2005 Fucking Sucked: Part 1 - Marc vs. Employment
Yes, right, I did say I'd start this series on Friday, but there were extenuating circumstances that prevented me from fulfilling that promise. Those circumstances included spending several hours at a local bar singing karaoke. If anyone tells you that I stood in a roomful of people with two other women and that the three of us performed a rousing, white-girl rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back," I will deny it. You cannot prove anything.
Anyway, back to 2005 ...
Although I would like to tell you that Marc and I are the sort of people who have scads of cash lying around in savings in the event of an emergency, we have not yet reached a place in our lives where we can subsist without two incomes. For Marc, the year had started out well in the Gainful Employment category. He had a gig as a restaurant manager at a local university, was making decent money, and was generally happy with his job apart from the fact that it often demanded his attention for upwards of 12 hours a day. Then, one Spring day, Marc decided to have a serious conversation with the company's head chef. Head Chef was in the habit of chatting up the restaurant's female staff in wholly repulsive and inappropriate ways. One of the female cooks came to Marc and said she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, and my husband thought perhaps he could nip the situation in the bud with a brief man-to-man conversation with Head Chef. Head Chef seemed to take it well, but then, most coincidentally, Marc was called into his manager's office two days later and told that he was being laid off. No explanation was given.
The search for work began, and after a month of juggling finances to ensure that the lights stayed on and that we could keep the dog in kibble, Marc accepted a job in management training with a local restaurant chain. What we didn't know at the time was that "manager-in-training" was restaurant-speak for "slave." The deal went thusly: Marc was salaried, not hourly, so there were no limitations on the number of hours the company could require him to work. Most weeks, he was working between 60 and 70 hours per week. He was exhausted beyond comprehension. One evening, he came home looking spectacularly awful. "Look," he said, showing me his forearm. There was a pink blister approximately 3 inches in diameter where once had been perfectly healthy flesh. He'd burned himself on some kitchen equipment at work, and when he reported the incident to the manager, the manager shrugged it off and sent him back to work. After three or four days, the wound had taken on a rather disgusting countenance. I am not a medical professional, but I was fairly certain that "red, swollen, and weeping featuring some sort of eery, darkened epicenter" was something that might do with a doctor's look-see. The doctor took one look at it, declared it a third-degree burn, and sent him away with a prescription for antibiotics. Then, because the situation had not already become ridiculous enough, Marc had a reaction to the antibiotics and spent the next two days cacooned in blankets on the couch between trips to the bathroom to rid his stomach of any pesky food or liquids. Obviously, he was too sick to go to work, and even though he procured a note from the doctor stating something like, "Marc's arm is all buggered to hell and he's been barfing up his guts for two days, so please excuse his absence," the restaurant saw fit to terminate his employment. Marc subsequently learned that the company's upper management referred to managers-in-training as "LSD," or "Labor-Saving Device." It works like this: For every one manager you intend to hire, hire ten people as "trainees," work them halfway to death whilst looking for any possible reason to terminate their employment, thereby ensuring that only 10% of all trainees complete the program. We were suitably enraged.
Another six weeks of unemployment ensued wherein we were forced to use credit cards to pay for some of our basic living expenses. As someone who, in her early 20s, made some serious errors in judgement when it came to the use of credit, and as someone who worked very hard to get out from under the mess she made, using credit for groceries felt like someone was removing my appendix by way of my ear canal.
Eventually, a new job offer came down the pike. Marc was offered a job as a cafe manager at a gas station/convenience store, and while this would hardly be a glamorous occupation, it seemed to compensate in benefits for what it lacked in luster. He was told he'd work a 40-hour week on a regular 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. schedule, that he wouldn't have to work weekends except in case of emergency, and that he'd be able to take advantage of the company's tuition reimbursement program to finish his degree. It seemed like a great solution. He'd be working a regular schedule, we'd get to see each other, he wouldn't be exhausted, and he'd finally get to go back to school. Swell, right?
Um. Well.
Until Marc took that job, I had no idea that "regular schedule" meant "totally erratic schedule"; that "6 a.m. to 2 p.m." meant "2 a.m. to 11 a.m., then 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.;" and that "you'll be able to take advantage of our tuition reimbursement program" meant "we were just kidding about that tuition thing, because your schedule will be such that there is no way for you to attend class on a regular basis." For extra kicks, the man who was his immediate supervisor was possibly the most mentally incompetent man in North America, a man whose pathological lies included the following:
- That he'd once been a U.S. Marshall
- That he used to work for an insurance company making large sums of money in subrogation work
- That he played football for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1980s
We began to receive phone calls at all hours of the day and night, including one notable example in which an employee phoned at 3 a.m. to ask, "What time do I work tomorrow?" I don't know about you, but in my world, a phone ringing at 3 a.m. means one of two things:
- Someone is dead; or
- Someone is dying
"What time do I work tomorrow" is not a question that is permissible at 3 a.m., a fact Marc reminded the gentleman on the other end of the phone after he'd gone out and rented an industrial winch with which to pry my trembling body off the ceiling. This, however, did not stop a young woman from calling the house at 1:30 a.m. the next week to declare that she couldn't figure out how to OPEN THE STORE'S FREEZER, and Marc had to get up and drive across town in his rubber-ducky pajama bottoms to show a grown woman how to gain access to the contents of a major appliance.
Two months of this went by and the holidays were upon us. We had our usual plans to go to my parents' house for Christmas, but a dejected-looking Marc came home one day to announce that he might have to work on Christmas. I was done.
"You are going back to school," I said. "Full-time. You are not going to work. Your occupation will be 'student.' We will take out loans for living expenses, and you will get your degree. Enough of this."
And so it went. We borrowed a lot of money to compensate for the lack of a second income, but something had to give. I couldn't watch my husband being miserable any more, and it was important to me that he get the same chance to have an education -- full-time, without major employment obligations -- that I had.
He started classes on Tuesday, and he's the happiest I've seen him in a long time. Here's hoping for 2006.
Tomorrow -- 2005: The Year of the Hospital
p.s. I've finally upgraded my Flickr account and now have a reasonably large photostream going on. I'm still working on sets and tags, so it's not finished being organized yet. Feel free to take a look.
posted by Kate at 1:54 AM link/comments
