So many little lives: a grand finale!!!
the serendipity of it all
Hello from the horniest Subaru dealership I’ve ever had the pleasure of walking into! I’m just here to get my car serviced but Usher’s Nice & Slow is blaring, my jeans are tight, and I’ve started eyeing everyone who walks through the door like it’s a Friday happy hour in the dog days of summer. Like you know what else could stand to be serviced???? Y’all get it. Deepest apologies to my family members who read this — you made a choice. Reminder to my LA friends that there’s never a bad time to set me up with the funny, kind, therapized single men in your life!
And while we’re on LA friends, let’s hang in Santa Monica TONIGHT! It’s Funny Now has a stacked lineup of comics, tv writers, Mort from Bob’s Burgers, moth champions, and…me! TONIGHT — Tuesday, 4/9, 8pm. 🌊
This week is also the final bring-back of my Top Girls scene for class and then it’s immediately on to starting Clown 2 — WHAT HAVE I DONE? I’M MICRODOSING MID-LIFE CLOWN COLLEGE! Shaking with terror and excitement (ok nvm still just horny).
For now, I’m ready to dig up some bones (👅) on three final little lives. This finale installment of sorts take place between 2009-2013, with 2012-2013 also being a whopper of a year with grad school, multiple student-teaching internships, and the insane, last-minute job offer and leap from Florida to DC.
2013 and beyond marked my chapter as a high school teacher, curriculum writer, and eventually, transitioning out of the classroom to work in the civic education non-profit space where I’ve held program director roles, research manager roles, and now, 7+ years later, work as a grants manager. But this lil series isn’t about my resume and I’m still mulling over how and when I want to delve into teaching traum—I mean, fodder, so let’s put a pin in it.
::FINAL DRUM ROLL::
Satchel’s Pizza
City: Gainesville, FL
Age: 21-24
Wage: $10/hr + pooled tips
My time working at Satchel’s was the quintessential, early-20s / post-grad / partying through a series of existential crises stretch of my life. I’d started here a few months after being fired from 101 Downtown and a few months before landing my first “white collar” job. It outlasted the latter and served as my home base while I studied for and then bailed on the LSAT, studied for and actually took the GRE, decided I wanted to be a teacher, started / finished grad school, and of course, entertained a string of embarrassingly misguided situationships and at least one truly bizarre one-night stand with a customer. When I think of the word “hungover,” my brain cues up a slideshow of my years here, but like, in a loving, nostalgic way—except for the time I woke up naked next to a bowl of cold white rice and no one would cover my shift. That horror aside, Satchel’s was honestly the first real workplace vibe/community I ever felt fully a part of and is where I made friends who I adore to this day, even if I shudder at the fact that I met them FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. HOW. WHY. HOW. Whew…taking a deep breath…
Shifts here were usually nonstop—Satchel’s famously doesn’t take reservations, so two+ hour wait times are common. I usually worked the garden section, which is, hallelujah, the reason my calves are still ripped to this day. You don’t need implants, babe, you need to carry scalding pizzas and unwieldy trays through a massive garden bed made EXCLUSIVELY of PEBBLES. While wearing mary jane-style CROCS. This reminds me that I was the queen of wardrobe malfunctions.
Once my adorable Croc slide was filled with so much foot sweat and dirt that it made a very viscous mud and proceeded to fly across a full dining room. I had to hop one-footed in front of people EATING FOOD to retrieve it. Another time I was dying to wear a new thrift store find and the button popped off mid-shift — between that and the fact that hot coral really showed my cascading pit stains, I spent 5 hours trying to contain my boobs and keep my arms at my side. Not a wardrobe malfunction, but I also once managed to cut my fingertip open on the foil of a wine bottle while tableside. Dork! Miraculously, none of this stopped strange men from leaving me their numbers.
Satchel’s obviously wasn’t immune to the wild chaos and heat (emotional and literal) of restaurant life—don’t worry, I had plenty of fights and nursed several awkward tensions with BOH and FOH buds!—but there was also a special kind of magic there. I sustained myself on shift meals and we never abided the one shift drink rule (oops!), one dear friend/co-worker became my roommate for my finale year in Gainesville, we did photoshoots for a staff calendar every year, the soundtrack was courtesy of an old iPod that played everything from Motown to The Smiths and beyond, a few of us spent Thanksgivings together, took trips to St. Augustine to stay in Satchel’s (yes, he’s a real person!) beach house, I made a living wage and had a healthcare account, and I’ve kept a bejeweled painting of an Appaloosa horse hung prominently in every living room ever since. It is, to this day, my most prized White Elephant gift (no shade to Hellcat).
