I've had a lot of jobs (part 4)
Virginia edition
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Catch up here on Part One, Part Two, and Part Three!
Like I mentioned in Part Three, Husband (then-boyfriend) was offered a job in Northern Virginia and we decided to move together.
Before we moved, we were renting a huge apartment in a small building owned by one of my brewery regulars’ cousins, and we rapidly got two sets of our friends to move into two of the other empty units. It was a takeover. We had a 3-season front porch, a new back deck, a huge kitchen with the goofiest linoleum and paint combinations possible (we loved it), and 3 bedrooms. We paid $600 a month and I lived 6 blocks from work. It was 2016 and we were in our 30s, surrounded by all our best friends like it was a grown-up dorm. We swore we’d never leave.
…Six months later, we would leave for the expensive Virginian suburbs of DC, some 1200ish miles away, where we would definitely never pay $600 a month for a giant 3-bedroom apartment ever again.
I was excited by the prospects of living in the orbit of such a powerful and important city. What kind of work would I do there? Could I make a real difference somehow? Could I get a great DC job in the government somehow, with my strange and wide array of job experience? I thought maybe I’d be inspired to write more and get back into activism, maybe combine it with photography somehow.
I started looking online at jobs in the area before we left and found that seemingly every decent job required a security clearance, which I certainly didn’t have and wasn’t sure how to acquire. I resolved to figure it out.
Brewery and restaurant server, 33
Upon arrival in our new home, we quickly realized that our financial situation was going to remain precarious until Husband started getting paychecks from the new job and we had paid off the last straggling utility and other bills from Minnesota, so I looked for a job I could get more quickly while I explored the lay of the land to see what my options were. We were staying with Husband’s brother and his family in an exurb of DC while we got ourselves situated and found a place of our own, so I started there.
We found a cool brewery with a restaurant and trivia night in downtown Fredericksburg a few days after we arrived in the state. Because it was a brewery, I felt very confident and asked the bartender if they were hiring, and sure enough, they were, but not for bartenders, only servers. Of course. I was hired anyway and started a few days later, because why the fuck not try serving again despite my disastrous restaurant track record? But I figured I had a good shot of becoming a bartender soon with my specific brewery experience, so I thought I could handle a short wait time starting out as a server.
I lasted one slow lunch shift and about fifteen minutes of a Friday dinner shift before leaving in tears, apparently my preferred job-quitting method now, overwhelmed by their very lassiez-faire seating system and nonexistent sections. The fact that Virginia is a tip-credit state and I was only earning a $2.13 base wage didn’t help any — I was used to Minnesota, where tipped employees earn the full minimum wage in addition to their tips (Minnesota is one of only seven states to require this of their restaurants).
I learned my lesson. No more serving, anywhere, ever again, no matter how cool the place seemed. Especially not in a tip credit state. I needed actual paychecks.
Claims adjuster at a large insurance company, 33
Since I wanted to avoid any more restaurants and call centers and already got the first restaurant out of the way, I applied for the next most sensible position I could find: claims adjuster in the call center of a large insurance company. Naturally. We’ll just call them ACRONYM. They offered a higher starting wage than I’d ever earned at that point (if you don’t count the first brewery before I had to start sharing tips with my boss): $17.65 an hour.
I passed the phone interview and cleared the rest of the corporate hurdles and scheduled my “HR day,” which was several hours long and included a series of tests and interviews and acted-out scenarios and job-shadowing and waiting around. I did one of my assessments in a room full of computers, seated next to a young woman who couldn’t have been older than 21. She’d come from Alorica — a large 3rd party call center with a horrid reputation that would eventually buy the one I worked for doing Best Buy chat support, MNsure, and Verizon supervising in Minnesota. This gal’s contract was with Comcast; I shuddered at the thought. I asked her how much she made there. She told me, proudly, that she made $9.00 an hour, “but there’s so much overtime available. You can make so much money!”
I was appalled at every single thing that came out of her mouth during that conversation. She thought $9.00 an hour was good? She thought that working in a call center for even a nanosecond longer than 40 hours a week just to get a more livable paycheck was enjoyable? Was this region under some kind of mass delusion? Did they not understand that these were not reasonable wages for such a job in such a high cost of living area? Did these people have no pride?!1
I almost left the HR day before it began when I saw the signs all over the walls that said “hair samples required for drug screening.” They were framed and had tufts of cut doll hair to show how much they were going to take, which was a surprisingly thick amount. I quickly checked my phone to see how long THC stays in your hair: up to 90 days! There was no way I was getting this job; it had only been, like, 3 days since I last smoked weed after a few years of regular use, expecting only to need to pass a standard pre-employment UA, easy enough to cheat with those overpriced vitamin drinks you could get at head shops. Those don't work on hair.
