Today for Father’s Day, Thomas and I went up to Dawsonville to see my parents, and while my relationship with my dad is complicated, this isn’t about my dad. Warning, this is long, and I have no idea why I’m writing about this.
My mom has one sister. I think that A., as I’m going to call her, is four or six years older than my mom, and their relationship has always been tough. Jokingly my mom would tell me how she and her sister used to fight so much, they broke a lot of my grandmother’s antiques from Scotland; how A. hit her in the head with a glass baby bottle; how her pet bird was let loose outside. All pretty standard sister stuff. When I was younger and we lived in Lawrenceville and my aunt’s family lived in Snellville (if you are unfamiliar with Gwinnett County geography, it’s not terribly far), my mom and my aunt used to go shopping, or at least out, every weekend at Gwinnett Place Mall, and we traded holidays - we would do Christmas at our place and Thanksgiving at theirs and vice versa every year. Maybe this is normal, but instead of the tension falling off between them as they got older and had families, it seems to me that things largely stayed the same. I remember my aunt, even when I was 8 or 9, used to do weird shit like show up early and then freak out that my mom and I weren’t ready to go yet. She used to make my mom cry over all kinds of weird stuff, things I don’t even really know the gist of, but given what I *do* know, I assume it was all chock full ‘o nuts, if you will. When we moved away, for example, my aunt accused my mom of moving to “get away from her,” which was pretty absurd - generally speaking, no one moves their entire family 50 miles north just to escape one person. After that we made some effort at the every-other-holiday thing, and mostly stuck with it until my cousin got married, which threw a whole other wrench into the works and is probably another story all on its own, and after that, we just trailed off with it.
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After ye olde mortgage office job, I moved on to temping in another office, which was the home office for a small chain of convenience stores. I want to say I was working for the marketing department, but that doesn’t really make any sense to me since we were dealing with the actual inventory lots of the stores were holding. This job entailed learning yet another DOS-based system that kept track of what each store had been shipped. I remember going through endless reports with item numbers, matching and adding and . . . God, I don’t even remember why I was doing it. Anyway, the people there were very nice, but I remember being really weirded out on September 11, because they had this memorial event where they all went outside and prayed or whatever. To that point, I’d been working at nationally held companies and group prayer service was not really part of the agenda. As a temp, of course, I was not invited to go pray around the flag pole, which was fine in one way, because, well, wtf, and so clearly exclusionary and you-aren’t-really-a-person-here that it was completely offensive in another.
The one thing I remember really clearly was that we had to call around to all the stores about these novelty items that they had put in the stores. I don’t remember what they were, but just imagine the cash register at any local convenience store - breathalyzer tests and whatever - stuff like that. So, they weren’t tracking in the database or something, and I had to call all the stores that were supposed to have them. Some of these stores are so far back in the back woods that the stores probably had running water installed sometime in the last 50 years, so calling these places was by and large a hoot. I called this one store, and the guy said, “Those things! Good lord girl, I’m gonna have to have all the customers in here take off their shoes to have enough fingers and toes to count those things up!”
It was a good place to work. I can’t remember if my temp contract ended there before I got my next job or not, but the lady I worked for wanted to keep me on, I remember that, and she said she would ask for me again if they hired any more temps. As a temp, having someone say that about you is nice.
Eventually in Athens, Amber and I both applied to Randstad. I think she got work before I did, working at a hospital, and eventually I got work temping as a receptionist/document jockey at the office of a small regional bank that had a mortgage office in downtown Athens. Here I had my first real encounter with someone who was actually petty enough to lie about me to satisfy their own small, mean ends, but I’ll get to that later.
I can’t remember why the girl I was subbing for wasn’t going to be there, but I came in and learned how to answer the phones and work in their software really quickly, and was within a matter of time working with the one female mortgage lender there a lot to call back clients, print forms, fax things, and do various odd filing jobs to do with selling mortgages in the secondary market. I don’t remember enough about the loans that we worked on there to know if they were subprime or not. The bank has actually been acquired by BB&T since, but acquisitions are so normal in banking, who knows why that was done. In any case, I was pretty happily doing my job, showing up to work dressed nicely, running errands, doing favors, generally just being happy to get paid. At some point the girl I was theoretically subbing for came back, but she then started doing loan processing work, and I kept on doing her old job.
For the record, she was not a nice person. She was not a lot taller than me, but very overweight, and was probably my age at the time, and definitely had a kid. I was nice to her, but we didn’t have a lot in common and I didn’t really need any help, so I was perfectly happy to go about my business and to let her go about hers.
I don’t remember how long I worked there. My assignment ended, and the woman at the staffing agency signed me up for another office job. I do, however, remember that when I was speaking to the lady at the staffing agency, she said that “my supervisor” (the not-so-nice girl) had said that I came to work dressed inappropriately and that there were “other problems.” I told the staffing agency lady, look, the person who gave you that report, she was not the person to whom I reported. And then I called the woman that I’d really been working for the whole time, and she was basically through the roof that this girl had lied about me for no discernible reason. As I recall, she talked to HER boss, who then called the staffing agency and explained that they really had liked me working there, and that there had been no problems. Generally I would not go after someone with such ferocity, especially for job I didn’t care about, but I had had such a hard time finding ANY work, I was not willing to let it stand on my record at the temp agency, because it could prevent me getting any more good work. I still have no idea WTF her problem was; I was clearly a temp, I wasn’t staying to threaten her “territory.” People are so weird.
