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My new job and my personal vibecession
This is an update to an ancient (back in the Reddit days) comment concerning being financially drowned by deadbeat roommates. I’m not trying to get too culture war about the economy, just remarking on my local, personal situation. I am well aware that I am a fuckup who spent most of his time/effort in college, his early 20s, and beyond drinking and delivering pizza instead of figuring out a career. Many of my problems are my own fault. That said, here goes:
Long story short, until recently I worked (I still do, a few dinner shifts a week, but it’s summer and they’re apocalyptically dead right now so I’m averaging 2 nights a week.) at a locally owned Doodash-style (We were around first, so not a clone.) food delivery company in an SEC college town (We’ll call it University to Go.), and did so for 8 years. Averaging $20/hr to drive in circles during the mid/late 2010s was crazy money for the low cost of living in my area at the time (I was paying less than $500/month in rent, for perspective.), better pay than a lot of “real” jobs. Sure, 1099 taxes suck and I became a part-time auto mechanic due to running my car into the ground for the job, but it was easy, genuinely fun, and it’s hard to beat being a small business owner’s favorite crony. In short, it was easy to stay comfortable, say “Fuck it, one more semester.”, and keep going.
Over time (Covid bought us a few years.) Doordash and Uber Eats ate us alive (It’s hard to convert students who enter town having already used one or the other for years, are already sunk in with subscriptions to Dashpass, etc.) while post-Covid inflation/labor shortages hit us from every angle (Anything to do with buying or running a car was hit especially hard, a lot of our restaurants went under or quit offering delivery due to short-staffed kitchens, and a lot of our customer base ran out of money quickly once the stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment ran out.) such that we’re more expensive and have a worse selection (In particular, the sort of fast-casual restaurants that used to be our bread and butter have nearly gone extinct.) than we used to (Still cheaper than Doordash, but we don’t deliver fast.). Stagnant income in a low-inflation environment was one thing, but this town is a lot more expensive to live in than it used to be (A process that was occurring throughout the 2010s, but Covid put it into overdrive.).
During 2020-21 (because I have no backbone, make bad decisions, and apparently acquired a friend group filled with terrible people during my 20s) I managed to acquire not one but two roommates that don’t pay their bills (I’ll get to one of them in the second comment.) and wound up paying for two apartments while going through a string of more bad decisions/luck with vehicles. Needless to say, my easy existence with plenty of spare cash transformed itself into an endless grind of working seven day weeks, picking up a second job as a barback and later bartender, and still being broke. Adding fuel to the fire, the bottom seems to have fallen out at University to Go and my potential as a bartender is not unlimited (I kind of hate bartending, have zero passion for cocktails, and am not a woman, so I’m going to be stuck working mediocre gigs or barbacking.), so I needed another job
In comes an old friend of mine with a job she’d just been promoted out of and thought I’d be a perfect fit for. How convenient, right? It seemed so, like a bit of a pay cut but survivable, more stable, and without the hassle of 1099 taxes and maybe I’d open some doors in a new field (alcohol distribution) that seemed like a logical step from bartending. I mean, I had to complete a 90 minute harassment training from HR, so this is a real job, right? Enter, being a draft quality technician, aka. beer line cleaner.
The Job
Pros: The hiring process was quick and relatively straightforward, management is relatively relaxed and hands-off so long as you do your job, and in 10 weeks with the company I’ve lost 25lbs (and wasn’t obese to start with, but was getting closer to that than I was happy with). Weekends off are nice, and I’m finally catching up on the backlog of stuff I have to do at home (My car is now fixed and has a radio installed that had been sitting in the closet for 6 months, the roommate’s car has a new fender installed, my apartment is passably clean, etc. Now I just need to get moving on getting my inoperative vehicles running so I can sell them.).
Things that annoy me about the job: The company phone and carrier get worse reception than my T-mobile ghetto android (and now every time I hear an iphone notification I think I’m getting a message from my boss) and the company app we use for logging tasks is glitchy and has to be babysat to make sure it doesn’t miss a stop that you actually cleaned. Bad cooler and line management are as rampant in food and beverage as bad cable management is in IT and there are few things as fun as wrestling the coupler off a keg in a tight space that was installed by a barback with the grip of Thor showing off his gains at the gym, having to move a bunch of produce stacked on the kegs, or coolers so nasty that I gag every time I walk in them (Thankfully the latter is rare.). The job is not technically challenging (If you can change your own oil, you can do this.), but it is boring, tedious, and heavy on details. The equipment we have to carry is heavy and unwieldy (~100lbs if my water and chemical tanks are full; you quickly learn to fill them all the way only when necessary to save your back) and the line cleaner is a lye-based caustic that makes gloves mandatory and will burn thin skin if not quickly neutralized by dumping beer on it.
