Mimosas and martinis: the fine madness of waiting tables

Rejection letters always start off the same. Thank you for your interest. After careful consideration, we've chosen another candidate. blah blah blah blah.

My "stack" - rejection letters

I've started a small collection of rejection letters. Some may say this is masochistic. I thought so, too, when I'd heard of people saving rejection letters in the past. A friend once saved every rejection letter he'd received from the literary journals he'd submitted work to.

Each letter (and a lot of them are electronic, so I don't have hard copies) is a reminder of something I wanted, something I invested and believed in. And, I have to believe that with each rejection comes the possibility of honing my skills, building character, an opportunity to adapt and add grace to my life.

I started waiting tables two weeks ago, and so far, here's what I know: it's a hella more difficult to wait tables at 40 than it was at 25. But, I walked in on a Monday to fill out an application, and walked back into the same restaurant on Wednesday ready to serve. It's a fairly swanky, one-of-a-kind local place where people order mimosas with Sunday brunch and martinis with Porterhouse steaks.

Here's what else I know: you have to be willing. When you are willing, opportunities present themselves. 

Author Cheryl Strayed said in Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

My small quiet room is a bustling room of mimosas and martinis, of chicken marsalas and porterhouse steaks, of American Express and Visa. And every day I'm hustling.

For whatever reason, this is what presented itself to me at this time. I've chosen to embrace it with love and as much grace as I can muster. I have to believe there is a method to the madness.

I'm lying on my hammock half dozing, lulled by a warm breeze that sways the hammock gently from side to side. Above me, tiny buds emerge from the small stand of dogwood trees that support the hammock cradling me; beyond the branches, the sky is a delicious azure. Bald eagles screech and  red-winged black birds call from trees surrounding the Ranch's seven acres.

I am savoring this day off and have vowed to stay off my feet -- and outside -- as much as possible. I've curled up with a copy of Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk,  which seems perfect.

I open the book to a random page, and find this:

“Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.”

Amen. 

Thanks to my friend Jim for recommending The Cloister Walk. 

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

About two weeks ago, I received an email from a recruiter who found my profile/resume on monster.com. Her email explained that she was impressed with the versatility of my skill set, and that my kind of diversity and original, creative thinking  is exactly what her company - a large manufacturer of "over 510,000 different products used to maintain facilities, solve problems, and fuel the imagination" - strives to bring on board. She ended her email with a request for a phone interview and an attachment for a job description that I couldn't, for the life of me, decipher or decode, so thick was the jargon.

Now, mind you, I spent eight years critically reading, processing, thinking about and churning out words. I've waded through an entire year of Shakespeare and all 52 of his plays; slogged my way begrudgingly through all of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; devoured all 800 pages of James Joyce's Ulysses (as well as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners);  and spent an entire summer with the entire collection of Willa Cather's novels. I also managed within those eight years to produce God-only-knows how many 20-page essays as well as 100 pages of a master's thesis fulfilling the requirement for my creative writing program. 

If anyone knows drivel, I know drivel. And this job description was full of it. 

Still, what did I have to lose.

Wednesday

So, after a successful initial phone interview, I headed to the company headquarters for a three hour interview despite coming down with the first head cold I'd had since I could remember. I stopped at a drug store on the way to the interview for some pseudoephadrine-filled goodness, then headed to the interview. It was a beautiful Wednesday as my gps lead the way through the corporate landscape to the building that would be my destination. The atmosphere was modern, corporate and sterile inside; row upon row of cubicles filled a giant, open room.

A perky older lady with an updo glanced at me through her bifocals at the reception desk. 

"I have a meeting with Cathy at 1:30," I explained. 

She looked quickly at her day planner, then asked, "Oh, are you Shannon?"  

"Yes," I nodded. She smiled warmly and handed me a clipboard with a three-page application. "If you could fill this out, I will let Cathy know you're here." She smiled briefly, dismissing me to a corner of the reception area next to an art-deco looking sculpture of giant rectangles in primary colors stacked in an alternating pattern. 

I met with Cathy, a slightly rotund blond with a button nose in a mundane burgundy cardigan and matching t-shirt. Very "office casual." She spoke a language I did not speak, referring to a large catalog of over 500,000 products. 

"Clearly we care a lot about presentation," she said. "You can tell that by this catalog of our products. The paper is of the highest quality, and even though it is thin, it is superior in strength." She pinched her fingers along the edge of about five pages of the giant catalog and picked the whole thing up by these pages as a demonstration.

She went on, "Our signature catalog contains more than 500,000 of the highest-quality, highest-demand products, and our supply chain and logistics management allows us to deliver those products to our customers quickly and reliably."

I met with Allison, a bubbly 20-something with calf-length boots and blond highlights through her mouse-brown hair. She spoke the same language as Cathy. I asked for clarification about what the position entailed. 

"Your job as a Generalist would be to guide our diverse clientele quickly and effectively through our enormous inventory to the specific products they need to meet their business goals," said Allison without skipping a beat. 

I listened attentively. As it turned out, Allison formerly worked in my field, in health education, and knew a former colleague of mine from the medical school I worked at two years ago. We discussed the struggles with grant-funded positions and why health educators aren't valued more in the medical field over nurse educators. 

