Zine 0: Impromptu PTCB Exam Guide

Zine 1 has been a work in progress for almost a year at this point. It's definitely a topic I want to really take my time on. It might never be finished. There's a lot of feelings around the topic for me, after all.

Now that it's early September, most of the college kids at my job are gone. The thing about this store that's so vastly different from my old store is that we had like, 11-12 technicians total (all of which were full-time), and between 5-9 were working on any given day. At this store, there are a total of 39 employed techicians and 23 scheduled on any given weekday (11 on the weekends).

I started working here in May, right around the same time that all the college kids started their break. Technically, I was also enrolled in college, and my break was also beginning, but I had been working full time for nearly the entire 5 years I had worked there unlike them. I had also been acutely aware (not just from my experience here, but also my experience at the retail store I worked at 3 years ago) that college kids got a disproportionate number of labor hours compared to the full time career techs during these breaks. Even if I was attending the same university as my college-aged coworkers, I've always felt more similarly to the full-time techs; after all, when I started this job I had thought that it was the end-game career for the rest of my life.

At my last store I spent the whole day around the same 8 people, but here I can go days without directly working with some of my other full-time coworkers. Sometimes, expecially for certain ones, it can be weeks. I noticed one coworker seemed to work once every three weeks, and apparently it wasn't just like, a former employee wanting to hold onto their discount. The other day, after I had helped her set up an immunization in the system, she said I would make a good teacher, and asked if I was certified. I told her yeah, I had been certified for almost 5 years. She asked if I had any pointers on taking the certification exam - which shocked me, that she got so few hours at this job, and the times that I did see her, they kept her on the register the entire 8 hours.

I also started working for this company as an "apprentice" with no prior experience or certification. And the "apprenticeship" that they had had barely covered the material needed to pass, plus since it was interspersed with time spent working at the register, it took forever to complete. Within a few months of working for this company, I decided to pay for my own certification course. I bypassed the apprenticeship altogether and showed up 5 months later with my certification.

Getting to know this coworker, whose story was so similar to mine, I felt so strongly for her situation. I decided to write up a quick guide to my tips on the PTCB.

And by "quick guide" I mean nearly 3300 words, 20 pages (that is, 20 pages in zine format). And then I arranged the pages into a pintable zine.

Printable PDF (Flip on Long Edge)

The next time we work together will be Monday. I'm going to try to put together a sample question zine to go with this one.

Original published date: 9-9-2026

Update 9-10: today I talked to one of my coworkers about this, thinking that maybe someone who had gotten certified more recently than me would have some insights on what to add. I forgot to bring her a copy to look over, but I did also give a copy to another tech who I found out wasn't certified yet, so that she could look over it. Then I read through the printed copy in entirety myself and oh boy I wish I had looked over it before giving it to her (even if I told her I was looking for feedback). It's got a lot of run-on sentences and a handful of typos I want to fix. But I'll check in with her on Tuesday when I work next.