Route management is the actual challenge of this job (Much of the technical stuff I thought I would be doing was omitted from my job title, training above what it takes to clean the lines was minimal, and I don’t carry anything more than a coupler and faucet, so even if I were to correctly diagnose a problem in a system I probably can’t fix it, and not being able to fix things drives me nuts.). In theory there’s a fair amount of flexibility as to which stop you hit when, but in reality you’re very much captive to time windows (Big places need to be done before 11AM as a rule, some spots have narrow time windows, and I have four days every two week cycle that involve driving an hour or more out of town because the local area doesn’t have enough taps to make a full route.) such that the workload is uneven (Some days are a cakewalk and others an ugly grind that leave me beaten down by the end of the shift.) and it’s hard to switch from racing the clock (In particular, I have one heavy day where I I could get one of my first three stops to show up before 8AM it would be easy, but that isn’t the case so I’m always behind on that day.) and feeling like you’re always 30-60 minutes behind to needing to slow-walk it and milk the clock for hours just to get 40 a week.
I don’t like this job, but the real dealbreaker is the pay. It’s $17/hr plus a $2/hr bonus for completing 100% of the route, and vehicle compensation that was supposed to be $500/month plus a mileage reimbursement that covers fuel (This sounded pretty generous so I asked several times about it during the hiring process. On the other hand the position used to come with company cars for everyone and $500/month is presumably less than what they would spend to lease and insure a car, so I believed it.) but is actually “in the neighborhood of $500/month” with fixed compensation plus mileage. The difference is about $200/month and I’m driving about 1800 miles a month for this job so much of that is eaten up in gas, let alone tires, commercial insurance, etc. The completion bonus should be consistently achievable moving forward but is easy to miss (I got docked last cycle because of places that were closed on Memorial Day in spite of taking pictures of closed signs and apping them as instructed in the meeting the week before. I was the only new guy at the meeting so I guess it was just taken for granted that I would know that I needed to make them up later, in which case I don’t see the point of taking pictures.). Before being hired I was told that they don’t care about overtime (and every other hourly job I’ve worked since college meant 45-50 hours a week, not 40). Welp, turns out they initiated an overtime crackdown and that if you get more than either 42 or 44 (I don’t recall which.) hours in a week you’re ineligible for the bonus. Including the fact that company policy is to clock out an hour after you left home and an hour before you get home on out of town days (which makes for 7 hours of unpaid driving every two weeks) and I’m struggling to hit 40 hours a week. I can’t afford the health insurance anyway, but it’s of the malicious compliance variety with a carrier that has no network in my local area in addition to being vastly more expensive than what I had through Obamacare. Adding to the suck factor, from what I’ve learned the jobs within the company I could gun for getting promoted into don’t pay much better than my current position (I’d get a company car, but that doesn’t pay my other bills and leveraging my mechanical skills to run a car cheap is something I’ve been doing for over 10 years at this point so I’d prefer even the mediocre vehicle reimbursement I’m getting.)
In short, adjusted for inflation this is worse money than I made delivering pizza for Papa John’s in the early 2010s (and my rent is twice what it was then), and dinner shifts at University to Go have been a bust because it’s the slowest part of the year in addition to the usual issues with them dying. I’ve picked up a few bartending shifts (As weird as it sounds, right as I put in my notice something “clicked” and I don’t hate bartending as much. I’ll never have the passion, but I play a character and it works well enough.). I’ve cut pretty much all of the lifestyle inflation fat I can cut, and I’m still going to be broke. I’m not going to starve, and if I have to tough this job out for a while I can, but I feel tired, defeated and like all the enormity of the mistakes I’ve made in my adult life are hitting me at once. I feel poor, afraid, and frankly angry and resentful. I’ve made my peace with the fact that this job isn’t going to work, have my backup plan in place (Go back to my old jobs; with my reduced expenses I can start getting ahead again and I think I can squeeze one last school year out of University to Go.) and am looking for better work (I have precious few friends who aren’t stuck in the service industry, but one I’ve helped in the past recommended a manufacturing plant and told me to use him as a reference to get over the “we want plant experience” hump.). It’s one thing to work a dead end job if it pays well (University to Go) or is stupid easy (barbacking and later bartending at the place I was a regular at and was probably going to be at that night anyway), and a different story for a rough grind with benefits that are worse than what I already had. I’m going to break my supervisor’s heart when I quit, but I’m trying to quit being a codependent/martyr in my personal life and damned sure can’t afford to do it with a job (because I have to pay for doing it in my personal life).
