E and I braved the snow yesterday and headed out to a career fair. I’ve never been to a career fair before and was rather expecting a large room with rows of booths, smiling recruiters, and job-seekers suited in their best and wearing expressions of either extreme nervousness or high-and-mighty superiority. The ads that we’d been hearing and reading and seeing for the last month advertised dozens of employers from varied industries, gifts, food, and on-site interviews. E had his suit on (and looked quite handsome) and optimistically brought along a folder full of resumes.

What a disappointment.

I don’t know if it was blatantly false advertising in the first place or if the quarter-inch of snow already on the ground kept people away, but we were underwhelmed from the minute we walked in. The room was small-ish and there were about fourteen booths around the perimeter, manned by individuals whose mostly-dour expressions indicated that they’d rather be salting the sidewalks than handing out brochures. They were all eating sub sandwiches that had obviously been provided by the career fair organizers in a desperate attempt to keep them from leaving.

Just about the only advertised promise the fair kept was a representation of a wide assortment of industries. An Avon Lady with pancake makeup offered E a cologne sample and told him that an increasing number of “Avon Men” were becoming highly successful across the country. A large man with three gold teeth expounded on the virtues of driving a school bus. A private security firm was hiring armed officers to fill new positions for the city’s public transport system. Someone told us about how fun it is to be an outsourced customer service representative, and another asked E if he’d like to join the National Guard.

My personal favorite was the booth recruiting for the national border patrol. That would be one hell of a commute from here.

Anyway, we collected two free frisbees, four pens, a hand lotion sample, a carabiner with an LED flashlight, a peanut butter cup, seventeen useless brochures, and one slightly good lead from an employment placement agency that gave us a magnet.

The snow continued to fall, turning from fluffy flakes to icy stingers. We stopped at the grocery store on the way home to pick up dinner stuff and put the Jeep in 4WD just to drive 2 miles home on the back roads, away from the mad drivers we’d seen cause three accidents on the highway. It was a good night to make chili mac and biscuits, curl up on the couch together under a homemade quilt, and watch The Office while the world outside was silently blanketed with eight inches of snow. And really, even without the free frisbees, that made it a pretty good day.

So I’m a week and a half late for that post title. Waaah.

I quit The Restaurant! It looks like my promotion at The Hospital is going to require my hours to be a bit more flexible, so I won’t be able to make a schedule commitment to The Restaurant anymore.

At least, that’s what I told the owners.

I caught them both at the same time on the day I wanted to give my notice. LadyOwner isn’t too bad, but BossMan is a bit of a pill. I was really looking forward to his reaction.

Red: Hey guys!

Them: Hey Red.

Red: Do you have a second?

LadyOwner: Sure. (BossMan is silent)

Red: I just wanted to let you know that I have to put in my two weeks’ notice. (BossMan turns around and walks away) I got a promotion at The Hospital and my time won’t be as flexible, so I can’t commit to shifts here.

LadyOwner: Blah blah, congratulations on the propmotion, we’ll miss you, blah blah.

He just WALKED AWAY when I was talking! How dare he rob me of my moment of triumph?! I wanted him to cry! I’m actually the last waitress standing there right now. Meghan got fired, Natalie quit last week, and one of the bartenders also has her notice in as well. That leaves one bartender and one bartender/waitress to run the joint. E is pretty pleased that now BossMan and LadyOwner will finally have to do some actual work around The Restaurant instead of sitting at the bar all night “supervising” while they drink up what little profit we make.

This is why I REALLY quit:
In lieu of crappy tips, I am now raking in some bigger bucks tutoring high school English students. The pay is better, the hours are better (6-7 a week at $60 per!), and the kids are a trip. Look for more about them on here in the future; they do some pretty nuts things. I never really wanted to be a teacher – I was always afraid I’d end up on the news with a headline like “English Teacher beats student to death with comma splices” or something of that nature. Tutoring, I am noticing, is much more pleasant. I only have three students and they actually WANT to do well, so that’s a definite plus, along with the fact that it is awfully nice to feel smarter than someone once in awhile.

The Restaurant is driving us crazy, my boyfriend and I. We’re both seriously on the verge of quitting and letting the alcoholics who own the joint fend for themselves when their underappreciated employees walk out. They promised a raise to one of E’s staff and when it didn’t show up on the paycheck… well, it went something like this:

E: Hey, BossMan, Evan’s raise didn’t show up on his paycheck this week.

BossMan: What raise? Did we talk about this?

E: Yeah, after Justin was fired and you and I agreed Evan would come on full-time here and get a raise.

BossMan: When did we decide this?

E: Two weeks ago, at the beginning of this pay period.

BossMan: Was I drinking?

E: Um, yeah, you’d had a couple beers I guess…

BossMan: Well then how do you expect me to remember THAT?

