Restaurant Retail – The Life of a Post-Grad, Married, Twenty-Something

When I was younger I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t get married until I graduated college. June 13th, 2009 I kept that promise and Graduated from the University of Oregon with a Bachelor’s Degree in Magazine Journalism. June 14th 2009 I married the love of my life. I kept the promise but about 28 hours, but I certainly didn’t let myself down!

If I could pick a dream job it would be a tie between a writer for Rolling Stone and the editor of Paste Magazine. I would want the kind of epic writing life such as that of Cameron Crowe in “Almost Famous.” It was in my last 3 months of school I had this terrible discovery that perhaps I’d wasted most of my time trying to find a place in the magazine program when perhaps I’d belonged in their Literary Non-Fiction program. I didn’t really know where the degree would take me but at least I had one.

For six years of my life I worked as a Nanny for the best family ever. I started out working once a week watching an 8 year old boy and walking him home from school, making sure he finished homework. I’d work a few Fridays or Saturdays here and there so that the parental units could venture outside the house. Less than a year into my Nanny Career, the mom was pregnant with baby number two. After about a 6 month hiatus I got this adorable note in the mail saying they may need me soon.

When the baby was about 6 months and big brother was about 9, I started working 5 days a week from 8 or 9am to 2 or whenever in the afternoon as the official “Nanny.” I left them when the youngest was 6 and big brother was 15, and I miss them every day. Once they were all grown up and my job was more or less, “done” I’d exhausted every other idea that came along with staying in Oregon.

The hubby worked as a chef, and we knew a lot of people in the restaurant biz but I still couldn’t even get an interview. With family stuff becoming emotionally horrid, friendships falling apart at the seams and tearing our love into pieces we decided to get up and go after graduation and the wedding to start a new life. We moved down to Tampa in June 2009 to be near his aunt and cousins and my cousins who lived in the next city over.

Some people thought we were crazy, some didn’t know how the hell we picked Tampa, of all places, and we had no idea what was in store for us. My husband found work almost instantly as a line-cook at a Sushi place, making the teriyaki and fried dishes that anyone who didn’t enjoy sushi was prone to order at these places. Shortly after I found a job at a place that sells “Medical Apparel,” or as I later informed anyone who asked, “I sell scrubs.”

My husband, Eben, hated his job. He said the place was a huge health code violation. They started him at decent pay but he literally worked about 6 days a week with no say in his days off and single-handedly cleaned that place up and was treated terribly. One day they just fired him because he brought up the fact that they were paying him under what they had promised him.

My job wasn’t so terrible. It was air conditioned and the girls I worked with were pretty nice. I folded and hung scrub outfits, organized shoes, filled out embroidery forms, rang up sales and what not; pretty simple. My boss and his wife ran the place. He was okay. He was mid-50’s, kind of anal-retentive, but with a pretty sharp business sense. Eben said it best when he described his wife as looking like a mix between the wicked witch from Wizard of Oz and a troll. She had this annoying muddled southern accent and when she spoke she’d use the wrong words to describe things but had decided it was the correct way. Like saying an attitude was holding yourself in a certain “posture.” She also had this way of disguising an insult in a compliment. A personal favorite of mine was, “Oh that’s a cute vest! Are vests in style?”

I thought the scrub store was okay. My bosses said it was the best place to work as far as retail went. In some ways they were right. We worked in a nice hospital, away from all the blood and guts and diseased areas. There was a coffee shop right around the corner that sold lattes and such, the cafeteria had pretty good stuff, and we could get snacks and go to the bathroom whenever. I thought I was pretty good at the whole scene and the chicks I worked with were pretty cool. For minimum wage it could have been worse.

When Eben got fired we hit panic mode. I was only working part time. I found this place on Craigslist that had great hours and wasn’t too far away. They were closed Sunday and only open 11am-9pm so no more insanely late nights. It was a Mexican Grille, which was Eben’s specialty. He knew a lot about Latin American cuisine and such. He blew them away on the interview and fell in love with the place.

About two months into his employment he mentioned something to the owner about how I’d always wanted to work in a restaurant but had only ever worked at fast food. I earned my stripes at a Burger King on campus when I was 19. They needed an extra person to run food in the front of the house and the owner looked at Eben and asked him one simple question: “Can you work with her?”

