I've had a lot of jobs (part 3)
This is starting to get ridiculous
Where were we? Ahh, yes. Best Buy chat support. Well, fun as the job was, they paid garbage wages, so I went out, again, in search of an additional gig to supplement my meager income.
(Catch up with Part One and Part Two!)
Cocktail server at a chicken restaurant
My mom knew the owners of this place somehow. The details escape me, but she hooked me up with a job there as a cocktail server one night a week. I thought I could give serving another try, and that maybe keeping it to cocktails would make it simpler and more profitable.
That one day a week turned out to be “Liberian Lounge Night,” an accidental homage to that suburb's most prominent immigrant population who had just sort of claimed the place every Wednesday. That first night, I was thrown to the wolves.
“Just walk around with these shots and ask people if they want any. They're $4 each,” the manager brusquely instructed me. “They're usually $3 each, but they don't tip,” I frowned. “…so I overcharge them a dollar for everything and give that to you guys at the end of your shift.” I smiled. This was gonna be an all right gig, probably.
Lol.
I would proceed to nervously weave in and out of the huge crowd made up entirely of Liberian immigrants with bright, colorful clothing, who sneered at me for reasons I never could figure out as they considered whether to buy one of my shots. Bosslady was right: I didn’t get a single tip from anyone.
At a certain point I was to go around and ask everyone if they wanted to order the dinner special, some kind of Liberian fish dish that looked something like this. I don't remember what it was called, just that the intact fish faces were staring deadly at me as I brought out the dishes.
No one could make a decision, and I was barked at or waved away dismissively by about half the customers, and I couldn't hear or understand the other half. It was all very confusing. The whole atmosphere was so aggressive and bright and loud and so much more fast-paced than I was used to. Learning, once again, that I was not cut out for serving of any kind, I went to the kitchen and walked up to the manager.
“I… I… I don’t think I can…” I started to sniffle.
“It’s fine, I figured,” Bosslady cut me off, reaching into a bank bag to count out the “tips” I’d already earned. “It’s not for everyone!” she handed me the money and nicely told me to go home. I sniffled some more, thanked her, and got the hell out of there.
Call center supervisor, 29
The glory of Best Buy chat support couldn't last forever. After about a year, Best Buy pulled the contract and sold it to the Philippines or something, and they would soon be dispersing us typers amongst the phone-answerers. We were devastated, and a handful of people just quit, unable to fathom talking to these people with their voices. I didn’t blame them. We were a special kind of sheltered over in chat, especially if you were a call center veteran and knew what the alternative was like. We knew how lucky we were, and we saw the envy all over the faces of those on the phones during smoke breaks. They wanted to be us so bad and they couldn't help but smirk at our horror at acquiring their fate. I dreaded the transfer back to the phone world, but I stayed.
I had a vacation planned and didn't yet know which client they'd be sending me to. I was desperately hoping it wouldn't be Verizon, our newest, largest, and most infamously miserable contract, and instead had my eye on MNsure, the brand-new online healthcare marketplace that had been created for the ACA in Minnesota. I didn't know what the job entailed exactly, but I figured if I had to talk on the goddamned phone again, at least I'd get to learn about and do something more valuable than giving people order and product updates. (It turned out the company would pay me so little that I actually qualified for the newly-expanded Medicaid. While working the MNsure contract. The irony remains amazing.)
It happened, I was put in MNsure like I wanted, and it was truly awful for a person with any level of compassion. The website was brand new and a complete mess, wait times were at least 45 minutes for these customers so they were always angry and we were always busy. We got two days of very minimal training before being shoved into the phones and had no real way to help anyone with anything other than to tell them to try Chrome instead of Internet Explorer. People with cancer and other awful health issues were calling in and crying and all we really were was discount 3rd party tech support for the website itself. It was brutal for customers and employees alike.
Somehow, despite my continually poor attendance, I was promoted to supervisor after about a month of taking those calls. Supervisor training consisted primarily of watching inspirational Simon Sinek Ted Talks about novel new leadership ideas they would go on to never allow us to fully implement, and how to handle a stinky employee. We thought that last part was a funny thing that probably never happened (you know where this is going).
