Jobs, Unemployment and Ice Cream Cones

Getting out of the harness

To me, the best part of any job is that last day when you quit (or get fired). I don’t take to the harness very well. I hate jobs. The only reason I’ve ever taken jobs is to make money. I shudder when I think about how much of my life I have wasted being a beast of burden so some boss or CEO or shareholder can get wealthy off my work while I make barely enough money to keep a roof over my head. Am I an idiot, or what?

I’ve had hundreds of jobs. Seriously, I’m not exaggerating. A lot of those jobs were fun and educational but when you do the same thing over and over and over and over the fun starts draining away. It is never long before I am itching to get out of the harness.

I am currently working a part-time 30 hours a week job. It used to be a 38 hours a week job but the business I’m working for is in trouble and my hours have been slashed to help maintain the bottom line. I was thrilled to learn that I would have 8 additional hours each week to write but the significant cut in income has been like having my head stuck in a slowly closing vise.

On June 15th — just two weeks away — I will have been working at this job for four years. Believe it or not that is actually a record for me! I have never stayed at one job that long before. My old record was two and a half years — which I did twice.

I should point out though that on two occasions I was self-employed and ran my own businesses and both of those experiences lasted longer than four years. One lasted for five years and the other for nine years. But working for yourself is a whole different kind of job so that doesn’t count as far as the duration of the hundreds of traditional jobs that I’ve had. More on that later.

There has been a little voice in the back of my noggin that for several months now has been whispering, “June 15th! June 15! Four years! Four years! Having set that record wouldn’t it be the perfect time to quit?” (That voice often whispers with exclamation points.)

With that date echoing in my head I am suddenly realizing that date is now just two weeks away. What the hell am I going to do?

Quitting a job is not easy. After all, there are bills to pay and food to buy and there is the dreadful uncertainty of finding another job. Too often quitting a job involves merely switching one harness for another. I’ve known so many people who hate their jobs and desperately want to quit but don’t for matters of security. Been there, done that.

Often, these people who don’t have the balls to quit a job they hate will subconsciously sabotage their job with a slowly decreasing job performance until they are fired. That way they can get out of the job and play victim as well.

If Tom Arnold is to be believed, this is what happened with Roseanne Barr. He has postulated that she was happy doing season ten of Roseanne but she didn’t want to do another season. But she couldn’t say no to it so she subconsciously set out to sabotage the show and get that next season cancelled so that she could go home to her Hawaiian macadamia nut farm and enjoy life while there was still some left. Whether he is right or not we may never know.

Been there, done that.

Unfortunately I do not have a macadamia nut farm to go home to. Hell, I don’t even have a single macadamia nut! The money in my retirement fund is a negative number!

If I quit my job on June 15th I will have to immediately find and begin a new job or risk immediate homelessness. Getting yet another job is the very last thing I want to do! I want to quit my job and never have another job again!

And what if with that new job I had to work more hours and work harder? What if I end up coming home from work from that new job too exhausted to write? That would be a fate worse than death. And what if that new job was across town and I had to walk a long way to get there? My current job is only two and a half blocks from where I live. I don’t want to put up with any commute longer than that.

The truth is that my current job is ridiculously easy and that is one reason I’m still there after almost four years. There is nothing strenuous about the job at all. I just shower people with love, fiddle on the computer, do some filing and some occasional very light janitorial work like vacuuming the carpet or wiping down the desks and counters.

Don’t tell anyone but there have been a few slow times when I have actually taken a short twenty or thirty minute nap. Who wouldn’t love a job where you can occasionally take a nap? I mean seriously! I don’t come home from work exhausted. Often I come home feeling rested and refreshed and energized and ready and eager to sit at my laptop and do what I really do.

Of course this current job pays below poverty level wages, there are no paid sick days, no vacation time, no health insurance, and no retirement fund.

Anyway, I turned the page on the wall calendar in my kitchen this morning and there it was….

June 15th. Right in the middle of the page.

Among the hundreds and hundreds of jobs I’ve had, one of the very worst ones was working on an assembly line in a factory. The work was exhausting and the conditions were brutal and I felt like I was a brain-dead robot. I really hated it and desperately wanted to quit.

The irony was that this worst of all jobs came right after the best of all jobs. But, as I said before, this best of all jobs really wasn’t a traditional job. It was my own business. That’s different. It wasn’t a job because I was working for myself. It was the nine years I owned and ran my own bookstore. I was the boss and I did whatever the hell I wanted, answering to no one. And it was a pure joy! I thoroughly loved it. How can I call something like that a job?

I only had two employees during those nine years of self-employed bliss. One of them was there every single minute the bookstore was open. Luckily I didn’t have to pay her because she was a dog. But she was the best, most loyal employee of all time. She took her job very, very, very seriously. Every single morning she would go to the front door of the apartment at 9:45 and wait for me to open the door so that she could go to work. She is the only person I’ve ever known who truly loved having a job.

And she was very good at her job. She greeted every single customer at the front door and did everything she could to make them feel at home. She kept a vigilant eye on everything that went on and immediately alerted me if anything was askew. And a big part of her job was to maintain high frequency vibrations of joy. Actually, I’m not sure she was an employee so much as a co-owner. I think she felt the bookstore was as much hers as it was mine.

The other employee was a human. I really had no need for a human employee. The dog and I did just fine running the business by ourselves. But one day a woman came into the bookstore and ordered me to hire her daughter part-time. The woman was downright gorgeous! She was a Halle Barry look-alike double. But more importantly, she was the bookstore’s number one best customer. She spent hundreds of dollars in my bookstore every month. She almost single-handedly kept the place afloat. How on earth could I say no to her?

She said that her daughter needed to learn some responsibility and what it’s like to have a job and also how to manage finances. She said that I didn’t have to hire her for more than one day a week but that would suffice to provide the lessons she wanted her daughter to learn.