One room over from the painting is a turquoise ring that sits on top of my dresser. It was early in a dinner shift one summer when I complimented a customer’s ring. I’d told her how I’d recently fallen in love with a similar one at the vintage store downtown and that it bore the word, “serendipity,” carved into its silver band. It was too expensive for an impulse buy so I saved up some tips and went back to get it but it’d already been sold. I shrugged telling her, “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be after all!” I brought them their check and she found me on the way out.
“Here,” she stretched out her arm and unveiled the ring in her palm.
“What? Wait! What?! No! Oh my goodness you are too kind, I don’t want to take your ring!”
“It’s serendipity! Please take it.”
I never did see her again but I’ve worn her ring for over a decade. It needs a cleaning and the stone could stand to be reset, but it’s with me always — from DC to LA and wherever else this absurd little life takes me. Serendipity. That was a bit of what Satchel’s was for me. A time and a place to be while everything fell into place around me.
Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (ok mouthful!), University of Florida
City: Gainesville, FL
Age: 22-23
Wage: MY FIRST SALARY! $30,000/year!
Throwing suspense into the sewer by starting you off with this real email exchange from 2011. This job BLEW ASS!!!! It positioned me as the Department Chair’s personal secretary, the sole administrative assistant and receptionist for a large office, and the primary planner, coordinator, and facilitator of a massive biannual career fair for all CISE students. So essentially, it paid $10,000 a year per role.
On any given day, I was to manage the Chair’s email communications, calendar, travel, and that of any and all visiting faculty members. I handled the logistics for every single department meeting, every tenure voting process, and yes, lucky me, even the COFFEE CLUB BALANCE SHEET! The career fair required extensive coordination with reps from the likes of Microsoft (whatever), Lockheed Martin (gag), Northrop (vomit), Disney (cute!), and more. I did everything from managing the budget to booking the venue and arranging the catering and driving a U-Haul truck to pick up 36 stanchions.
Even with this limited recap of Hell, I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when one day, Dr. Helal (of coffee club email fame), walked in and slammed his hands down on the desk when I didn’t look up at hime fast enough. I’d been in the middle of an email confirming an interview with a post-doc fellow from China, but the full second that I didn’t look up from my keyboard was too much to bear!
“LOOK AT ME WHEN I WALK IN! I WILL NOT BE IGNORED!”
With zero thought, I shot out of my seat and burst into tears. “Do NOT yell at me. EVER."
“I’m here to place my tenure vote and you ignored me!!!”
“I’m WORKING! HERE’S YOUR BALLOT!!!”
I slammed it down on the counter and booked it to the Chair’s office. He was mildly apologetic on Dr. Helal’s behalf and I was beyond fury. I filed a formal complaint and demanded a meeting with the HR office which I got, but all he got was a piece of paper in his personnel file documenting the incident. I do not wish him well.
I believe this is the time stamp of when certain male faculty members decided I wasn’t a good cultural fit for the office, but it would be another six months or so before I was “let go.” (Florida is a right to work state so they do not need a reason to fire you — fun!)
At some point, they did decide to list and hire for a Department Chair Secretary role that was separate from mine. That way, I could focus on leading the career fair and general administrative duties. Great! Naturally, they hired the most grating, ultra conservative, “my will is to serve” woman to ever walk the plant. Jennifer Jackson. Now she was a good cultural fit. I eventually moved upstairs to the Student Services office to serve as their receptionist while pulling double duty on the other roles and became buddies with an undergrad work-study hire. One day at lunch, she was telling me that her old high school boyfriend was coming to see her and that she was excited he would be staying over. I did the usual, “Oooo! Ok, fun! Be safe!!” Jennifer was upstairs lingering nearby and because she couldn’t mind her business to save her life, decided to chime in with some 1950s bible thumping line about how she shouldn’t be hosting a boy. We laughed and rolled our eyes, but believe me when I tell you that she eventually got her revenge “privately.”