I decided to stay and put myself through the pointless torture of the HR day and the hair test, anyway, just in case. I read the rules and, after the drug test surely showed up positive, I could reapply in 6 months. I was hired conditionally, awaiting the results of my drug test. I didn’t think much of it, expecting a phone call informing me that I had failed. I kept looking for jobs.
They called me a few days later to tell me what to expect on orientation day. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. I still don’t know if the test was somehow faulty or if they just didn’t care about weed, despite it having been illegal in Virginia at the time. Eventually, as we in the training class started opening up a bit more, I learned I was not the only one who assumed they'd fail the drug test and had no idea how they passed. We compared bald spots from the hair we'd all had chopped off.
Despite being in yet another goddamned call center, I was excited for the training class because call center training classes were where you always made fast friends, and I was going to need some mere weeks after moving halfway across the country. Moving life hack!
This is where I met Todd, who I decided during orientation was going to be my first Virginia friend whether he liked it or not. He had said something in the large orientation group pertaining to the restaurant industry, which he had just left himself, and I sensed a kindred spirit, finally escaping the trenches for the first light at the end of many retail and food service tunnels: a call center. The worst job imaginable, but somehow preferable to food service for many. We would have many stories to trade.
I also met Corbin, who wore a beanie every day in class and talked like a very articulate surfer. He would entertain, happily, my constant insistence that he listen to Minneapolis hip-hop. We bonded over Eyedea and Abilities and Dessa. He introduced me to Aesop Rock.
It was out on the smoking patio that I ran into Justin, the server who was training me at the brewery the day I left in tears. Apparently he worked full-time in IT at ACRONYM and picked up the serving job for extra money. We said an awkward hello. Eventually Corbin, Todd and I started hanging out and organized training class outings to the very brewery where I’d gotten my first very brief Virginia job for trivia night (Justin would be our server) and Todd gave me the occasional ride before I got a car. I started buying weed from Corbin.
ACRONYM insurance claims training was like a crash (heh) course in Virginia culture. This is where I learned that a “tractor trailer” was not, in fact, a John Deere towing a U-Haul behind it but instead what normal people would call a “semi truck.” After a week of hearing about “tags,” I finally learned they were talking about “license plates” and not the stickers on them. They would also take the “h” in “vehicle” very seriously. None of them thought they had an accent, but they always giggled when I said something with the letter “O” in it, or the word “bag” (I relish this difference and refuse to let the entirety of my Minnesota accent disappear).
The trainer was a balding guy with those horrible old aviator glasses and a central Virginia drawl that I've since kind of grown to hate (sorry). He was a youth pastor who called things “retarded” when he didn't like them. All of this was utterly shocking to me, especially the fact that when I looked around, no one else seemed particularly bothered or even surprised. The fact that he talked endlessly about church was even bizarre to me. Minnesota, at least in the Twin Cities where I'm from, had a much more secular culture, and due to either a lack of participation or maybe a desire not to be pigeon-holed as one of those people, you never really heard that kind of casual church talk in a big corporate workplace like that. He never preached at us or anything; it was just so different from what I was used to. Not to mention that back home, saying “retarded” in a training class like that would've surely gotten him reported to HR. We were not in Minneapolis anymore, Toto.
Despite forming our little tight-knit groups in the beginning of class, we all dropped like flies not long after getting out onto the floor. It would be my shortest time in a call center (so far): not even five entire months. My tolerance for being attached by headset cord to a desk all day and micromanaged for every second of it was diminishing exponentially.
ACRONYM was well-known in the area for being a miserable place to work, no matter which position you found yourself in. There was a dark section in the back of the main floor with its own dreary supervisor, dotted with pinkish-orange Himalayan salt lamps set to varying dimness levels, a team created specifically for people with migraines, because they were so easily triggered there. There was also a “silent room” across from the cafeteria where you were not allowed to make a single peep; there were signs all over demanding silence be observed at all times, which included no eating. I did not need to be on Team Migraine, thankfully, but I did love the Silent Room.
Cell phone sales, 33
My ACRONYM health and vision insurance kicked in that May, and I desperately needed new contacts and glasses. I also desperately wanted to quit my job. So towards the end of April, I called in sick for the three days leading up to my scheduled ophthalmology appointment and, the day after it was over, sent an email to Renee, my feathered-blonde tanorexic supervisor from a bygone era whose email signature was in bright green Comic Sans, to tell her I was done. By this point I knew how to properly quit call centers: just go.