Other people are doing this! Check out Rusty, who links to almost everyone else who’s doing this at one point or another.
I’ve changed the theme and I’ve pruned the blogroll; if you’ve been wrongly deleted, let me know.
After I worked the summer at Kohl’s, I worked a little there for holidays and evenings, but they were not . . . understanding . . . about the fact that my priority was school, so I quit. I felt badly about it, because I liked working there, but it was just not going to work out. I didn’t have a job the next summer because I went abroad, and then I did not work my senior year of college (yes, I am aware I had it superaweseomegreat). I worked holidays at the outlet mall with my old manager - most memorably a fill-in one-day gig at Charlotte Russe on Black Friday that was basically my single most hellish day of retail ever.
After graduation, Amber and I (my roommate/best friend, not Amber Rhea) decided to move to Athens. I don’t really know why, now. I think we were looking for somewhere that we could rent a place cheaply and look for jobs. In retrospect, even though it was a stupid idea, I’m glad we did it. It wasn’t a lot different from living together the entire time at Davidson, we just had to manage bills. I by and large managed the joint ones.
The thing about Athens that we didn’t think all the way through is that there is, naturally, an endless supply of people willing to work for peanuts there, so we were not exactly hot commodities since we had real bills to pay and had worked, both of us, in jobs long enough/had enough experience to command fairly decent wages. In short, finding work was a bitch. There was literally a point where she and I rolled coins to make a deposit so that we could pay bills, and we got SO SICK of looking for jobs that we went to dollar movies. “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” will always say “hot parking lot plus a plastic bag full of quarters equals picking up coins in the hot sun.”
During this time I looked at a LOT of ads for jobs online, including some weird ass government job that I basically stopped following up on at some point, because I am pretty sure Amber made the point that it’s almost impossible to find someone worse than me (other than perhaps an anarchist or something) to work for The Man. What can I say, I have problems with arbitrary authority. I also looked into what was basically a MLM job; I went so far as to interview, and I went on a ride-along with this one guy - it was basically hell on earth. He was on about how you could make so much money and the woman who ran it lived in the pent house of the Five Seasons and on and on and whatever and all I could see was wear and tear on his car and a lot of psycho babble meant to encourage people who don’t have anything else left to believe in. After doing this for like, four days, I quit. I called the dude I’d been riding with and I told him, this isn’t for me; you can keep whatever my commission was supposed to be. I was so exhausted by all the driving and the attempting to sell to people who are as happy to see you as I am happy to see Jehovah’s Witnesses that there was no way it was worth it.
I think that “job” was probably the lowest point for me while I was looking for work in 2002. I was just like, holy shit, are you serious? Is this all there is? There was a recession on at that time, as well, and it was just horrifying out there looking for work. I can’t imagine how much worse it is now.
I spent at least two summers and a lot of holidays at Petite Sophisticate. It was a pretty sweet deal; I basically walked in and became a defacto third key and sort of worked where ever they needed me - I could close any of the three stores, stock and merchandise any of the three stores, and everyone there was like a family. However, my sophomore year of college, my roommate and I decided we wanted to say in Charlotte for the summer, so we got an on-campus apartment. She already had a job at CVS, but needed to find something to do. Since I’d worked retail successfully two summers previous, I figured this would not be too hard. The local Kohl’s was hiring for an “area supervisor” and since I’d done merchandising at Petite, I figured this was an awesome fit for me. I can’t remember really how I was hired on to begin with - they were a little leery of hiring me on as a supervisor, and I feel like someone quit or something and I was defacto promoted, but I could be making that up. Anyway, Kohl’s was not a bad gig. It was much more corporate than Petite had been, but there was a lot to do in the Misses’ area, so it wasn’t like anyone really had any opportunity to mess with me, since I definitely got the job done. As dopey as it probably sounds, I was proud of the work I did and the skills I already had when I got to Kohl’s - I was young, but I was responsible and I kept my department in ship shape. I wasn’t a total bear to my part time girls and I picked up and managed the other section in our department when other people had emergencies.
The one thing I did learn about myself there is that I am not suited to work overnight. Sometimes at these big department stores, they will allow day staff to work over night for time-and-a-half to do big mid-season stockups. I am sure the money is why I volunteered to do it, and it was basically the weirdest thing I have ever done as far as work. For one thing, the store was utterly silent. I didn’t have an iPod at the time but in retrospect, I would have been much happier with one then, since I was working by myself, in relative silence, stocking and merchandising. The worst thing though, was that you had to bring your lunch (okay, I did pretty often anyway) and that, clearly, you had to eat it inside, in the breakroom, and you could not leave the building. The not leaving the building and the silence were the weirdest things I’ve dealt with in my working life, and I never volunteered to work over night again.
