As I type this I am now entering my third week as an unemployed person. This is something I have not experienced, voluntarily, in quite some time. The last time I was “fired” (for unknowingly insulting the wife of the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh, who was a major investor, it turned out, in the restaurant I was a host and bartender for) I remained on the schedule for over a month and it was me who had to ask the chef and owner to take me off so I could try something new. Even my last job in San Francisco slowly took me off the schedule when word got out that I might be moving to Tucson, AZ. Big whoop. The owner was an alcoholic asshole who kept threatening me because I had long-ish hair. About a week or two after I was completely removed from the schedule, I packed up a rental car and drove over fourteen hours to be with the girl I had fallen in love with.
We've been engaged now for over seven years.
Finding work for me in a completely new town was rough. I even spent two nights as a disc jockey at a high end strip club but couldn't take it for several reasons. One, I was a DJ in a strip club and, Two, when I saw little baggies of undisclosed white powder being sneakily handed around, I knew I had to get out quick. I managed a kid's dinosaur and science museum for a while but the owners were complete idiots and ran that place straight into the ground. Desperate for just “work” my lady, She-Ra, hooked me up with a kitchen job at the restaurant where she bartended.
It wasn't a bad gig, making pizzas and flippin' burgs for a decent wage and corporate benefits, but after four years of being stuck back there, with no room for growth, I knew I needed a change. That's when I went to cook with a popular chef here in Tucson at some fancy resort. It was cool for a while, I learned a lot, but it became pretty obvious that they don't teach you interpersonal management at the Culinary Institute. The day after a particularly horrific shift (I'm talking flooding, dishwasher exploding, hundreds of tickets just flying out of the machine, managers and servers yelling at us, all that good stuff...) the chef sat me down and told me I was on my final warning. Shocked, I was all “Um, what were my other infractions?” He informed me of a few and I told him it was his responsibility to let me know if I'm getting written up. After that, he hired a guy, a really cool guy unfortunately, at nearly $2 less an hour than me and slashed my hours. As I began trolling the internet job posts I came across a small but busy family run bar and grill that needed a kitchen manager. I soon jumped ship from the fancy resort and chef to got to work with ex-cons and chain smoking servers.
Basically they needed help with their disaster of a kitchen system and service problems. Having some corporate training behind me, I pretty much implemented a whole new system, organized everything, set up efficient stations and was there, every day, to try and make the place run a little smoother.
Then I got a raise. Then my hours were cut in half but my workload had doubled.
One night I was scheduled to close the kitchen with just one other guy and we got hit like nobody’s business. Tickets just wouldn't stop coming out of the machine, the servers were out of control, we were literally just throwing food into the window and when it was all over with, it took us almost two hours to restock and shut down that tiny little kitchen.
The next day, as I'm doing my taxes online, the phone rings. It was the manager on the other end and she told me that I obviously performed “Less than effective” last night that I was “Obviously not happy” with my job and let me go right then and there. No warning, no sit down conversation about my abilities or performance, nothing.
I sat there in shock. Once the realization hit of what just happened, all I could think of was “Are you serious? They used me to fix their restaurant then just plain got rid of me. Assholes!”
Turns out that the owner of the place was a former manager at the corporate restaurant I worked at for four years, stole a bunch of recipes then opened a “similar” place on the other side of town. I always wondered why the pizzas looked familiar and the peperoni filled dough rollups were almost an exact match to the ones I made at my former employer's.
Huh. Once a thief, always a thief.
Then the deep seated doom thought quickly washed over me. I would no longer be getting a regular paycheck. Sure I’ve had my struggles in the past, but once I was seriously out on my own and grown up a bit, I have always had a steady job to coincide with all of the other dumb stuff I like to get into. Being 41 years old, in a committed relationship, planning for the future, planning to own our own business with bills coming in, the idea of being unemployed really didn’t feel too hot. In fact, the feeling just plain sucked.
That first week without a job I literally was machine gunning my resumes out into the ether. Managing a tea shop, supervising a sandwich place, selling toilets at the Home Depot, managing a burger joint, shelving books at the library, writing for an Aerospace newsletter, admin for the Nature Conservancy, sushi chef, garde manger for a French bistro, etc etc etc… Nothing. Not one call back. Actually, that’s not true, I did get a few calls but they arrived literally minutes after I submitted my resume and the last time I took them up on their offer, well, let’s just say I got canned over the phone.
Here’s a tip: If you are job hunting and someone calls you back like within minutes of your submission – do not take that job! It’s obvious they are super desperate and are willing to give you crappy money for crappy work so let the real jobs take their time. This chain of sandwich shops, Jimmy John’s, which has the reputation for being the fastest made and delivered sandwiches (and they are!) anywhere called me back less than an hour after they got my resume for manager. Nope, no thank you. Not to mention I’m 41, a little chunky and pretty mellow so being in an overly kinetic environment five to six days a week for eight to ten hours a day starting at $9 an hour really didn’t seem like a good option.
