No time for a long post this week. The move is in full-swing -- packing, cleaning, staging -- all that good stuff. We put a sign post up in our yard saying it's for sale and posted it on the sites online, so it's official! Within a few hours we already had a few inquiries. I told you, the DC market is insane. That's a good thing. And a bad thing, as we also are probably putting in an offer on a house we both think is really nice, but it's more expensive than I was hoping, and the location is not quite where I would like it to be. Alas, you can't have everything (and things ain't getting any cheaper if we wait). Getting all our financing in order is a bee-otch. We might have to borrow a bit (i.e., a lot) of money from S's parents as a "bridge loan," which I'm not thrilled about, but if everything goes according to plan -- we get the offers we expect on our house -- we will be able to pay them back in short order. Also, we are buying this house in no small part because there is a room on the main floor for S's parents to stay in when they visit -- not that you need a quid pro quo when it comes to helping family, but it often just works out that way.
Anyway, that's about all I got for y'all today. I'll leave you with a few truly terrible songs, just because they're stuck in my head. The main downside of my gym is that they play the same shite playlists over and over and over. It gets to the point where I'm like, yes, finally, some decent music, and it's Blink-182. It warps your entire musical value system.
I give you...
Some band called Trapt:
A terrible song by Fall Out Boy, who at least get credit for The Simpsons reference, and for sampling (?) Suzanne Vega:
I haven't mentioned it on my blog yet, but we are probably moving, probably soon. We don't have a place to live yet, but we will likely put our house on the market in a few weeks. It will undoubtedly sell quickly, which is a blessing that portends a curse. The DC housing market is hot right now (it seems to never cool off), so selling will be easy and profitable, and buying will be difficult and expensive. I'd prefer not to move, truth be told, but S has been agitating about it for over a year, and I've put her off as long as I possibly can. And if we are going to do it, then we have to take the plunge at some point. I mean, it's not going to be any easier five years from now.
As an alternative we could renovate our current house, but it's not conducive to renovation -- at least not for the things S wants.* It would be a lot of money, and I just don't think it would be worth it. Also, it wouldn't solve one of our biggest problems, which is schools. Our sons currently go to a public charter, which we are happy with, but we only like the elementary school. The middle school is not as good, and it's in an inconvenient location. Our neighborhood middle school and high school are even worse. S has never liked them, and I was like: Give them a chance. Different kids thrive in different types of environments. The "best" schools aren't the best for everybody... But then I went online and actually researched them, and I must admit it was a big turnoff. They pretty much underperform across the board, and like half the people on their administration boards are labeled "interim," which doesn't exactly instill confidence.
*And I don't mean for it come off as if S is being unreasonable or overly demanding or selfish or anything like that -- she's not. In fact, two of the things she wants most are a better public school for our kids and a room on the first floor for her parents to stay when they visit because her mom isn't great with stairs.
This is how it goes in DC. People live in one neighborhood and send their kids to school in a different one, if they can. Matthew Yglesias of The Weeds was talking about this on a recent podcast. He lives in the Shaw neighborhood in DC, and he summarized it by saying his white liberal neighbors, although they claim to be progressive, won't send their kids to schools with a bunch of minority children. Maybe that's the case for him, but that has not been my experience. Here's what I think is really going on: Parents of all races look at the ratings for their neighborhood school, and if they are low, then they try to send them somewhere they are high. That's it. If the metrics (graduation rate, reading proficiency, college acceptance, etc.) of the schools in Shaw were good, then I bet all the white liberal johnnies-come-lately would send their kids to them even if they were overwhelming nonwhite.
And it's not just white parents who behave this way -- it's everybody who can. My wife isn't white, and she's way more worried about "good" schools than I am. DC charters are filled with minority children whose parents don't want them to go to their neighborhood schools. Just this past weekend we had dinner with a family who moved across the DC-Maryland border, and our friend, who's black, told us it was largely because the schools in their old DC neighborhood are low-performing, and then she said of her decision to move her kids to a better school, "Maybe it's a woman of color thing, but I don't care, I'll own it." But it's not. Like I said, it's an all people of all color thing.
I don't think this is a good system, by the way. I'm not defending it. I think it's an awful system, but it's understandable from the point of view of the parents, which is exactly what makes it so awful. It is a situation in which the rational best move for the individual hurts the collective good. When that happens the solution is to fix the system, not expect each individual to "fix" themselves. I can't think of a single notable collective-action problem that was solved by everybody deciding en masse to go against their own best interest for the greater good. That's not how humans operate. The real problem is not that faux-progressive parents are unwilling to send their kids to underperforming schools, it's that so many public schools in DC are underperforming. And this is a whole other topic for a whole different post that I'm not going to get into now.