My attendance improved instantly — I had a mission now, and I became obsessed with my job and never missed another day. The Ted Talks apparently worked on me. I knew how terrible call center life was and I knew that MNsure, being a government contract, was incredibly generous with their availability codes. This meant that I could pull people off the phones for “training” and “coaching” much more often than other contracts typically allowed without financial penalty from the client. I used those trainings not only to teach them about their current job, but to set up shadowing sessions with employees in other, non-phone areas and gave them more tasks they could eventually use on resumes to get out of the damn call center. One gal who repeatedly locked herself out of the system we needed to take calls (I knew she did this on purpose but I could never prove it) was autistic and utterly miserable in her position, but she was easily the smartest employee I had who, when you could actually get her on the phone, would be my best, most knowledgeable and helpful CSR. For the times she was off the phone, I tasked her with writing a job manual for our department, collecting all policy and procedural information we’d learned over the months into a centralized location, something we desperately needed, and she was more than happy to take on the responsibility.
I couldn't make most of the material realities of the job better, like the pay or schedule or the nature of the job itself, but I was blessedly given the freedom to do a few things to make their days a little less miserable on that contract. I scheduled as many team meetings as I could get away with because, literally like the fucking meme, while they wouldn’t raise the base pay rate, they were always willing to spring for pacifying pizza and had a surprising amount of money allotted for “meeting food” worked into the department’s budget.
MNsure also ended the contract. It was a short-lived one, only 6 months or so. The actual state organization snatched up a lucky few members of the team and paid them properly as state employees, and the rest of us were shuttled to our ultimate fate: Verizon.
My team was almost entirely the same people I had in MNsure, only now including Mitt, who would be placed on my team fully to punish me for laughing during the stinky-employee unit of supervisor training: dude reeked. He always appeared to be kind of… shedding something, almost like that cloud of flies on Pigpen, and his clothes were wrinkled and covered in what I can only assume was a Swiss Alps amount of dandruff. He smelled vaguely homeless, almost like Clarence from the Bunny Store of Part One, but less boozy and more… mildewy. Now, fixing his personal hygiene had become my responsibility.
I have mostly blocked this entire mortifying conversation from my memory, but I know I tried to be a gentle as possible. I remember him saying defensively, “I take showers!” and that's when it occurred to me that I didn't think he actually regularly washed his clothes. The flaky old black metal t-shirts he wore every day just hadn't been washed since 1998.
His hygiene would not improve. Other employees would continue to complain to me about it. I turned I over to my own boss to handle.
Professional photo lab customer service, 31
Guess how I left the Verizon call center supervising gig. Just guess.
Anyway, after I exited the building in tears that fall after too many “exempt” 60-hour work weeks making less than my employees did working their own overtime, I applied to the real MNsure and a few other places, unsuccessfully. It was October now and places were just starting to hire seasonal labor. I saw that a professional digital photo lab nearby was hiring — one we’d heard about back at the old photo lab of my early 20s, a practically mythical institution of well-oiled photo production that paid much better than our one-hour mall lab.
I got hired for customer service this time, which I thought I wanted because it paid more. After settling into my new customer service cube, I immediately regretted it and longed to be in the lab. My job was to call customers whose photo orders had problems and asked them what they'd like to do about it. I got to use Photoshop and listen to podcasts and drink tea all day. It didn't completely suck, but my the end of the season, having made zero friends with any of the snooty customer service employees who ignored seasonal temps like we were a cold virus, I was already over being in a cubicle again. I didn't even try to get hired on permanently and decided to enroll in yoga teacher training afterwards instead.
That was a massive fail of a first attempt that I'll talk about some other day!