So I hired her home-schooled sixteen year old daughter to work for four hours every Thursday. I knew her already because she came in quite often with her mother to get books. I knew she was very smart (if slightly dyslexic) and that she was a voracious reader. I love seeing young people read a lot.

(Now that is how you get a job. You get your mother to get it for you.)

The woman’s daughter was thrilled to get the job because she had already fallen in love with the dog and looked forward to spending four hours every Thursday with my doggie. And she turned out to be a very good employee and it turned out to be a great thing hiring her. With her running the store for four hours each Thursday that gave me some time to get out and take care of business around town. I left the dog with the girl in the bookstore to manage the place and make sure everything went smoothly. And I trusted the girl with the dog because the girl was such an animal lover (she went on to study veterinary medicine in college). That time on Thursday afternoon was the only time each week when my doggie and I were not joined at the hip.

Anyway, my human employee worked there for a couple of years then quit to go off to college. The dog and I missed her.

It was soon thereafter that that damn, confounded Jeff Bezos finally succeeded in running me out of busy. Of course it wasn’t solely Jeff Bezos’ fault but I like blaming him. The dog was heart-broken (as was I). Every single morning for the rest of her life she would go to the front door of where ever I was living at 9:45 in the morning and look at me with her big loving brown eyes as if to say, “Okay, I’m ready to go to work.”

After having been self-employed twice for almost 15 years I suddenly found myself in the position of looking for a job. If there is anything worse than having a job it’s looking for a job. Before being self-employed for almost 15 years I was a stay-at-home full-time mother for 5 years. I had not looked for a job in 20 years!

I finally found a job working on the assembly line at that factory. I’ve already mentioned how I hated that job and how truly heinous it was. But you know what the very, very, very worst thing about that job was?

I couldn’t bring my doggie to work with me!!!

I worked at that darn factory for almost a year. I never quit the job and I never got fired. One day the job just disappeared into thin air.

I went to work one Friday — it happened to be payday. The workers were all standing outside the doors to the factory. The factory doors were locked. There were no signs or any notice of what happened.

We finally learned that the CEO had shut the factory down and had disappeared with every penny the factory had including all the wages the workers were due to collect on that Friday. We had worked 8 hours a day for two weeks and never collected so much as a dime in wages for it. Furthermore, we could not collect unemployment because the unemployment office could not locate the CEO to confirm that we had worked there and that we had been laid off.

Man did that ever suck! For the second time in a year I found myself once again looking for a job. The mountain town where I was living was very seasonal. During two short times of the year jobs were a dime a dozen but for the slow rest of the year you couldn’t find a job to save your life. And the factory shut down during the slow time.

I had been hitting the pavement for several days without finding a job when one warm afternoon I was walking downtown and was about to pass a little ma and pa deli that I knew served ice cream cones. I though, ‘Man, an ice cream cone would be really great right now.’

So I reached into my pocket to pull out and count my money. I had $3.27. It was all the money I had left to my name.

Call me crazy but I went in there and bought myself a soft-serve ice cream cone.

With ice cream cone in hand I exited the little deli and lo and behold who should I see walking down the sidewalk but my ex-wife! If I had not bought that ice cream cone I would have missed her because I would be much further down the street.

She stopped and we talked for a while. She already knew about what happened with the factory. I updated her on my extreme fruitless job search. We talked a while about our daughter and other things ex-husbands and ex-wives talk about.

Then her eyes grew large, “Oh my goodness, I just remembered something. One of Roxy’s employees just quit. She’s probably looking to hire someone.”

Roxy and her husband were mutual friends with my ex-wife and me. We had known each other for years. Roxy and her husband also owned and ran their own family business. They shopped at our family business and we shopped at their family business. We also ran into each other frequently at parties. I also once worked with Roxy on some volunteer work for a local non-profit. She was a flamboyant, tequila-swilling party gal who was constantly either smiling or laughing. She was one of my favorite people in town.

“Really? Maybe I better get down to her store before she hires someone else. Thank you so much for the tip!”

“My pleasure. I hope it helps.”

I said good-bye to the ex-wife and headed to Roxy’s business which was about 8 blocks away. I finished the ice cream cone about halfway there.

It turned out that Roxy was indeed looking to hire someone. We talked for a few minutes then she immediately hired me. We talked some more while I petted her dog. Roxy and her husband brought their dog with them to work. How perfect was that?

I was about to walk out of her store when she said, “Wait!”

I turned around to see her handing me a piece of paper.

“That’s a job application. Why don’t you take that home with you and fill it out then bring it with you to work tomorrow. That kind of makes it official.”

So that, folks, is how you get a job. You simply buy an ice cream cone and run into your ex-wife. It’s that easy.

Today, so many years later, my ex-wife now lives on the other side of the country and there is no way I could run into her.

But yesterday I did go down to the local convenience store and I bought myself a soft-serve ice cream cone.

But nothing happened.

Major change is imminent. I can feel it. My time at my current job is coming to an end. It needs to. It’s time.

But I have no idea what is going to happen. I really don’t want another job. I just want to stay home and write full-time. But I have rent and bills to pay so that won’t cut it. I need some income but not a job.

To tell the truth I wouldn’t mind opening another business. But the jar atop my refrigerator with about 6 or 7 dollars worth of coins in it isn’t enough to open a business with. So that doesn’t seem like a viable option.

Whatever the case, I am tired of thinking about it. And I’m tired of hearing that voice in my noggin. I am turning it over to the Universe. The Universe knows what I want and it has heard that voice. I’m not wasting any more time thinking about it. I certainly don’t want to impede the Universe with any more thinking. It’s out there and whatever happens, happens.

And if nothing happens? Well, at least I’ve got a job.

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