Tough Crowd

The professional gardening world appears comprised mostly of ex-Marines and middle-aged women, and it's unclear which group harbors the most rage.

The common thread seems to be psyches shaped by long-term emotional abuse, and a cheery but hostile defensiveness that we use to unsettle others. Passive aggressively.

On one side, we have young men chewed up and spat out of a military system of emotional sadism that promised them camaraderie and loyalty. I worked with one very muscular jiu-jitsu practitioner whose inscrutable stone face made me want to either hug him, or talk to him gently while I sloooowly took the garden shears from his hands.  In my last job, another ex-Marine was so furiously anal about how we restocked tools that I would not hang so much as a rake without his permission, while wondering how I could get him to smoke a LOT more weed.

On the other side is the 50-something mom who does heavy gardening all day (including heavy tarps, wheebarrows, and tools), who anxiously measures out portions of food in tiny plastic containers (her 10am yogurt break is like a one-woman Running of the Bulls, and God help anyone who gets in the way), and who goes to a cardio class afterwards. She also routinely runs in the morning, and discusses in detail a half-dozen low-cal dinners with chicken as the base ingredient, and she does NOT approve of my abstinence from meat, white or otherwise.

She will not pee outdoors. Ever.

Like me, she is the child of an alcoholic, and I empathize with the control issues; however, once I realized I could say "Screw you!" to those issues, I've spent the time since cultivating a liberating, almost taunting "so what?" approach to most everything. I have realized that there is rarely only one right way.   I realized it's a lot more fun to not constantly self-edit.

This attitude, and my clear disregard for whether others approve of me, drives this poor woman straight up the wall.

And if we're being honest here, I get a kick out of that.

The third middle-aged woman is emotionally needy and chronically depressed, so they hit it off like a house on fire. (My most sympathetic response to her lament about a recent ex was to say, "He's a fucking loser. Move on.")  At one point Needy Woman complained of a headache, and I looked up to see Apotheosis of Mom standing in front of her with a Tylenol and a glass of water.  It was horrifying.

The excuse I gave for my notice was family reasons, because there was no need to say, "I'm bored, I am NOT bonding with the team, and if I'm going to work this hard, it will be for real money for myself."

Nobody misses me.

And if we're being honest here, I'm fine with that.

Or maybe THIS plan....

Throughout the winter I have been exploring my options in an attempt to formulate some kind of strategy about my Next Step. My strategies generally prove maddeningly elusive and change as rapidly as those choose-your-ending books I loved as a teen.

I will move to Maine! I will have a small home on many acres, grow vegetables and keep bees. I will make soap and have an art and pottery studio in the barn. I will sell honey at the farmer's market. 

I began the job search. I had my sights set on a botanic garden and sent off my resume. I got a response (I'm moving to Maine!) that said they had no gardening positions open, but I might want to consider an educational assistant position (sounds a lot like a job that can't pay me to move to Maine). The job description detailed leading children through a kids' garden, talking about plants, feeding chickens, general upkeep. Nothing sounded scary or odd, and if  nothing else would afford me the opportunity to shape the next generation of tree-hugging vegetarians.

If I get a decent job offer from Maine, I'll move to Maine. If the pay is low, I could maybe buy a mobile home. Or rent in a depressed area.

They wanted me to send a resume for the position, so on the advice of a friend I created an entirely new resume, underscoring previous mentoring/educational experience. With youth.

The result was a stellar example of my ability not so much to teach children (although I can) but to create a narrative where teaching SAT classes twenty-five years ago, a few months of supervising teenage interns, and nine months of babysitting made me the love child of Mary Poppins and Mister Rogers.

"Instilled expectations of good behavior and a respect for nature through games and play, daily trips to parks and beaches, and by exploiting children’s natural love of routine, ritual, and expressive communication."

Yes. I actually wrote this. It was fun, this challenge to elevate instinct to skill, and mundane activities  to intentional education. This blurb was my respectable distillation of "We walked to the park! We threw rocks in the lake! We waved hello to the cottonwood trees! I taught them to pull up their shirts every time I yelled 'MARDI GRAS!' I trained them like I train puppies, because it was fun, they loved it, and because I could."

The visit to the street vendor of corn chichas almost made an appearance as, "Developed an appreciation of international cuisine and multicultural interpersonal interaction," but I couldn't quite bring myself.

I heard nothing, but was OK since the pay was super low.

I was in talks with landscapers who were very interested in hiring me, but they operated in southern Maine, which is not much cheaper than Massachusetts. Generally, any area in which a president summers (The Cape, Kennebunkport) is unlikely to present a wealth of cheap apartments or thrift stores, opting instead for four-figure weekly rentals and Consignment Boutiques.