I met with Beth, who would be my manager. She explained her vision of the Generalist position. 

"This job as I see it is not only to quickly and efficiently supply customers with the products they need, it is to ferret out more information from them so they do not have to ask the same questions the next time. Our job is to figure out what the customer needs before they even need it."r 

So this is a customer service job answering phones and taking orders. The picture finally began to come into focus. 

"Escape"

I left feeling confident I would receive a job offer.  I thought of the relief I would feel receiving, finally, the first paycheck and how I could finally get caught up financially. 

Thursday

But then, a dread began to fill my heart. My career spans fifteen years in education and non-profit work. I am driven by jobs that do something good for others, give something back. What would this job provide? At the end of the day, I could go home knowing I helped Mr. Jones find the perfect air carbon-gouging electrodes? Sure, I could catch up on my credit card bill, but where is the intrinsic value? 

Friday finds me in near panic mode, convinced I would be locked into a corporate job that lured me in with its compelling salary and sexy predictability. 

So imagine my shock when I opened a rejection letter from none other than the "industry leader in distribution, operations and customer service." A generic form letter, Cathy stated that upon review of my credentials, they had chosen a candidate that more closely matched their needs. 

I sighed with relief, thanking God for narrowly escaping corporate hell. 

Then, I scratched my chin, furrowed my brow and thought, "who the hell do they think they are? Rejection letter! Pfft!"

It's hard to receive a rejection letter, even when it's from a position you don't necessarily want. But I seem to receive them weekly these days. I feel a solidarity with the thousands of unemployed masses seeking to find that golden opportunity, seeking to find that someone who will recognize our talents for what they are and scoop us up into their arms.

I keep trying to understand the lesson I am supposed to learn from all of this. I am trying to accept that I am exactly where I need to be right now, despite the fact that I want desperately to change where I am, both in latitude and longitude, as well as figuratively.

 Monday

Perhaps what I need is another job waiting tables and bar tending.  I put on some make up, curl my hair, and put on something other than a hoodie and sweatpants and head to town to an upper scale restaurant/bar. I meet with the manager who I spoke with on the phone just two days before. He is middle aged, clearly anxious for he is fidgety, constantly looking around, wringing his hands.

By Monday afternoon, I am employed as the newest member of their wait staff and bar tending crew.

Forty years old, a masters degree, and 15 years of experience in non-profit outreach, education and communications/PR and I am a bartender. It might not make a dent in the $85k I accrued in graduate school, I might not find the satisfaction or intrinsic value of "doing good" divvying out martinis and plates of Chicken Parmesan. But maybe, just maybe I can get caught up on my credit card.

Shannon Miller is a freelance writer and photographer from northeast Ohio.  Her worthless resume can be viewed here

My unemployment journey

I walked into the cabin to find a message blinking impatiently for me on the answering machine. It was from Red, the owner of the bar I had put my application in at a few days prior.  He wanted to meet.

I pushed the door open and stepped into the restaurant hopeful. I needed this job desperately. My unemployment from my job at the medical school in Ohio was about to run out, and this tavern was the closest thing to the cabin in a very desolate, remote area.

Built like a large cabin, the room was warm and rustic. Red's intense blue eyes met mine, and he immediately made me nervous. The back of his black t-shirt said, "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard." Quick on his feet, he began showing me where jars of mayonnaise were kept, how he made a Long Island, how to do prep work. He hired me on the spot. Before I knew it, I'd made $50 in tips.

But just then, the eastern U.P. decided upon a fluke heatwave, with temperatures soaring to nearly 50 degrees in December. The snow melted rapidly, and along with it, the snowmobilers disappeared. And so, almost as quickly as I found myself employed, I found myself unemployed. Without snowmobilers, there is no economy in the winter in Deer Park.

I was back to square one.

6.7 % of the workforce in Ohio is unemployed as of December 2012. In Michigan, at the same time period, it was 8.9%, putting it in the top seven out of all 50 states.

I dabbled in freelance articles about obscure topics such as "How to raise a pet mongoose" for $25 an article. I sold some of my photography on etsy. I helped at my friends' Tasha and Ed Stielstra's kennel hooking dog teams for tours with eager and bright-eyed tourists from Indiana. I stopped into a cutesy tourist shop to sell some of my artwork on consignment; the owner humored me, but then said they didn't sell much photography. I checked the Ace Hardware in town, as well as the two grocery stores, the feed store, the hospital, the health department and a handful of gas stations. No one was hiring.

Gradually, my means of survival narrowed.

One Friday night, while sitting at the bar commiserating with my also-unemployed friend, Mike Betz, I noticed Larry, the owner of the Pine Stump and Robert, his pizza cook, eying me from the other end of the bar. Betz and I had frequented the Stump regularly all season, and had come to know Larry, Robert, the 19 year old server, Marissa, and her mother, Debra who was also a server quite well (there will be other stories about the Stump and my adventures with Betz soon).

