More clarity is arriving daily for my son. Yesterday on his work run he says the job requested 12 but only needed 4, so he was cut. He also said he would get a check just for showing up. Then, later in the afternoon, he said he was wrong, there was no check. Um, there should’ve been a check. This morning I am waiting across the parking lot at the job site. It sucks for both of us. I’m certain this horror, just sitting and waiting with a bunch of other guys, hoping to get day labor work, is another of my son’s definitions of “hell.”
Yep.
I get it. There are easier ways to get work. Last summer, when he was struggling in the same movie, I suggested looking at jobs from my old employer, the high-end grocery store. He was not interested. I even started looking at the job openings at these two particular stores.
“Overnight Nut Roaster, looks like a perfect gig for you. $15 an hour. Starts at 10 pm, that should give you time to wake up. You can probably zone out and wear your airpods while you roast.”
“Fuck no.”
I was snickering. “It would be different. Wouldn’t require you to shift to daytime hours of ambulation. You could be left alone with the nuts. Just do your thing.”
“I’m not talking about this anymore.”
A month ago, realtime, my daughter was FaceTiming with me, as she does. We were bullshitting about her school, her roommates, and her brother. “Nut roaster,” she said.
We both laughed for five minutes.
“I can’t believe you remember that from last summer.”
“Sure, Overnight Nut Roaster, it still sounds pretty perfect for him.”
“I mean, I think he might be able to show up on time.”
We are all looking for our perfect “overnight nut roaster” job. I am applying right now to several full-time jobs at a state agency. The recruiters seemed excited. They get your shit submitted. And then you never hear from them again. Twice in my history, these motions resulted in two different jobs. So, I’m open, enthusiastic, but not counting on either of these roles, even though my experience is a slam dunk.
I’ve had two overnight nut roaster jobs. At Central Market, the fancy grocery store, I was a cashier. I stayed for 10 months. It was hell. And I learned a lot of things about myself. Resilience. Tolerance for being treated poorly. How the lower-end of the employment world feels. And grace for all my colleagues in their various stages of disrepair and grief.
A few weeks ago I passed through the South store and saw one of my favorite co-workers. I said hello. He didn’t recognize me. I guess I was dying my hair back then, so god bless him. I tried to tell him the story of how we would share greetings in the aisles of the store each day we shared a shift. I was okay with him erasing me. “There are so many people who flow through here dude, I’m sorry.”
“No worries. I was just happy to see you. As I was when we worked together.”
“I’m happy to see you too, man. Gotta go. Sorry.”
The store is on the way to airport. I think I was picking my girlfriend up from her trip to CA, her motherland. We stopped for lunch on the way home. I was even more clear that our relationship was cooked. She looked amazing. Went for the jugular and wore a white tennis dress on the flight. I was impressed, aroused, and over it. Sorry, that was too harsh. I was aware that I was no longer part of her family. I would miss her, her two amazing dogs, and two semi-sweet kids.
I hate hurting people. This breakup was months in the making. I was trying to give her space, give her opportunities to take her own initiative. She was overwhelmed at work, the closing weeks of school before Summer break. She had no capacity to imagine that my frustration in our relationship had already boiled over and was now burning the bottom of the empty sauce pan on the hot stove. The WE was cooked. She didn’t know it yet, but she was single again. I knew it. I had a harder time articulating it. I used my son and my need to return to my house soon after we finished our lunch in the grocery store cafe.
“Let’s get a few things,” I said. “Since you’ve been gone, I don’t know what you need at your house.”
We wandered the store for ten minutes. I met the guy in the organic coconut oil section of “wellness” products. I was a fan of, but also over, the coconut oil phase. I was on to CBD in my coffee. It was working for me. I stopped taking daily ibuprofen. I felt some of the entourage effect, as they call it, with a rising sense of calm and creative excitement. We checked out and I drove her home. The dogs were bonkers to see us.
“I’ve got to go home now, but we can talk tomorrow. I’ll come by with the part for your pool sweeper.”
This morning, typing this in my car tethered through my phone, I am listening to a football practice across the street coming in through my open windows. The day is warming up. Summer football practice. The promise of making the team. Heat, hard work and water that tasted like heat-blasted plastic. I was not giving up. I had been returned to the scene of the crime, Westlake High School. Though I had been the starting “strong-side linebacker” there was no guarantee I would make the team. My mom dropped me off at 6 am. Picked me up at 10 am. Then brought me back at 6 pm for an evening practice, that was thankfully cooler.
I was not up for any position. The 7th and 8th grade coaches were not there to sing my praises from my time in their program. And I didn’t know the PROGRAM of the mighty Chapparells. I was a walkon. After two weeks of torture, I was assigned to the Junior Varsity team. As a junior in high school, that was a death blow. I withdrew and became an angry man on top of the depressed man I already was. Okay, Westlake, fuck you and fuck this. If I’m no longer part of the “in crowd” because I tried to escape Texas high school Shangri La, well, so be it. Outwardly I was furious and dark. Inside I was collapsing.
My mom did her best at encouraging me. She fed me a lot of amazing Southern foods and I ballooned up in my weight. Depression, weight gain, loss of interest in anything related to high school. Seems like a pretty normal experience now, right? I mean, we’re all giving our struggling kids the “pandemic” excuse. Nope, that’s not going to fly with me any longer.