Actually, I will say one thing. I was ambivalent about charter schools, but I'm starting to think they are more bad than good. They are the main way parents can bypass their neighborhood schools. Gentrification is happening all over DC, and one of the supposed upsides is that when rich(er) people move to a new neighborhood public services improve. But with charter schools, this doesn't have to be the case with perhaps the most important public service, neighborhood schools. If gentrifying parents had to send their kids to the neighborhood school (most people, even those who are relatively well-off, can't afford DC private school) then it would have more resources and would likely improve. But the flip-side is that charter schools already exist and help a lot of low-income students (those lucky enough to win the entrance lottery). So, what do you do? I don't know. But it's hard to see how sending my kids to a struggling school will help anything.
So, that brings me back to the move. We want to go somewhere that's zoned for better public schools. As you might guess, houses are very expensive in such places. Any money we make off selling our current house will be used as a down payment, and even then we're less than breaking even. It makes me a bit nervous -- I think I lean more towards the risk-averse end of the spectrum -- but buying a house you plan to live in long-term seems to be one of the safest investments you can make. If something happens and you can no longer afford the mortgage, you can sell it, and if the housing market tanks, it doesn't really effect you if you can still pay your mortgage. The only way you can really end up underwater is if the market tanks and you suddenly can't afford it. That's very unlikely. I mean, everything in life has some risk associated with it. There's no such thing as playing it safe. As Jim Carrey once said, "you can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love." It's not perfectly apt, but it's close enough.
More worrisome (to me) than the financial commitment is the actually finding of a house. It's so stressful, and you constantly second-guess yourself over everything -- should we put in a bid, should we offer more, should we walk away, should we negotiate, should we this, should we that? It's enough that I've thought on several occasions: Screw it! We're moving to the suburbs! But then I'd just be miserable. I could live in the suburbs if I already had a social network in place -- like, if I was living near family and friends, I would perfectly content in the suburbs. But moving to Rockville, Maryland or something like that as a fortysomething family man, with nothing much to do outside of the house, that's not for me (nor S). I probably don't "use the city" as often as I should, but the times I do are very important for my quality of life.
So, there you have it. We are very likely moving. I'll keep you all posted on our progress.
The first boss I ever had was named Song (not really, but that's what I'll call him, for the sake of anonymity and because I honestly can't remember his name; I find this highly distressing, by the way; remembering names was once a superpower of mine, but like the ability to clasp my hands behind my back and bring them vertically over my head, it's one I've lost with age). Song was a business student at UW, working with a big paint company (Sherwin-Williams, I think) to run a house painting outfit for the summer. Such a venture can be lucrative if done correctly. My cousin made a career of it. Unfortunately for Song, he did not do it correctly. Mistake number one: He hired 17-year-old me to be his primary painter.
I'm decent at manual labor, so long as it's merely grunt work. But I'm terrible at anything that takes the slightest bit of skill, multiplied by a thousand if it needs to be done quickly. I fuck up; I daydream; and I don't care. My first job for Song was billed at four man-hours, meaning I would be paid for four hours regardless of how long it actually took me. It actually took me 11 hours. I was supposed to finish before lunch; I was still working at dusk. The man-hours system is a way of hedging against painter slowness (and if you're a fast painter, you make more per hour), but I was so slow that it didn't work, because a four-hour payment on an 11-hour job was less than minimum wage, so, by law, I had to get at least 11 hours at minimum wage. This ate into Song's profit, and I overheard his superior, who was called in as a reinforcement, tell him to fire "the entire crew." I was the only one on the crew at that job.
Song didn't fire me, unfortunately. He gave me one more chance. But on the next job I unknowingly knocked over a tray of paint, while working on the soffits of a roof. The paint dripped down to the ground and the customer noticed it and got pissed, and the next day Song mercifully let me go. He told me maybe someday I would be a good painter, but for now I was too slow and spilled too much paints. I might not remember his name, but I remember he said "paints."
Later in the summer, a friend of mine said he saw Song on a weekday morning, sitting at an outdoor table by himself, with his head buried in his hands, holding a lit cigarette. So, I'm guessing things didn't get much better for him after I was gone.
****
A few days after being fired, I interviewed with my friend JY for dishwashing jobs at The Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown Tacoma. We wore slacks and ties. Initially, I wanted a busboy job, but the general manager, Peter (again, not his real name), said none were available, so I settled for a dishwasher position. The next day, my friend A turned down a dishwashing job and was promptly hired as a busboy. That's how Peter operated. He lied, manipulated, and generally treated his employees like serfs. Most notably, he got a bunch of workers to help him move one weekend and didn't pay them anything for it. The workers all thought it was a job (you know, because he's their boss), and he thought they were just doing it out of the kindness of their hearts -- like were all buddies or something.
