From my teenage years on, I have either sat or stood behind a desk or a counter. From cashiering at Hardee's to the multitude of truck stops/gas stations and a few bartending gigs. Even my time on the factory floor frequently found me in the assembly department, putting stickers and warning labels on drive thru light fixtures. Those early days standing with aching scrunched up feet after four hours made me realize something: I don't want to stand, I want to sit... "on your fat ass" my mother's voice chimes in within my head. It was not a straight path at all, but if I was going to end up degreeless and accepting a smaller fate than the one I had imagined, at least I could dream of a job where I showered before work and not after.
I managed to wiggle my way into the backup manager position at the truck stop. I was paid an extra fifty cents an hour the nights I was in charge and given keys to the office where I could hide and count money and balance drawers, prepare deposits. The solitude was my jam. I was terrible at actually being in charge, nobody listened to me, and I would have to bear the brunt of verbal assaults from the volatile head honcho every time something went wrong on my watch. He used to say things to me like "do you know what lackadaisical means?" and call me at 7am screaming, when I bounced an $800 check because my very elaborate check kiting scheme fell apart after my alcoholic boyfriend stole money from my deposit. Volatile boss accused me of sexually harassing his schizophrenic son, which I did not do. A crazy manager accused me of sexually harassing a maintenance man, which I did do, but only because we were having a secret affair.
I was surprisingly never fired. I quit three or four times but would miss my work family so much that I would just end up hanging out there for hours on end, jumping in to help when it got busy and find myself back on the schedule.
Even once I managed to get into the factory office full time, I would spend nights and weekends at the truck stop for extra cash. I basically had two full time jobs in order to pay my rent and I hung on until the bitter end of the truck stop. It still stands but the restaurant was taken out to make room for a beer cave and the office where I once embezzled rolls of quarters was bulldozed and turned into a McDonalds.
That job was the cornerstone of my early twenties. Everything good and bad (but mostly bad) that happened to me was set against the backdrop of that place.
Jump cut to the office of the manufacturing plant. That place was to my mom as the truck stop was to me. She spent her twenties working her way up from the factory floor to the office as a customer service person. When I returned to the factory and a position had opened up that was officially accounting but mostly just data entry, my mom asked the HR guy about it. He was just going to get a temp but said I could try it out but I would have to take a pay cut. That was the most hilarious thing about that place, you never got promoted -- every time you changed positions you had to take a pay cut.
I was terrible at first. So slow and full of errors and nobody talked to me and they took away my internet access because I would go to Webshots.com everyday to change my background because my predecessor did it. I split my time between two branches and slowly I improved enough so that one of my bosses decided he wanted to keep me all day and gave me more data to enter and gophering to do. He was impressed that I took initiative, that I built a little spreadsheet to do monotonous math and made unofficial work instructions and slipped me a hundred dollar cash bonus. It did not help that we were close in age and he was the CEO's son and that I developed feelings for him.
One year I had a so-so review and he gave me a 23 cent raise because everyone was getting 3.5% and I had to hide and cry in the bathroom because at the truck stop we didn't have a review, everyone just got a quarter every year. I guess I was insulted.
But I also got to work with my mom and feel like I was a part of her clique that would take cigarette breaks every hour and I listen to the radio and cd's through headphones and send personal emails and generally do what I wanted as long as I also got my work done.
Eventually an AP position opened at another branch and I was not promoted but allowed to make that lateral move with no cut or raise in pay. It was a much bigger job, and I spent a lot of that time figuring out what accounting stuff was when I had no formal accounting education. I also spent a lot of time blogging and looking for love on dating websites. When they started introducing the "Who Moved My Cheese" books and brought in a black belt six sygma guy who had us outline exactly how our jobs could be downsized, and accounting had a new manager, and I had started taking photography and other gen ed classes at the tech college, and they purchased a fancy copier that cost as much as I was making, I was still surprised when I was the one who got downsized.
But lest I actually be set free to collect unemployment, cash out my meager 401k and move to New Mexico, I was offered another position at another plant, on second shift, WITH A CUT IN PAY, in the receiving department where I spent the summer of 2007 drinking until bar close almost every night with a forklift driver who I never slept with but everyone assumed I did.
At the end of that summer I was yanked back to AP at the branch where I started and instead of a cut in pay, I asked for my fifty cents back. It was strange to be back in the corporate HQ on days, mindful of suits and customers. I attempted to stick with my photography classes but dropped out when it became too hard. There was tension in my mother's clique, then between my mother and I, then I became a little more emotionally unstable after a breakup and then I was flirting with on myspace with a coworker who wouldn't look me in the eye in person but would send me filthy text messages. Enter then 2009 and the economic crash. First a one week layoff where I was allowed to take unemployment. Then they started closing the office on Fridays and I figured out that I could file unemployment for the one day a week that had been cut and I'm pretty sure that was the reason I was laid off first. I would call in once a month and talk to the CFO and he would say next month, next month. My mom was still there and she heard someone say I got fired because of an incident where the head of maintenance was buying personal items for himself and I should have caught it, but it was their system that was flawed because he approved his own invoices. I also got into a power struggle with the CEO's sister that nobody liked, so that might have had something to do with it. I like to joke that I still work there because I was never actually let go, just laid off and forgotten about.
