Late last year I took my first Elder Job, working part time for the City of Austin. Four days per week, five hours per day, I am a cheerful docent at The Susanna Dickinson and O. Henry Museums. Each museum is contained within a small house and most tours take about ten minutes. Yes, there are the history buffs and compulsive talkers (there’s a big Venn Diagram overlap there) who want to test me or school me or simply talk at me for extended stretches. Mostly though, folks come in, we have a great exchange, they leave and then I wait for the next visitors.
Financially speaking, this job gets me nowhere. Monthly I clear enough to almost cover the expense of feeding myself and my livestock menagerie, with nothing leftover to pay my other bills. From a psychological standpoint, though, I have hit the jackpot. This is not the backbreaking work of food service, which I have engaged in, off and on, for nearly half my working life, forty-five years and counting. Nor does it require that I use my brain for things that bore or stress me out, like all those commercial writing gigs over the years. Perhaps most importantly, the risk of client conflict is extremely low.
This is the sort of gig recovering addicts refer to as a Get Well Job, a place to land, a chance to gain one’s sea legs while navigating profound life changes. Though I have been booze sober for nearly a quarter of a century, I spent much of last year drunk on a chemical at least as toxic as alcohol: rage. This is the thing from which I am slowly recovering.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever fully heal from being bullied day in and day out for the seven most hellish months of my life, during my brief stint in Shitville in 2021. Life in that hellhole town left me totally beaten down, and the effects of this perpetual torment bled over into other areas of my life. I wasn’t back at the ranch a month when, last February, I totally lost my shit on Kim, the worst bride I have ever encountered, which is saying something seeing as I’ve performed around 2,000 weddings. Perhaps I could have tolerated her had I not been so wounded by having my life threatened on the regular in Shitville. But by the time she got in my face, to say I was beyond suffering fools is an understatement.
Though she thankfully wound up getting married elsewhere, the stench of her attitude still lingers over the ranch. I literally shut down my wedding business within an hour of her vacating the property. She was the final straw in a line of lockdown brides—and it was always the brides—who, needing to take their frustration out somewhere, decided I would be the perfect target. I understood, intellectually, they were dealing with deep disappointment. Courtesy of covid many had to reschedule, sometimes more than once. The particular bridezilla who sent me over the edge fell in this category. She also planned an outdoor wedding for February and then, when the weather didn’t cooperate, she treated me as if I had done a successful Ice Dance the day before her wedding, and thus it was all my fault.
My intellectual comprehension of her dismay was no match for how she made me feel. I had had more than enough of being yelled at for things beyond my control. Burnout is real. I stepped away from most paying work at that point, relying on savings to get by, a plan that lacked foresight but did afford me months to recuperate emotionally. I needed those months. I don’t regret the time off. Quite the opposite. Still, there came a point when not working was no longer an option. Unwilling to deal with the prospect of another bride spittling in my face, I began my search for an alternative source of income.
It’s a curious thing, to drop the entrepreneur reins after decades and go to work for an employer. I had my concerns. Was I about to step into a situation where I would be demeaned, undervalued, bossed around? Would I freak out at having to be on someone else’s schedule? Turns out, no. So far the biggest hurdle I’ve faced was figuring out the parking meter my first day, before I was assigned free city parking. Somehow I pressed the wrong buttons on the meter and wound up doling out $36, nearly half a day’s wages. I think a parking ticket would have cost less.
To my delight, my coworkers are all interesting and enthusiastic. My supervisors are smart and funny. We are a small staff. Everyone pitches in. No one complains. The schedule, rather than feeling oppressive, has offered me the sort of structure that lockdown stole from me. Turns out this structure suits me. I like having a place to be and things to do. I budget my off-time better. Routine, for now anyway, feels very good.
Pleasantly surprised, I decided to try to add a second part time job. With no sense of urgency, I scrolled through job site listings. I applied for various writing and editing gigs. I realized pretty quickly that it is a minus, not a plus, to inform potential employers that I have more than thirty years of experience. Though I know it is not legal for these employers to say so out loud, they don’t want someone with thirty years of experience. They want someone who is thirty years old. I am feeble granny material from their perspective.