I tried to avoid Peter for the few months I worked there, which wasn't hard, as he didn't like to come into the kitchen, and he typically left early in my shift. Once he had to stay late because the usual kitchen manager was out sick, and he refused to let me leave early, even though one of my coworkers wanted to work my hours, and I wanted to go home. "You'll be more motivated to finish quickly," he told me. So, of course, I intentionally took extra long, and, just for good measure, I scarfed down a bunch of chicken we weren't supposed to eat when he wasn't looking. I nearly choked (seriously) and didn't get home until 3:00 am, but it was worth it.
****
My next boss, at a different restaurant, dishwashing again, was fake-named Matt Nokes. (His real name is the same as a different 1980s Tigers catcher.) Matt was super cool -- the polar opposite of Peter. He was flexible, accommodating, and he always stood up for the lowly dishwashers, which I appreciated. We were constantly understaffed, and the busboys and busgirls didn't always have time to bring their tubs to the kitchen right away, so I would get slammed at closing time when they could finally catch up. I would be there for hours by myself toiling away into the night. The only other person in the entire restaurant was the closing manager. It usually wasn't Matt, but when it was, he would either come into the kitchen to help me (even though he was the big boss), or he would tell me, "Go home whenever you want, and if anybody says anything to you about not finishing, tell them I said they can go fuck themselves." I never had the need to say that to anybody, which is good, because I certainly would not have.
*****
Freshman year in college I worked at a dining hall on campus for a shorter time than I worked as a painter. All the available shifts interfered with my class schedule, so I signed on as a "caterer," which typically entailed making box lunches for the busy student-athletes. The woman who ran the catering service was named Cathy -- or rather, in my mind's eye she looks like someone who would be named Cathy. She was gruff, but kind. Presumably, she was the type of woman who wore cat sweaters to work everyday, but sucked down a few Camel Lights and a finger of gin during breaks. I don't actually know, however, because I only interacted with her for about five minutes total.
My first -- and only -- day on the job, I had to make, like, 100 sandwiches in two hours. The plastic gloves I was supposed to wear slowed me down considerably, so I took them off to bump up my speed from glacial to very slow. As I was finishing the last sandwich, Cathy, who had left me alone for most the shift, returned and noticed me working without gloves.
"Where are your gloves?" she asked.
"I took them off. I couldn't really work with them on," I replied.
"That's unsanitary."
"Not really," I argued, "I washed my hands really well. I mean, cooks at restaurants don't wear gloves."
"It's just... our food safety guidelines... corporate policy... *sigh*... it's okay... I guess... no, it's not... throw all the sandwiches away and make them all again. I'm not gonna be on the hook for this."
She left again. I waited a few minutes and then clocked out and went to class. I figured she wouldn't do the math on my time card, and even if she did, I didn't care. I wasn't coming back. Quitting was easy to justify -- I had to focus on academics after all.
A week later I got a pay check for $6.47. I had it transferred to my supplemental dining hall account and used it to buy mozzarella sticks and a milkshake. The sticks were okay, but the milkshake was lousy -- I could tell they used soft-serve ice cream, a pet peeve of mine when it comes to milkshake making -- so, I'd say ultimately the entire experience came out in the wash.
***
The summer after my freshman year in college I moved up in the world: busboy at TGI Friday's. I have only fond memories of this job. I was too slow to hang with the dinner shift, so I worked at lunchtime almost exclusively -- 9:30 am to 1:30 pm, and in addition to my base pay, I'd come home with about $25 cash in tips each shift. For a kid living with his parents for the summer, it was a pretty sweet deal.
The general manager of the restaurant, Bob, liked me a lot, probably because he was a huge baseball fan, and I would regale him with Mariners trivia every time we worked together, which wasn't often. Most of the time my boss was a woman named Carla, who didn't like me as much and frequently accused me of "slacking." I tried to explain that my slowness was not due to a lack of effort, but it never seemed to assuage to her.
When I left to go back to school, Bob told me to come back next summer -- he'd make sure there was a job for me. I did just that, but when I returned, Bob was no longer there. Carla was the new general manager. Unsurprisingly, they happened to not be hiring at the moment.
***
Well, that concludes Boss I Once Had, A Pointless History, Volume 1. Be on the lookout for the next installation sometime soon .