Beertender, 31
During yoga teacher training, I discovered a new brewery had opened up a couple blocks from my house on my walk home. I went in and seemingly without being able to control myself, asked if they were hiring. Sure enough, one of the owners wasn't interested in serving behind the bar anymore and wanted to hire someone. I was in the right place at the right time and was hired on to this very in-demand job, as breweries with taprooms had finally become legal in Minnesota and everyone wanted in.
This job was easily the most fun I ever had working anywhere. Because of the newness of the brewery scene in the Twin Cities, the industry was extremely cheerful and generous and I could suddenly drink craft beer for free at pretty much any taproom I visited, and ours reciprocated happily. We basically treated each other like local royalty, and occasionally, so did our customers. I got recognized on the street downtown as “that Wabasha girl!” more than once. I didn’t have to actually serve people at tables, which was an absolute gift from the hospitality universe; all I had to do, serving-wise, was pour beer. I was, of course, expected to chat amiably with my bar guests, which came very naturally. Drunk people can be annoying when you're not drinking with them, but brewery customers didn't tend to get as crazy as a typical bar-goer. I made tons of friends that I’m still in contact with today. It was amazing until it wasn’t.
I’ll spare you the boring details, but after a number of changes culminating in a re-titling of certain management in order to allow them to earn tips so they could get away with paying them less, thereby cutting my income literally in half, I left. I still make a point to visit whenever I'm back in Minnesota, though, mostly for the jalapeño beer and the regulars. No hard feelings. Mostly.
Parks and Rec, 31
I discovered this job when I was still only working at the brewery a couple days a week and needed more money. I was pretty much the oldest non-boss there, surrounded and trained by teenagers who did this every summer because it was so easy. I was told that it was a pretty sure bet that I did get a full-time position there if I came back next year.
This job was really nothing like I'd experienced before: it was actually physical in ways that weren't just standing behind a register or a bar, but not too difficult or complicated for someone of my stature. I was sincerely excited for the change of pace.
I spent my days loading the various equipment into either the Mule or the city truck, depending on what we were doing that day, and driving from park to park, weed-whacking and picking up litter and setting up for events and cleaning the horrifyingly revolting public restrooms with barely-reflective metal instead of mirrors because they kept being broken. I literally loved every second. I was getting stronger from all the actual labor and I finally learned how lawn equipment worked. And that some people say “weed whip” instead of “weed whack,” which is weird.
My first day, I would be in charge of driving the full-sized city Parks and Rec pickup truck to one of our parks we needed to clean up. As we were leaving, I immediately backed into a large, decorative boulder. My coworker and I hopped out to assess the damage.
Great, I thought. I will be fired on my first day for crashing the fucking city truck.
My new coworker looked at the dent in the truck bed and shrugged. “I've seen worse. They won't notice.” (She was right.)
One of the most surprising — and oddly freeing — thing about the job was that we could drive those damn trucks anywhere. Well, more accurately, on anything. We did not merely park on the street next to the park; we drove over the curb into the park itself and parked directly next to the bathrooms, aggressively and enthusiastically. In my dented city truck, I could do anything.
I only left because the brewery wouldn’t cooperate with my Parks and Rec schedule, but the brewery also wouldn’t lay me off at the end of the summer, so they won.
Professional photo lab production, 33
By this point my then-boyfriend, now-husband and I had moved in together. He had recently separated from the military and I just had my tip earnings halved at the brewery. I told him about the professional photo lab where I’d worked for a season a couple years prior, and we both applied, this time for the lab. We got the jobs and had a great time working together. We were both offered full-time, permanent positions after the season was over, which we happily accepted, but then Boyfriend-Husband suddenly received a much better job offer out of nowhere.
We moved to Virginia three weeks later.
I’ll tell you all about my working life in Virginia, so far, in Part Four and Part Five.
Maybe just my pessimistic nature but three parts in, with not many exceptions this series read like an homage to the abject fucking misery of US employment culture. I’m not sure I would have made it to 33 years old if my employment history was like yours, and I’m glad you appear to be made of sterner stuff.
Good piece again by the way, just to make sure you don’t take my comments as criticism of what you wrote.
Really enjoying this series, looking forward to the next ones!