I thought perhaps my OccuPast might’ve been polite enough to stay in Minnesota and that it might be safe to start applying to banks again. I tried Navy Federal, PNC, and that crappy one inside the Walmart. I got phone and video interviews with Navy Federal, but they didn’t hire me.
So far, I’d managed to avoid going back to mall retail since the camera store and I was not looking forward to the possibility of returning, but after 3 days renting the basement of a grouchy Air Force lady's overpriced Alexandria townhouse and nope-ing back down to Husband’s brother’s house, we finally settled on an actual entire apartment down in Fredericksburg for the same price and we needed me to have an income. I took a job as a sales associate at a franchise T-Mobile store that was opening in the nearby mall (fun fact: it was the DC sniper mall). It wasn’t open yet, so after training in Richmond, about eight of us new hires were sent to other nearby malls to set up other new stores that the franchise was opening in the region and stayed for about a week each, cleaning up construction trash and Plannogramming2 the entire store for the first time.
Setting up the stores was kind of tedious, but I absolutely hated sales and I was happy to get paid to put off doing my real job for as long as I could. I liked the week we spent in the Charlottesville mall setting up that new store, because the long drive there from where we lived in Fredericksburg was stunning in the morning. Once you got closer, you could see the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance, and the two-lane country roads were misty and hilly and there were picturesque fields blowing around and horses eating hay. Just endless pastoral charm. The infamous march on Charlottesville would happen just a month later, on my 34th birthday, while I was camping drunk somewhere on the Potomac with Fiancé (as of that very night!) and Corbin.
(Just before that birthday camping trip, I applied to work at that very state park as a seasonal ranger and had a really great interview, but they never called me back. Might've been the loud drunken shenanigans and day-drunk Potomac skinny-dipping. I guess we'll never know.)
My store finally opened. I worked one shift during which we discovered that the store’s location was situated perfectly within the mall's dead zone, so no one’s phones worked the second they walked into the store. The Sprint guy a few doors down kept trying to get me to switch when I'd walk past in my hideous magenta jersey shirt.
You will be shocked to learn that that was my last day at the cell phone store.
The Pub, 34
This goddamn motherfucking hillbilly ass shithole.
I started patronizing the place because it was next door to the laundromat I used in the same strip mall. I was absolutely done serving, for good, but I hadn’t given up on bartending, which I was certain I could do without a problem after a little practice learning basic drinks. They all google that shit behind the bar nowadays, anyway. My experience behind the brewery bar had emboldened me, despite having only poured beers. I was a fast learner and I could talk to any random asshole all day long.
As I was saying, it was a fine place to hang out as a customer, at first, plus I was still a smoker then and they were one of the few places in that part of Virginia where you could still smoke indoors, which had been banned in most of Minnesota since 2005 or so. This was exciting to me. The bartenders, especially the loud one, Rhea, were a bit over the top, but they were friendly enough and welcoming. Eventually, I asked the fateful question: are you hiring… bartenders?
“NO,” Rhea yelled for no reason, “BUT IF YOU SERVE HERE, YOU CAN PROBABLY BE ONE SOON. WE'LL GET YOU TRAINED QUICK,” she blatantly lied through her lumpy brown teeth. She swore it was an easy job and the regulars were great tippers. I needed a job, so I nervously took it (she would go on to steal all of my tables that contained the great-tipping regulars).
I never did become a bartender; Rhea trained an even newer server to be the new bartender instead because, she told me, she had been a regular customer longer than I had.
The place was a shitshow. I’ll let my Facebook posts from this time period tell you the story:
Cut to three years later after being hired at TSA:
They would also refuse to give me my W2 for that year and, after I called about it, claimed they already mailed it, wouldn’t provide another, and hung up on me. I had to obtain it from the IRS.
I’m not bitter. Not at all. Why do you ask?
Ruby Tuesday, 34
I wanted out of that shithole and texted Todd and asked him what he was up to since leaving ACRONYM. He was back at his old restaurant bartending and serving. I asked if they were hiring. The Pub gave me a bit more restaurant confidence, and apparently no one else was going to hire me. Clearly I was just going to follow Todd all over the city wherever he worked.