Wanted to let you know that I greatly enjoyed your story and the way in which you wrote it (morbid though it may be). It has a David Foster Wallace level-of-detail quality to it
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Assuming you work a distributor, see if you can leverage your mechanical skills and work ethic to convince your supervisor to send you to Micro Matic Dispense Institute. It's only a few days, but you learn everything you need to know about troubleshooting draught beer systems (which is a constant problem for accounts) and installation (there are constantly new bars and restaurants opening all over the country). Once you have some experience with that, you should be able to command higher pay either with your current employer, one of the competing distributors, or if you're really motivated—starting your own draught installation/maintenance company.
One of the oddities of my company (which is a subcontractor for distributors, of which one of the two that comprise most of my route is presently breaking up such that we're essentially losing the contract to a competitor) is that they emphasize Cicerone certifications, which from my uninformed opinion seem aimed more at the serving/bartending end than the back end/dispensing side of it. I don't think that I want to pursue the beer industry long term, but I'll check out competing distributors/line contractors for what opportunities they have.
My mechanical background is primarily automotive (mostly picked up from fixing my own cars or other delivery drivers' cars), so my diagnostic approach sort of follows (how to find a leak in a gas line, for example), but IMO my training was lengthy but spent far too much time on easy stuff and too little time in coolers such that I had to learn how to do things like read kegs on my own, I have little idea how fobs work or why (just when to bypass them), why beer pumps are necessary, etc. If a problem is more complex than I can diagnose in five minutes I'm supposed to tell the account to call the 800 number and send out a service tech (who is booked at least a week in advance and whose fee is likely too high for a probably simple issue).
Cicerone is heavily geared toward the brewing and serving side of things. Micro Matic is what you want. You'll learn just about everything you need to know in 3 days.
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The best route for smart, capable people who find themselves in this kind of unfortunate predicament seems to be to find a job - any job, even if it’s as a receptionist or phone support or retail worker or caterer or whatever - at a medium to large sized company and then just aggressively promote yourself internally. It’s likely your years of bartending and other customer-facing work have made you relatively personable, and that’s the main ingredient. Talk to others in the business, get drinks, promote yourself as a highly ambitious and capable person, apply for any internal promotion pathways, then see if you can make a jump into a position they wouldn’t hire you in directly but might promote you into. I’ve known at least a few people who have come crazy far with this method.
I believe that you're absolutely right, and I do credit the bar gig for leveling up my social skills in relatively short order (such that my boss there remarked that it made him feel good to watch me "emerge from my shell"; I did discover that I'm actually an extrovert or at least an ambivert and genuinely enjoy talking to people instead of being afraid of them) to the point that I would heartily recommend that any young man with lousy social skills take a bar gig for six months to a year. If I had gone that route at 21 instead of 31 I suspect that I would be vastly better off, but I didn't know any better at the time. As things are, I did light prep for the interview (The first job interview where I didn't already have the job before I walked in that I've done in 10 years.) and the feedback I got was that it had been "the most impressive he'd ever heard" (So much for the "can't interview well" excuse that I told myself for years).
One of the reasons I don't see much of a future at my present company is that it's more of an overgrown small business with bad financials than a large company with limited opportunities for advancement (My current supervisor did my job for six years before she got promoted, and she really did go above and beyond. I really hope she gets the promotion she just applied for/seems to have been groomed for because she's done far more than just put in her dues. As for me, I don't have six years to waste.). I'm currently looking at manufacturing because my father did the same sort of thing in that field, I have a knack for vocational/technical stuff, and he swears up and down that industry is begging for people like me.
I'm not terribly pessimistic for my long term, but this last few months have been rough and if it makes sense I find the act of typing out my irritation to be therapeutic. Getting feedback from smart and usually successful people (You've always been one of my favorites from the old days, BTW.) is a pleasant and appreciated bonus.
If your social skills are sharp, you should just go into sales. Any kind of sales, almost certainly you have some car dealerships around you and they basically take any warm body because there are an unbelievable amount of terrible sales people. Combined with your car skills you will likely become a top performer and then have a resume to go to more successful dealerships.
If you’re motivated, a good salesman, and have the knowledge, you can certainly carve out a comfortable life and maybe even quite a lucrative one if you are aggressive and make it an end goal to get to a good dealership. Some of those Finance guys and sales directors at dealerships comfortably pull in 100-200k and oftentimes more.
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