The best one was getting a call back from Panda Express, to manage one of their stores, who phoned, you got it, minutes after I sent the resume to their website. On the other end was a lady with, and I am not kidding or being racist here, one of the thickest Chinese accents I have come across. And I used to live a few blocks away from Chinatown back in San Francisco! This lady was almost impossible to make out.
“Why you like work fo Pan-na Eh-spress”, she said. Look, I am not joking here. This lady, who obviously has something to do with the hiring process, sounded as if she just landed in the US from her native country after studying English for maybe a week before doing so. I was pretty confused.
“Oh. Well. Um…” I then gave her the spiel about how great the company is, how amazing the product (even though I hate Panda Express) is, how talented and competent I am, blah blah blah. After this went on for a while, she then asked me what I made at my last job. When I told her she gasped.
“How come you leave lass job when you make so much money?”
Er, I really didn’t make that much money which indicated to me that they even start managers at a dishwasher’s salary. Pass.
I started to get frustrated. By the end of the week, I was pretty spent. Luckily for me I have an amazing support system with She-Ra, who is my lady for you that may not know, and a bit of savings so the situation was dire but not that desperate.
I exited week one on an angry note. Week two of being unemployed, I was pretty threadbare and forlorn. If you know me at all, I’m a pretty sensitive guy, so when the phone continued to not ring and my emails not filled with job offers, I started to get worried that my only option at this point was to pack up my knives, put the old chef’s coat back on and get behind the line once again. This is something I know I could do but really wanted to break away from for a while. My time at Old Chicago was great. My time at Lodge on the Desert cooking with Ryan Clark was amazing. Going to Brooklyn’s was a step back, but at least I was a manager. I figured that if I could make the same amount as a cook or chef without having to run around like crazy, be “in the weeds” all the time, face down in fire and grease while dealing with annoying servers and managers, sounded like a much better option to me. I mean, some people just crave that lifestyle, life for it, love it. Not me. Sure I love to cook but at my own pace. Standing for over eight hours with nonstop tickets coming at you all day, trying to juggle meat, sides, salads, appetizers, deserts, creff thrown in the fryalators and trying to get them all out on time and temped just right was starting to get to me. I don’t strive for that kind of action on a regular basis. It’s not really me anymore. Time to move on.
Week two slowed down for me job hunting wise as I took to watching TV more, taking long naps, puttering around the house, Facebooking way too much, and all that good stuff of the woe-is-me section of unemployment. I started to have weird dreams at night, that is if I slept at all, and poor She-Ra had to deal with me and my newfound blah-ness. Good ‘ol peppy Metal Mark had taken a backseat to poopy ol’ Misery Mark. And this was only week two! Man do I like to spread on the drama.
This really didn’t last too long at all. Because I remembered something.
Unemployment benefits.
Man, the last time I filed for unemployment was when I did production work that first year or two I lived in San Francisco. A job would end, I’d file my claim and, boom!, free money. That was over fifteen years ago and I hadn’t been anything but a good boy to Uncle Sam since. So I went online, filed my claim and found out I would be making only slightly less a week than I would if I stepped back into my chef clogs and began sautéing once again.
Week three was more of the “acceptance” stage of me being without work. Luckily I got paid two days after getting the shaft so I was stretching that as far as I could. About a week before me losing my job, She-Ra and I started this program for ourselves where we actually plan our dinners, shopping only once a week, utilizing an organic produce co-op and making sure we eat as frugally and healthily as possible. So meals were pretty much taken care of. Not to mention we stopped going to the bars like by more than half and good things it’s late winter, early spring because the heat/cold hasn’t clicked on in quite a while leaving us with livable energy bills.
So, all in all, it’s kind of the perfect time for me to be without a job. Even though I really really want to get back to work. I like working. I mean, if you like what you’re doing it’s not really a “job” then is it? It’s more like stepping away from your house for a few hours, having fun, making some money and when you do get home you can appreciate it all the more.
So week three started off great. I would wake up in the morning and take nice long walks around our neighborhood. I even found a quaint tea shop, some artist kiosk and an aviary and koi pond run by a bunch of Krishnas. I then set a schedule for myself. Research jobs that are actually available and would be something that I not only would want to do but could actually do them. Send out a few resumes and contact those jobs. Set a list of chores and keep the house nice and clean and organized. Write. Read my book. All that good stuff.
See, the thing is, what I’ve learned most about being unemployed right now is patience. I kinda have that “can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel” thing when times seem grim. But you have to wait for something really good to come your way. Luckily I have lots of friends out there willing to help and a lot of random experience behind me so I know something, eventually, will come my way. And, hey, if I do have to step back on the line and cook professionally again, a little break from it was good and I can appreciate it all the more.
Until things get too crazy. Then I’ll wish I had gotten that degree in library science.
So for all of my jobless pals and readers out there, do as the good book says, and by good book I mean “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, and that’s don’t panic. There’s a lot of us out there right now so if you’re sinking in a lonely hole of ‘what the heck am I gonna do’, just know that there are millions of others out there in that same hole. So don’t despair my little pavement pounding pals! There is hope for us all and all good things come to those who wait.
But if it doesn’t, we can always pull panties over our heads and rob the local Gas ‘n Sip.
There is always an option.
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