I was ultimately there for almost three years, with some other jobs on top of it or in-between stints there. The money wasn’t very good, but it was easy as hell to serve there, unlike literally everywhere else I’d ever tried, and I loved every coworker and boss I had there. All my friends here pretty much came from ACRONYM and Ruby’s, with a smattering from Husband’s job.
Other slightly nicer restaurant, 34
I decided to pick up a second job for extra money again, realizing I was pretty much the only Ruby’s employee with only one job. I picked a nicer restaurant on the river downtown. One of the other servers who worked there was Sara, who was in our ACRONYM training class (I was beginning to learn that this was a small-ass town). She had, in fact, been my least favorite person in said training class. She was always the first to confidently raise her hand to answer a question, but she was rarely correct and still managed to be haughty about it. She was from Richmond and bafflingly wore a short nightclub dress on business casual day and treated the rest of us like plebs and wouldn't shut up about her boyfriend. We all hated her.
She said a surprisingly warm hello to me on my first day at the restaurant, giving me hope, and then proceeded to ignore me for every shift after that, occasionally shooting a nonsensical glare in my direction but never saying anything else. The people here continue to baffle me.
The restaurant was okay, but my coworkers were snooty and took themselves way too seriously (especially the bartenders — what is it with small town bartenders always thinking they’re the shit? Calm down, glorified DUI machines), I was in no mood to work two jobs and didn’t strictly need to. I didn’t know what had gotten into me. I quit before training was over.
Back to the brewery, 35
By this point in my Ruby Tuesday serving “career,” I was tired of the $35 lunch shifts and the stifling culture of corporate chains. I was hanging out at the old brewery where I'd worked for a shift and a half all the time, anyway, and decided that with my year or so of practice both serving and behind the bar (Ruby’s was the only restaurant to follow through on that promise), I could probably try serving there again and maybe make more money, back in a brewery environment downtown among my people — the hippies and lefty, artsy pagan nerds of downtown Fredericksburg. They were dumb enough to hire me for round two, and I was dumb enough to believe them when they said I could become a bartender after serving for just a little while.
It was just as chaotic as before, but I was more prepared for the chaos and handled it with slightly more grace than I had the first time around. I was beginning to realize, however, that I was an absolutely horrid server. I put myself directly into the weeds if I had more than two tables at a time (I rarely had more than two tables at a time at Ruby’s unless I was bartending, because the place was a relic that would finally officially die from Covid a couple years later). It didn’t help that it had turned into a “seat yourself” establishment with a haphazard way of keeping track of who got which tables, and there were no hosts.
I worked trivia and drag show nights and went out downtown afterwards with my coworkers. I liked the people I worked with, my bosses, and the clientele, but the job was stressful as hell and I made next to nothing unless I worked a night shift, which I rarely did unless it was an all-hands situation like the aforementioned trivia and drag nights. It was there that I would learn that everyone in the industry is on cocaine at all times. Maybe that was what I was missing. I would not test this hypothesis.
Besides not making me a bartender like they promised, they also wouldn’t even let me pour my own customers’ beer when the bartenders were backed up, which was all the time and often just because the bartender I most frequently worked with just didn't feel like doing it yet, causing the most absurd delays that constantly cost me tips due to no fault of my own. It was very annoying. It was difficult to explain that the half hour it took to get them their beer from 3 feet away was not my fault without throwing the bartender under the bus. I was beginning to believe that working for these smaller businesses might actually be worse than working for the soulless, giant megacorps.
Ruby Tuesday again, 35
New Year’s Eve, 2018 into 2019, I was celebrating at my former Ruby’s coworker’s house getting drunk in her basement family room with her, her husband, and the general manager of Ruby’s, Helen, because there are no boundaries in the hospitality industry. Eventually my friend and her husband went to bed, leaving my former boss and me on the floor, backs up against the couch passing a bottle of Fireball back and forth, drunk as shit. I recall asking her if I could please come back to Ruby’s because I had begun to hate the chaotic brewery so much. She said to ask me again after I sobered up. I did, a couple days later, she welcomed me back, and I put in my notice at the brewery. I wanted to leave on a good note because I wanted to be able to keep hanging out there, and I had no ill will toward them. I was beginning to learn that brewery owners really only know how to brew beer, drink it, and talk about it; they do not know how to be employers.
Helen said she wasn’t sure if she could get me back in the bar and I said that was just fine and to please never put me behind the bar ever again. While I didn’t hate the act of bartending itself and in fact quite enjoyed making drinks, I did hate that at chain restaurants like that one, bartenders were just servers with extra responsibilities, taking a normal section of bar tables as well as the guests at the bar itself and making all the drinks servers rang in. The doubled workload was not worth the small amount of extra money it netted to me.