With very few exceptions, I have not even received form rejection letters from these places. Am I showing my granny attitude in suggesting this lack of response is rude? Or is it just how things are these days? In the end, it doesn’t matter. I have, I know, officially aged out in the eyes of most potential employers. This is not as big a problem for me as it is for some of my peers. Weirdly, through dumb luck, I am land rich and when the time comes I can trade out this ranch for a comfortable, modest retirement. But I’m not quite there yet and so, to support this magnificent homestead of mine, I must toil on.
I know, I know: poor me.
But the thing is, I’m not complaining. I’m merely adjusting. I know if I turn the wedding faucet back on, I can make more in two hours than I can with a week’s worth of museum tours. And despite the fact I took down my officiant website and stopped advertising, people still seek me out to preside over weddings and funerals. I’ve begun saying yes again, cautiously. It’s interesting to tentatively revisit the occupation that served me so well for so long until it did not, until I slid so fast and so far into resentment brought on by Kim and her likes. Perhaps I’ve grown more discerning, or maybe folks have simmered down now that we’ve been dealing with the pandemic for so long. Whatever the case, for the moment anyway, people seem to have resumed being kind.
I look back over my work life with equal measures of wonder, horror and amusement. My first job, when I was fourteen, was an under the table gig making cold calls from the basement office of a guy known as The Lawn Doctor. I guess that made me the Lawn Nurse. I got a dime for every person who agreed to a “free lawn evaluation.” Only many years after the fact did it dawn on me that some pervs kept me on the line long enough to wank off to my teenage girl voice. I was too naïve at the time to notice, too focused on gathering enough 10c commissions to purchase my very first pair of brand new Levis, an exhilarating acquisition for one who had worn hand-me-downs and home-sewn clothes up until that point.
Other gigs I’ve had: carnival barker, college cafeteria cook (a work-study situation that entailed ripping the fat off of hundreds of pounds of chicken at a time, the task made less savory still thanks to my vegetarianism), waiter, bartender, cook, editor, writer, pet sitter, nanny, comedy club manager, teacher and on and on and on.
When I stumbled into the wedding business, inspired by a NYT article I’d read about a growing need for officiants, I had no clue where that would lead me. I certainly could not foresee that it would result in me eventually buying a chapel and a ranch and opening a venue of my own. Or that I would one day get to dress as Elvis. As with most of my other employment, I was simply grasping for the next thing, something that would allow me to keep writing and pay the bills and not have to submit myself to some corporate hierarchy.
My current “problem” then, is not about a lack of opportunity—with weddings I am sitting on a gold mine— but a deep reluctance brought on by interfacing with one too many jerks. In this I am hardly unique. Job hating seems to be common enough if we are to believe reports of so many people dropping out of work altogether or “quietly quitting” while still picking up a paycheck.
My formerly abstract awareness of the soaring cost of living in Austin is now concrete. My pay rate is triple the minimum wage and yet, even if I worked full time, there is no way I could afford to live inside the city limits. I hold this knowledge up to the memories of being a poor single mother who managed to raise my kid in Hyde Park and Travis Heights in the ‘90s, when renting an entire house weighed in at less than $500 per month. I genuinely wonder how regular working folk—not the techie gazillionaires who ruined everything—manage to hold on. I know many people, in my age group particularly, have not been able to hold on and have high-tailed it for smaller towns in order to survive financially.
So how are you doing it? How has your work life changed since lockdown turned the world upside down? Did you quit? Did you start down an entirely new path? Is it working? Are you less willing to put up with shit? And if so, have you downsized in order to take on less lucrative but more soul-satisfying work? And finally, for now, because I never get tired of asking this question and I am forever blown away by the responses: What is the strangest/weirdest/best/worst job you’ve ever had? Do tell.
NOTES:
As noted, I am with great caution resuming some officiant work. I am only interested in working with laid back people and so for now will rely on word-of-mouth referrals. If you or someone you know is planning a wedding or funeral and you need someone to preside, you are welcome to give me a holler. Elopements at the ranch are cool. I’m not ready (and doubt I ever will be) to host any more big weddings here.
On Saturday February 25th I am unveiling what I hope will be an ongoing monthly event: The Tiny T Tiny Flea Market. If you are interested in being a vendor—you can sell your garage sale stuff, your arts, your crafts, etc, drop me a line.
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Thanks y’all!