I spent the next year and a half working part time at the gas station, collecting unemployment, working a few temp jobs until I decided to go back to school for a third time, this time for accounting. It was almost begrudgingly because every other time I had thought to myself "well, if I'm going to go back to school, it's going to be for something I actually want to do." Like photography. I guess 2009 was the wake up call. I thought with my years of experience I could nab a new AP job anywhere but due to the fact that I was competing with people that had experience and degrees, it became time to actually learn what the fuck a debit and credit were.
It took me three and a half years to get my associates in accounting. That's with transferred credits from my other collegiate attempts, going half-time so I could take student loans, and working full time. I graduated with honors, and my GPA .04 away from high honors thanks to the C I received in the accelerated version of Business Law thanks to a combination of too many courses that semester plus a very distracting dysfunctional relationship.
At the time it seemed like a death defying feat. Now it feels like *only* an Associates and people suggest I should get my Bachelors but really I am content to stay at low level accounting where I don't have to get overly invested. I do not particularly like it. I am not particularly great at it. I get by with my lackadaisicalness. Sometimes I feel like a fraud in my new job when I make a mistake. I feel like I duped them, that they are regretting their decision to choose me. Even though my boss keeps telling me they are so happy to have me, that I'm picking up on things so fast, everyone makes mistakes, I'm still learning, yadda yadda yadda.
If there's one thing I've realized through this retrospective (I didn't even touch on the office jobs I've had post 2009), it's that each job could in itself be a chapter of my life. Where I've worked has determined what kind of life I have had, who my friends are, the best of times and the worst of times. I have been a slightly different person at every job I've had. Sometimes I am the rebel or the funny one or the chatty one or the workhorse.
With working from home during the pandemic, I am only one foot into this new position. It takes awhile to for me to figure out how I am going to fit into the office dynamic, and this undefined existence has been exacerbated by the fact that I am not in an office. It is kind of like being unemployed but not. Sometimes I think I am working harder than I would in an office without the distractions of events or people to talk to. But I also am prone to being sidetracked by cats laying on my keyboard or shamelessly scrolling through facebook for too long because nobody can see me do it. I have been trying to take more focused breaks, like every couple hours I will pop in the kitchen and wash a few dishes for five minutes so that I can feel like I am getting the best of both worlds -- the productivity around the house and the productivity of work.
I have been with this new company for 90 days and have only been shown half the job. I was supposed to start the other half in December but it keeps being delayed because my boss is too busy to train me. It's not like it's anything foreign, she just needs to show me the way they do it in their system and let me know the rules. She's pushed it back to February and I am scared to admit to her that I am getting bored with only doing the one role.
There are questions here in this prompt, about work values and fulfillment. We all know that accounting is not my passion but that I lack the drive and tenacity to actually pursue a career in the arts. I had hoped to maybe one day find myself accounting for an art museum or a publishing house so that I could at least come in contact with things that actually bring me some sort of satisfaction. But given what I've experienced and had a sneak preview of, a food company might be a close second. At least it's not manufacturing plastic disposable garbage like the one place, or being a distributor that just resells parts at higher prices and rapes customers on freight charges like the last place. This new job actually seems to care about their employees and in turn, the employees care about the company. When the production plants had COVID running through them, office folks went back to their cheesemaking roots to keep plants up and running. I'm not there yet, as I still feel like an outsider, but I see the good insurance, the gym, onsite health care, the self-improvement classes, the books I've been given about the culture and philosophy, the classes about pizza making and I hope it turns my little cynical black heart into a person who is actually proud of where they work and who wants to do their best in order to give back to a company that treats them well, not just do their best so they can be given praise and rewards. And even if I can't change my cynical nature, I need to at least start acting like someone who gives a damn.
While not my dream job, accounting has given me the luxury to live a somewhat comfortable normal white bread middle class life. In the early days it always felt like a placeholder as in "I will do this now until I pay off all my debts and have money saved up to figure out what the next step is." I am living close to colleges now and have considered trying to finish my English degree one class at a time. Maybe one day. And then what? I could get an equally unfulfilling job editing something I have no interest in. As it is right now, if I want to write, I can write. If I want to take photos, I can take photos. If I want to paint, I can paint. And I do all these things. On weekends. My accounting job does not take up any excess space in my mind, just camps out in a dark corner for 40 - 45 hours a week.
That being said my dream job, if I won the lottery and didn't want to travel or after I was done seeing the world and was bored with hanging out in my wine cellar, I might open a shoppe (yes, with the superfluous -pe) in one of those artsy boutique towns in a building from the 1800s with creaky floors and where I would sell antiques and trinkets and artsy things that other people made or maybe I made, self-published or local books, maybe a coffee corner with muffins except there would need to be a store cat and I'm not sure how that would work for food rules, and I could read or write or paint and I'd only have a handful of customers per day and I would actually be losing money and have super erratic hours because I would take off whenever I felt like going somewhere so maybe I'd have to hire a young protégé who would hopefully not be the same hot mess I was in my younger days and if she was, I would just do her a favor and fire her like so many jobs should have done to me.
But alas I do not buy lottery tickets nor pay it much mind. So now we continue with the waiting for life to begin again. This phase started a bit before the pandemic, about the time I turned forty, a shift as things started to change. Buying the house, moving to a new city, breaking up with James, losing Phoebe, changing jobs. My old life is fading but my new life hasn't started yet. The pandemic has meant not meeting new people for friends or romance, less opportunity to explore my new town, even get to my neighbors. For now, I am holding my breath in chrysalis.