After the debacle of working at the Gap, I think I didn’t work at all until after graduation. I’m not entirely sure about that, but pretty sure. Anyway, this girl that I would not even classify as a friend, for some reason got me a job at the store where she was working, Petite Sophisticate. I came in as an hourly, part-time work person.
Now, the thing about Petite was that it was the third store in a line of related stores - Casual Corner, Casual Corner Woman, and Petite. My manager when I started was Ginger, and Ginger was an idiot. I remember that about her, and that on one of my first few days working there, she was lying on the floor behind the counter because she was sick with a UTI and could basically not move. The Assistant Manager there was Cynthia, and I loved working with her. She was fantastic. So, I was not totally shocked or concerned when our district manager came in, summarily fired Ginger, promoted Cynthia to Manager and, for reasons that I still can’t fathom, promoted me to third key (which is like, not a manager, but not a minion).
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After I’d been working at my dad’s store summers and holidays for a few years, the novelty wore off. I wanted, for some reason I cannot imagine, a “real job.” I wasn’t required to work by my parents; given how much crap I did after school, it was more discouraged than anything. But a friend of mine was working at the GAP Outlet at the Big Pink Outlet Mall, and they needed holiday help. I applied and was hired.
Working for the GAP is a lot like dying a little bit every day. It starts off fun enough, but of anywhere I have ever worked retail, that place can go from zero to zoo in about 2.3 seconds. This had to have been late 1997, and the GAP was very popular. Cheap GAP was even MORE popular. I learned how to fold jeans and shirts (there is a *correct* way) and learned a little bit about merchandising. I was never trained to run a cash register there, which in retrospect was probably very good. Checkout might have been the worst gig there.
Actually, the worst gig there was the dressing rooms, and followed by that, the kids and baby section. Those clothes are small. And typically people shopping for and/or with their kids are not the type to attempt to make less of a mess. Cleaning up in there after a weekend night was pretty much the most atrocious thing to do in the whole store.
After the holidays got over with, I can’t remember if I quit or if they just let all the holiday help go. I was actually reliable and probably could have stayed, if I remember correctly, but other than when it sucked because it was full of crazed people after mom-jeans, it was the most singularly boring retail job I’ve ever had.
My first “real job” was working for my dad. In retrospect, it must have been a really hard time for my mom and dad – my dad had worked at Goodyear for longer than my parents had been married (which is ten years longer than I am old), and in the early late 80’s/early 90’s Goodyear really went through some corporate bullshit. For the longest time, my dad was the service manager at the Goodyear store on LaVista Road in Tucker, and then there was a lot of noise around him being moved to the Perimeter store, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t remember. My dad and I don’t have a thing in common personality wise (ha!) so eventually all the BS and the mistreatment for his years of service got under his skin and he quit. There was practically a revolt in that area, as my dad had been working on older people’s cars in the neighborhood for literally all of my life.
I must have been 13, maybe 14. Within the next year, or less, my dad and his friend had figured out how to buy a Goodyear franchise in Norcross, and they purchased it and set up a business. My dad and his partner had . . . I don’t know, I think pretty disparate views on running the business but my dad got to service manage (which he loved) and his partner got to be front-end manager. During the summers and on long breaks, I would work the front. All of my dad’s customers from Tucker came over to his shop now, and these were literally people who watched me grow up in photos in my dad’s wallet. He also got a bunch of his reliable mechanics from his old stores, and these were all guys I knew. Some of them had awesome nicknames like “Redneckerson.” I am not making this up.
This was kind of awesome and kind of sucktastic. I had to get up ridiculously early – 5am, maybe even 4:30am – to get showered (which I cannot do without in the morning, I am not an evening shower person), get ready, and make the long-ass trek from Dawsonville to Norcross and be there by 7:00am, because my dad felt we needed 30 minutes to open the store before customers started showing up. I slept on the way in while my dad drove; we would do the opposite on the way home once I was 15 and had my learners. I was driving a giant Ford F250. To this day I *can* drive a truck, but I don’t care for it.
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I’ve had a bunch of quotes and links to a couple of articles sitting in my drafts folder, and I guess I’m just rusty, because I cannot figure out how to go about writing about this.
Within the space of about a week, I ran into both this piece in the NYT about Rent High School Edition and then this one in the School Library Journal (h/t Alyssa). You should read them both. Both are about censorship and to some degree discrimination, and the NYT piece in particular really hit home for me.
In the NYT article, the following quote landed about a half an inch from my heart:
“This is the first time I’ve chosen a show for the high school because I had an agenda,” Mr. Martin said. “In this instance, having an agenda as a teacher didn’t give me pause. My job is to give my students life skills. Discrimination is wrong on all levels.”
He said his principal, Fal Asrani, had objected to the show because of its treatment of “prostitution and homosexuality.” “When I heard that, I stopped her and looked her in the eye and said, ‘First, there is no prostitution in ‘Rent,’ and second, homosexuality is not wrong,’ ” Mr. Martin said. “She made no comment. It was the most demoralizing, disappointing moment in my career as a teacher.”
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