If there is one thing I am, it's persistent. I had become known as "that girl who wants a job" to Larry and the crew who ran the Stump. My number was tacked above the bar. I asked him nearly every time Betz and I went there to hire me. Finally, one night, he succumbed.

The night I sat there with Betz, the Stump was crawling with half-drunk snowmobilers, the sounds of their revelry a constant drone that swelled occasionally with laughter and the clank of their beer steins. Larry and Robert continued to talk and look over at me. Finally Larry approached me.

"What are you doing tomorrow?" he asked. I smiled triumphantly.

"What do you want me to be doing tomorrow?" I responded with a smirk.

"Can you be here at 1?"

But of course.

I rolled into the parking lot of the Stump in a way that would likely seem off-putting to a non-Yooper but which seemed perfectly appropriate for Deer Park. The bed of my truck was half-full of firewood, half-full of snow, and there was frozen deer pelt at the end of the bed. Betz had hit it with his Jeep a month prior, killing it instantly (and doing significant damage to his Jeep) and brought it to me for dog food, the fresh, young buck still warm. He'd taught me how to hang and gut the deer, and we stripped it of its soft cape that was just thickening up for winter. The cape lie frozen in the back of my truck.

I walked into the Stump, which was also built like a large log cabin, rustic and warm. While some found Larry intimidating, I felt at ease with him. He was tall and always donned a pair of black Wrangler jeans and a neat, button-down shirt and cowboy boots. His blue eyes were sharp but softened behind his glasses, and his brown hair fell in feathers on each side, and probably hadn't changed much since 1985. Larry didn't pull any punches, and I respected that. I went to work in the kitchen, stocking the cooler full of beer that seemed to disappear into the bellies of thirsty snowmobilers almost immediately. I also had the insurmountable task of washing dishes. By hand. For nine hours. On a standing-room-only day at the Stump.

After several hours, I left the mounting stack of plates to relieve myself, looking forward to the brief respite in the can. As I walked through the dining room, a snowmobiler grabbed my arm and pulled me next to him for a photo. He had stripped down to only his black winter bibs, the suspenders pressing softly against his salt-and-pepper colored chest hair. He smelled of Bud Light and pepperoni. I feigned a smile, then quickly headed to the bathroom.

I sat on the cold toilet seat and exhaled, relieved to be sitting for a moment even if only to pee. As I washed my hands at the sink, I startled at my reflection in the mirror. My own eyes searched to find the person behind them.

How did I get here? Interest grew daily on my student loan from eight years of college and a master's degree that seemed to garner nothing. An 11 year marriage to the father of my child had ended. My kids were back in Ohio, and I missed them with the most debilitating ache I'd ever known.

I brushed these brooding thoughts aside. I had to get back to work.

As I washed dishes and chopped onions, I talked to Debra, who was 49 years old, but looked older. She had a cigarette-stained voice and a cackling laugh. She gave me Advil when my back hurt from standing on concrete bending over a sink for hours, and a can of Keeweenaw "Pick Axe Blonde" beer to ease the pain. She was shocked to learn I had a master's degree.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Trying to make a living," I said, referring to washing dishes, although I knew the "here" she was referring to was Deer Park, Michigan.

That night at the Stump, I made $80 washing dishes for 9 1/2 hours and received free beer and dinner from Larry. I also sold the deer pelt for $20 to the fry cook, who used it to bait for coyotes. And I was extremely grateful for it all.

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After living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan - where jobs are even more scarce than other places in the country - I finally had to throw in the towel and crawl back to Ohio, penniless. I've been on four interviews in the last week, and have sent my resume out to half dozen or more potential employers.

This week, I met with a staffing agency. The lady at the staffing agency glanced at my resume, then looked up at me as if in disbelief.

"I can get you a job in a rubber factory for minimum wage," she said. "But it's dirty. Your resume is quite impressive. I wonder why you're not getting anything in your field?"

Because my "field," which is full of like-minded, talented aficionados of creativity - Writers/Photographers/Multimedia Specialists/Public Speakers/Educators/Marketing Communications Specialists/Event Planners - is completely saturated. The last two jobs in my field I interviewed for, I was one of 500 candidates. 

My friend Meg said it best: "The challenge for people like you and I (creative individuals with multiple skills and talents) is to figure out how to plug in to a world of very 'defined' positions."

I recently had two interviews in the service industry, and was offered a job at a popular coffee house chain 45 minutes from my house.  I was offered a whopping $7.85 an hour.

It only took me a quick minute to calculate the math: driving a V8 truck 45 minutes to said coffee house would cost me roughly $11.80 a day. I was offered 30 hours a week, which is about $280 before taxes. Subtract from that $50 in gasoline to and from, as well as probably $75 in taxes, and voila! I'm bringing home a whopping $110 a week.

Seriously?

Hank Williams said it best (and thus, is the title of this blog): my bucket's got a hole in it.

"Well, there ain't no use - of me workin' so hard..."

No thanks. I think I'll keep pounding the proverbial virtual pavement for a job in my field.

Shannon Miller is a freelance writer and photographer from northeast Ohio. Her professional resume for those who might have a job that pays more than minimum wage is here: www.linkedin.com/pub/shannon-miller/30/a23/306/