delaware River Port Authority, which operates PATCO, says the agency's print shop will produce 25 decals to glue onto the existing signs, which are posted throughout the PATCO system.

In three years, officials have fielded only a couple of complaints about misusage, he says.

From English teachers? I ask.

"I have no idea," he replies.

There was some thought of banning lying, Kasuba observes, but "no lying doesn't sound too good."