Yes, we all suffered during the shutdown. Yes, we are all suffering now. And, No, we are not all doing our best.
My ex-wife used to love that phrase. “Everyone is doing the best they can at the moment with what they’ve got.”
No, dear ex, that is not true. Were you doing your best when you renigged on the 50/50 shared parenting divorce we negotiated without lawyers for several months? Were you doing your best when you submitted your “enforcement” request to the AG’s office, knowing it would kill my home refi strategy? I was just trying to keep the roof over my head so I could provide a place for me and the kids to be together every other weekend. Is that the best you could do?
Throughout our marriage, I noticed my ex-wife’s propensity to let herself off the hook for some commitment. “Well, we did the best we could, we were just 30 minutes late. We didn’t know. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
But that’s not a way to live as an adult. It’s the way my son has been coddled his entire life. This morning as he was dragging his feet so we would be late, as he was saying, “We probably missed the window.” I stayed the course. “We’re going.”
So now he’s sitting on the sidewalk outside an employment office hoping for a day labor job. Or hoping I’ll give up and leave him there, where he can change the plans. Telling himself he’s doing his best. But is he? Is not getting up when you are awakened by your parent for “work” a teenage defiance thing or a “he’s just too depressed” thing? Does it matter? Was my son doing his best this morning? Or was he angling for the “oh gosh, I guess it’s just not going to happen today.”
Well, son, today you ran into me. Again. Dad. Sorry.
You sit on the sidewalk and wonder if you will also be late tomorrow morning. I’ll sit here in my car typing, fishing, for understanding of my role, my responsibilities, and my own employment opportunities. He’s sitting on the sidewalk waiting for a day labor job because he was here late. He is hoping I will give up and leave. Or let him give up and “go get food.” Nope. That’s not how it works. I am here, doing my thing. You are there “doing your best.” We will reset the plan in another hour or so if no job shows up.
My second survival job was a seasonal position at The Apple Store. Oh boy!
They loved to hype our success at the first round of group interviews. “Getting hired by Apple is statistically harder than getting into Harvard, so congratulations on making it this far.” Yeah, fuck that. It’s a retail job. Yes, it’s Apple. But the Geniuses take themselves much to seriously. When I was hired, however, and told to report to the Apple North Campus for three days of training, I was THRILLED.
I am going to Apple, today. They are paying me to train on Apple products. I’m IN. Like Harvard in.
Things went a little differently than I’d imagined. First, I really wanted to work for Apple Corporate in Marketing and not the retail side. But hey, you make due. And I knew the beginning of my “Apple Journey” as they liked to refer to it on this first week of training. It was like a pep rally in high school. A bunch of us didn’t want to be there, or didn’t care about football, but we were required to adhere to the school spirit.
We were grouped into workgroup tables around the large auditorium. There were probably 120 people in my cohort. All heading for various retail jobs at one of the two Apple Stores in Austin. I don’t recall much about my group, initially, but it was a fun first day.
On the second day, our group had been resorted. I’m not sure if several of the groups had been regrouped, but it was a blip that I hardly noticed in the fun of the first and second day of training on the Apple Campus. I was steeped in The Apple Way, Steve Jobs’ Vision for Retail, and the new Apple Grand Csar of The Store Experience. I learned how they made the stores such a different experience. I can share a few of the trade secrets. Some of them were obvious. Many of them comprised a well-honed system of organization and motivation that make Apple’s retail experiment such a success. Do you ever wonder why the Windows Stores no longer exist? Or Dell’s retail stores in shopping malls? Retail is hard. Getting retail right is something Apple continuously refines as the market and stores evolve.
I didn’t find out until a month later that a young woman of color felt threatened by me, the old white guy. And she felt disrespected twice. So she asked to move tables. And in the same breath the Apple trainers were going on and on about how customer interactions are like a feedback look. You listen. You answer their questions. You try to understand what they want.
The feedback look of this young woman was to not tell me anything, or push back on anything I was saying, or even inform me that I was being annoying. No. She reported me for “feeling unsafe” and guess what, a month later it was not my problem. I had a mark on my permanent record and I never heard about it, or had a chance to reply or adjust something I was doing wrong.
In the interview with the store manager. “It’s not about if you did something wrong or now, it’s about how she felt about things you said or did.”
“Okay, can we have a discussion so I can understand what it was I said or did?”
“No, that would be retaliation. We have an open policy.”
“So, neither of us will have an opportunity to understand something new about the situation.”
“That’s right. You are not to speak to her about this, ever.”
“Okay. That will be easy.”
“Maybe just give her a wide berth.”
I recall a moment on the third day, this same young woman was being praised for reaching the next level on the training leadership team. I didn’t know, of course, that she’d reported me for my behavior towards her a day earlier. The part that didn’t fit right for me, was, you’re saying we need to pay attention to the feedback look between two people during our interactions, and we’re supposed to give feedback to the other person when things don’t feel right. And you’re giving this young woman a leadership award… Um, for her ability to follow these ideals?
I was floored.
“She’s the same age as my daughter, for goodness sake. I would not say or do anything inappropriate. Did some others at the table validate her story? Did anyone else share they were unhappy with my behavior?”
“That’s not important.”
“Okay, and you can’t tell me what she said I did?”
“No.”
“And we can’t have a conversation about it?”
“You’re talking to me.”
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