I was hired a couple of weeks later and started working nights at the restaurant. The first few months were rough. Eben was working his way up to Kitchen Manager and the Front of the House manager secretly hated me. I think most of the other girls thought that I was under the impression that since Eben was climbing up the ladder, I was something special too, but they were wrong.
The restaurant kicked my ass! It still does. Mentally it has broken me down more often than I’d care to admit, and physically, some days it sucks. I do it for the people – my co-workers (well, most of them) and for the guests. I’ve met some amazing people there. Eben is like a fish in water at that place. I doubt he could exist without it. He is constantly working to better himself. Two years ago we would have killed each other if we worked together. Now, we do quite well, and are proud of it. It’s really nice.

Although I really liked the scrub store more at first, when boss man was promoted to Regional Manager and wicked-witch boss lady was made in-store manager, everything went to shit. I thought she’d be a great manager because we could do virtually no work and she wouldn’t even notice. Instead she brought in a kind of drama only her evil counterparts could sustain. I really wanted to shine at the store so I worked hard and slacked the least bit I could. Some days were boring so I slacked more than I’d care to admit, but everything always got done.

Anyway, our new witchy manager had all these little talks with us. They weren’t pep-talks, they were discussions that were usually about one person consistently making all kinds of mistakes and instead of being an adult and confronting the person one-on-one it became a store issue. She’d pit us against each other and make these crazy assumptions and jump to these insane conclusions about our “character” and our “attitudes” based on miscommunications on a daily basis. One day I was so violently mad that I stood there trembling in tears at her psychotic accusations praying for the strength not to quit while a fellow-coworker ended up defending me.

If you were out of the line of fire one week, you were in it the next. It was a vicious rotation. Eben confessed to me later that he couldn’t stand hearing me stress about the store. It was worse than my frustrations getting to understand the way the restaurant worked.

The scrub store fired me right before my birthday vacation back to the west coast. I’d never been fired before. I cried out of frustration and because I worked my ass off at the stupid store. Plus, it didn’t help that I had one of the girls planting the seeds of my firing behind my back, making me look bad all the time. Witch-troll-manager-lady was threatened by me. I did a good job there, no, a great one, and she hated me for it. When I tried to take initiative or defend others, she saw it as undermining her and trying to go over her head. There was no discussion because how things were meant and how things were perceived were concepts this woman could never grasp. Things happened how she saw them, period!

Working the two jobs was tough but we worked hard and we played hard. Eben liked that I was willing to work so hard. In turn, he worked hard and helped me out a lot. It was a good 6 month run of working myself ragged at both places but with the darkness, comes a light.
The manager that hated me at the restaurant quite and her replacement was much nicer, and far more understanding in terms of life and schedules and such. With this employee gone there was room for me to step up and be trained in a different position. So I did. I took the leap and I said, “hey, let’s do it.”

So from college to retail to the restaurant things have been interesting. As for writing, I freelance for an amazing entity called Creative Loafing. I mostly do online writing. I do concert reviews. I get to see bands for free and write about them, sometimes even getting paid for my work. Since I started writing for them I have been to over a dozen shows. I’ve written reviews for bands and artists like, Ben Harper, Jimmy Buffet, Foreigner, Green Day, Boys Like Girls, Good Charlotte, Paul Anka, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, David Gray, Flogging Molly, Bowling For Soup, Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Backstreet Boys.

They don’t tell you in college that things like this exist; that you can have your dream job without worrying about bills and having no life. I can go to my day job and make my rent, then I can sign up for who I want to see, request tickets, and if the promoter says yes, I can take my husband to a concert for free and then write about the experience the next day for the world to read. Every once in awhile they toss me a paycheck, be it 5 bucks or 50 and I’m just doing what I love.

Life is kind of crazy. When I was twelve I would have never imagined! Sometimes I think I should be doing more, or “better,” but what else is there? I mean, really? We pay our bills and have extra to lower the credit card debt and have a little fun here and there. We go to almost all our favorite concerts for free, I build up my resume with every piece I write, and sleep very well at night. No babies, no pets; it’s just me and my man. We’re healthy, we’re happy, we’re stable, and it’s simple. Life after college only goes perfectly planned for a small percentage…most of whom have a serious supply of money. You can drive yourself crazy with these, “should I’s” and “could I’s” and ideals and societal expectations but if you are where you want to be, and you are who you want to be, what else is there?

With all my life experience, with all my jobs in the past ten years, all my schooling, and all my relationships I’ve learned enough to write a whole novel, but there is some comfort in knowing that the future is just out there and whatever I do, wherever I go, I have the tools to do anything: write, work at the mall, be a Nanny, a personal assistant, a server, a hostess, a cashier, a mom, a housewife, an artist, whatever!

Life after college is not what I’d imagined, not quite what I’d planned and isn’t always easy, but I’m happy…and I love not knowing what’d next!