The main event came when one week, I’d requested upcoming PTO for a long lunch because I had a mediation for my Guardian ad Litem volunteer job. It was approved, but then the mediation was rescheduled so I notified the office manager that I was cancelling the PTO request. She was like, “ok yeah cool,” and that was that. Except that afternoon came and by some freak happenstance, every time she came looking for me for something, I wasn’t “at my desk.”
I remember the day so vividly because I was required to defend it over and over again. I’d been down the hall talking to one of the advisors, I was on my period which meant shitting in the bathroom half the day, I took my lunch outside by the loading dock at one point, you know, normal human stuff??? I was also active with co-workers on G-chat all day. But the new office manager, who LOVED Jennifer, was convinced that I cancelled my PTO request only to leave work anyways.
It didn’t matter that all of the advisors were like, “What are you talking about? She was here all day,” or that I had been active online all day, or that I’d seen faculty members outside while I was eating my lunch. This bitch brought in the HR person from the College of Engineering who also happened to be her SON IN LAW. The two of them ushered me into her office, accused me of being MIA while on the clock, and insisted that I sign a formal reprimand document that would go into my personnel file. If you know me well enough in real life, you know that this did not go over well.
I immediately said, “Oh this is your son in law, right?” followed eventually by, “And that’s not weird to you? That you’ve brought your son in law in here to coerce me into signing something untrue?”
She was aghast and he shifted in his seat growing more and more defensive while I repeated the truth over and over again before getting up to leave.
“You can’t leave without signing this.”
“Or what? Is he gonna tackle me?”
A week later, Jennifer invited me to a meeting with the Department Chair just labeled on the calendar as, “Private.” LOL. He and the office manager sat me down and explained that they just didn’t feel I was the right fit for the job (the job I’d been doing exceptionally well for a year and a half), that they would be offering me a severance of three months’ pay, and that there was someone from HR waiting for me in the lobby to help me pack up my desk. My body flashed hot and my heart rate was easily 170. I was so indignant about the gaslighting and I felt a visceral desire to punch them both hard in the mouth. But then…I fully registered what was happening—that I was being given three full months worth of pay, could cash out what I’d contributed to retirement, and that I literally already had another job I really enjoyed.
As long as I live and breathe, I will never forget the last thing I said to them: “Sayanara!”
The professor I worked closely with on the career fair was furious with the rest of the department and reached out over email to share as much, which I appreciated, but by the next week I was working FT at Satchel’s and I’d started studying for the GRE.
Serendipity, baby.
Shelter Medicine Program, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Florida
City: Gainesville, FL
Age: 23
Wage: $10/hr??? I don’t remember
This order of entries is somewhat bizarre, but I promise they’re chronological based on when I started each one! This short and sweet little stint came by way of a devastating Satchel’s kitchen fire that happened in February 2012. The entire staff was immediately out of work for three months and SCRAMBLING. Thankfully, the wife of one of our managers worked in an administrative role at the Vet School and she was hiring a temp secretary / digital project manager (aka more scanning!). She was gracious enough to hire me on a moment’s notice and quickly became a good friend. Previously traumatized by the world of academia, let’s just say that I was the PERFECT cultural fit here.
Hallelujah!
Because this office was specifically the shelter medicine department, it meant that the faculty and students I got to interact with were literally veterinarians in county shelters. They were heavily involved in animal rights, extracting animals from hoarding cases, educating the community on spaying/neutering, running low-cost care clinics, etc. We almost always had bottle kittens in the office and I even fostered a tiny grey fluff ball named Gouda (ok I demanded that we name her Gouda). It was WONDERFUL. I still keep tabs on the folks I met here and I love watching the work they still do all across the world — from being a rural shelter vet here in the states to leading the charge to end the trade of dog meat overseas, they are the ultimate badasses.
Of course, despite already being deep in the weeds of finalizing my grad school plans in 2012, I definitely spent significant amounts of this time re-looking into law school. BECAUSE WHAT IF I BECAME AN ANIMAL RIGHTS LAWYER????
And there’s no better question to land on here, really, because this has been at the crux of my being for as long as I can remember, the wanting to be and do and see everything. From veterinarian to marine biologist to interior designer to professional closet organizer to teacher to human rights lawyer to animal rights lawyer to fair trade store owner to writer to actor to Elton John’s body double, I have always dreamed of so many little lives.
Thanks for being a part of them. 💞
Omg from one new baby clown to another, I totally relate to the themes of wanting to do EVERYTHING!!! Thanks for your writing :)