Mold remediation company, 35
While I didn't totally hate my job at Ruby's and I loved the people I worked with, I was starting to feel antsy to make more money and have nights and weekends and holidays off again. I got on Facebook and asked for recommendations, saying I was willing to travel as far south as Richmond or as far north as DC, each 50 miles away, just so long as I didn't have to work anymore retail or food service ever fucking again.
The girlfriend of the head brewer at the very first brewery I worked at in Minnesota responded, saying her second cousin Sheila was looking for an HR and finance manager for the restoration franchise she owned near DC. I interviewed with her, which wasn’t exactly an interview so much as Sheila monologuing at me about her storied career in the military, why she left, and how she wanted to use her experience to be the great leader she never had (she would go on to tell me this story in painstaking detail several more times over the next half year). After over an hour of telling me her life story, she hired me on the spot. I guess she thought I was a good listener.
My job duties were pretty much invented by Sheila from scratch every day, but I did have a few regular responsibilities: I kept track of employee time cards and paychecks and child support garnishments, I filed bills and took care of things like accounts receivable and accounts payable and all the spreadsheet job stuff I’d done before, and I frequently went to court in behalf of the company in Fairfax, Arlington, and DC to sue customers who didn’t pay for their services. I drove to the post office daily and attended weekly meetings in Sheila’s tiny office where she and her co-owner husband would make me listen to them scream at each other for hours on end while my work piled up, like it was their foreplay or something. I would be called in to transcribe firings and write-ups, nervously wishing for literally any other responsibility because by that point, it was apparent that she was a fucking lunatic and I hated having to play on her side against the usually justifiably pissed employees whom she made a loud point to screw over at the first sign of perceived disloyalty. No one who left that company did so with any remaining goodwill toward her.
It was at around the 6-month mark at Sheila’s Bootcamp that I got a call from TSA, a job I’d applied for almost a year prior and had completely given up on by then. The application process was crazy long and took months, and although I’d passed every hurdle, I was just waiting on the official notice that there was an orientation spot opening up for me. The lady said I was scheduled to start in two months. Because of the nature of my position in Sheila’s discount army, I thought I’d be considerate and tell them right away, giving her a full month and a half to find a good replacement, and so that I could help train them in, making her and my immediate manager's jobs a little easier.
Sheila took my resignation personally. She literally refused to speak to or look at me for one entire week and told my manager to tell me that my month and a half notice was invalid and that I was only allowed two weeks. Not only that, but I was being removed from my position immediately, for “security reasons.” I was to move to the main office and become the marketing gal’s Google assistant. Literally I just sat there and fucking Googled shit for her, copying and pasting my findings into a spreadsheet.
After about a week, Sheila called me into her office and apologized for being “immature,” and assured me that she didn’t want to hold her employees hostage. She went on to inform me that because I has resigned — to take a much higher-paying job with much better insurance benefits and the security clearance I'd wanted for two and a half years, mind you — that she would never again trust a recommendation from family or friends ever again. She was apparently most offended that, because she had disappeared from the office the day I turned in my notice, I had given my resignation letter to my manager instead of to her, personally, which I thought was a perfectly normal thing to do, but okay. She graciously told me she had changed her mind and that I was now allowed to work through my original 6-week notice as Amy’s Personal Googler.
Okay.
Crazy fucking control freak would go on to be just like Rhea from The Pub and blatantly lie about my employment there to my TSA federal investigator, knowing full well that I could be denied the job for it because of her vast personal experience in how clearanced jobs like that worked, and told them that she fired me when, in reality, I just stopped fucking going in to be Amy’s Google machine a couple weeks before my planned last day, well beyond her original retaliatory 2-week restriction. She literally tried to destroy my entire future because I very considerately gave her an extremely long notice of resignation.
Thankfully, the investigator didn’t believe her, either.
I hope her husband cheats on her with a 20-year-old with real boobs.
Last but not least… check out the final (I swear… for now) Part Five!
The answer is no, no working class person in Virginia has any self-respect at all, and there is no such thing as class consciousness to speak of down here. People will stare at you blankly if you say those two words together and shake their head as they jet off to their 3rd minimum wage job like it’s normal.
If you don’t know what that word means, you have been blessed.
That is sooooo good. ANd the fact that I read most of it while on the clock at work made me feel somehow part of the magic.
Im going to write my own series in tribute. Restacking with my ones :)
Any other plannogram knowers want to get together and start a support group?