And so on.

It wouldn’t be too hard for me to walk away… I work full-time at The Hospital and actually just got a bit of a promotion at The Hospital, so I’m in decent shape, dollar-wise. For E, on the other hand, The Restaurant is his bread and butter, as it were. He comes home every night frustrated and angry, torn between the fact that he hates his job and the fact that he’s good at it and doesn’t want to let The Restaurant fail. If he walks, that place will fall apart at the seams and we all know it.

We spent a few evenings working on his resume. Managerial experience, sales experience, budget work, etc… he’s got the degree and qualifications to get out of this business that he hates, but to where? Qualifications can only get you so far when you have even one major limitation.

E is dyslexic. This is a completely foreign concept to me. I could read before kindergarten and was into chapter books in first grade, Greek and Roman mythology in second, and full-fledged novels when I was about 9. I was a pretty precocious child in that regard, nose in a book all day, under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime. Books were a world for me, an escape into which I could indulge my vivid imagination and create stories of my own. I wrote poems, songs, short stories, and still harbor the aspiration of completing the novel I’ve started about four times now.

I’ve wondered all my life how people could not like to read. I thought they were just reading the wrong things – schoolbooks only, being forced to deconstruct and write papers on things they weren’t interested in, curriculum-required reading, etc. But I just knew that if these anti-readers could find the right kind of books for their interests, they would understand.

I thought these things until I met E and watched him struggle to do what comes so easily to me, narrowing his eyes and concentrating on putting letters into words, words into sentences, turning sentences into meaning. He’s smart, he really is so smart and well-spoken, and it’s hard for me to comprehend the disconnect. And it’s harder still to know that he watches me read and understand so quickly, his self-esteem sinks a little bit because he can’t do what I can do. Not in an emasculating sense, mind you, just the same things he’s felt his whole life.

The skills and experience he has are highly marketable in various industries. I’ll say this, the man’s got people skills. He has a strong work ethic, cares about employees and customers and always puts his heart into his work – even now, when he hates the job he does and the people he works for. But the transition is scary… any business he goes into outside of The Restaurant is going to require him to write, to keep databases and send emails and so on. And he’ll struggle and fight for it, and it won’t be like the rest of us struggling to adjust or find a path in a new job. It will be ongoing, and I’m scared for him. You never like to see a person you love hurting, and his dyslexia hurts him.

I want to be there for him, to help him show off the skills he has to a prospective employer and get a job he’ll like and excel at. But I don’t want him to think he’s not good on his own. So where is the fine line between encouragement and nagging?

I have a tendency to take over, I know that. It’s kind of my job as a team leader and project coordinator, I’m supposed to direct people and keep things on track, in scope, and on schedule. But I’m going to try, for his sake, to clock out at the end of the day at The Hospital and come home to just be the girlfriend and rub his shoulders while he sits at the computer.

I’m in a coffee shop. There’s not much to do in a coffee shop besides tap away at one’s computer and look pensive. I can do both at once so I’m showing off to you.

I have another job now. I have some rather naughty spending habits, so to supplement the meat-and-potatoes paycheck from DMH, I decided to put my service excellence skills to good use and become a waitress a few evenings a week.

I have never been a waitress. The ad on Craigslist asked for servers with experience. I applied anyway and was still asked to come and interview. The small talk with the owner was easy – we were both dressed quite cute and had much to say on that matter before anyone said anything about working. She asked about school, my “real job,” etc. before finally taking a look down the page and noticing my novice status. (Although I didn’t know it at the time, this failure to notice important details was, in fact, a harbinger of doom.)

“Ah,” Andrea said, pursing her lips. “I see you don’t have any food service experience.”

“I worked at Lion’s Choice for a few months in high school,” I offered helpfully.

“I meant as a server, I guess.”

“I have a lot of service experience, though,” I pointed out. “It just doesn’t involve hefting a tray.”

“It says here you were a secretary, but I think we’re looking for more interaction with customers,” she said, indicating the first job I held at BGH four years ago.

I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but lady, you have no idea, I thought. I took my deep breath. “I was a secretary for a surgical unit that cared for post-op cancer patients. Every day, I dealt with patients and families who were upset, scared, hurting, and angry at the most vulnerable times of their lives. I held a mom’s hand while her son was brought back from cardiac arrest. I brought DVDs from home to the 18 year old girl who had 4 surgeries in 4 weeks. And I figure that if I can help those people every day, in addition to running a unit’s medical records and staffing, I can handle a drunk guy who doesn’t like his pasta.”

Beat. Andrea looks down at her paper and makes a scribble. “Can you start training tomorrow night?”

The real point of the story is that the next night I met the cute head chef. I dropped silverware and he laughed at me and I mouthed off to him and we’re in a blissful state of happy together now.