In the end I met with a local landscaper who wants to hire me and is going to get back to me with a job offer once he figures out his crew for the season. I've offered him less than full-time so that I can build my own business.

And so it is that just as I'm waiting to hear from Local landscaper, I get a call from the head gardener at the botanic garden. The Educational Assistant botanic garden. This garden that never has gardener openings now has two openings for full-time seasonal gardeners. On one hand I was a little excited; on the other I was annoyed at this ping-ponging, and a bit sulky about the lack of response to the three hours of brilliant resume writing to reinvent myself as the gardening world's Maria von Trapp.

The Head Gardener was very nice and we got along well. I asked what the position paid, and the level of hemming and hawing made my stomach sink. This was not the response of someone unembarrassed by her answer.

"Interns make about $11 an hour; for regular we could go up to about $13. I mean, it's Maine."

Thirteen. Dollars. UP TO. The last time I'd made that little I'd only slept with two men in my life. I mean, I was a late bloomer, but still.

Shit, I can't afford to move to Maine on what they pay. I'll work here and buy a place in Maine. Then I'll eventually move to Maine.

So I'm here for now, which is fine, if not perfect. I see my aunt in the nursing home regularly, and my sister and I get together and have fun. I know the area, I'm getting my business stuff in order, and if I'm lucky, I'll make a real living this year.

I could just buy land in Maine and grow things and keep bees there. I could get one of those huge room-like tents for when I'm up there. 

I can poop in the woods.

Winter Work

As I make my way through my first winter as a gardener and not a student (or rather, as I make my way through the prospect of a winter with no income), and after no luck finding temporary work on my own, I turned to recruiters. Because it turns out that all my plans of catching up on educational reading in the off season are thwarted by an inability to sit still as long as I'm jobless. As one can imagine, my gardening pay did not provide for a substantial nest egg, which situation was amplified by unexpected dental work for both me and a cat to the tune of almost three thousand in unexpected bills. So any time not spent searching for jobs and sending out resumes was consumed with the preoccupation that I had to look for jobs and send out resumes.

Cue the recruiters.

Landing a good recruiter is tricky at my age, because many recruiters are staffed by people not long out of college who have about five minutes of work experience.  It's surreal to put on a suit and dress shoes and be evaluated by someone who can't make eye contact. As luck would have it, I connected with a recruiter close to my age with whom I could have a conversation undistracted by the anxiety that my evaluation was similar to that of a Tinder date.

(Sidenote: My history of online dating is a hot train wreck of Boschian carnage.) 

So I landed a gig that does not pay anywhere near what I'm worth (ah, temping), but will last for as long as I expect to be out of work, and the staff is nice. No busy phones, no unhappy people. Very little stress.

The best part: They tell me every day how smart I am, how happy they are that I'm there. I've told them I'm a gardener trying to make her way to Maine, and they tell me all the time how much they want to keep me. 

"I wish we could get someone like you," the woman I'm supporting tells me.

"Well, that's easy. Hire someone who's overqualified, pay them 50% more than you've budgeted for the position, and there you go."

I'm basically helping with the mess also known as their accounts payable. The backstory involves a former employee who let bills back up until a vendor's threat to cut service alerted the company that they had a situation.

To be fair, the issue is larger. For one, the accounting system is crap. Don't worry, I won't go into boring detail, but trust me it was not designed by accountants. Given that the basics of  accounting are unchanged since the days of Venetian seafaring merchants, and also given that accounting does not benefit from jazzy new approaches, there is no excuse for this. That I have to enter twelve invoices from one vendor as twenty-four separate transactions rather than as a single batch entry makes me want to hunt down the software provider and use Language.

Then there are the vendors who, rather than taking the time to put the correct PO on an invoice, slap a random or outdated PO number in the apparent assumption that we won't notice. I mentally craft communications where these vendors are notified that a $50 fee per incorrect number will be deducted to cover the additional administrative time.

(Thoughts like these make me realize how pointless modern life can be. The self-righteous indignation of the Purchase Order is the first sign of societal decay. You read it here.)

Another issue is that, despite being in a digital world, the processes at this office are heavily paper-oriented. One process goes something like this: a Purchase Order is generated and put into the accounting system, and an original paper version into a big binder. Incoming bills are then processed, during which they are stamped and  information found on the digitally-generated PO is handwritten on the front. (I've chosen to log this in purple marker as a statement about the triumph of art over bureaucracy.) The invoice is entered into the system against the PO number (which if you just type in creates an error message; you have to type the number and wait several seconds for the system to offer you a selection so that you can choose from the list. Which for a stack of twenty or so invoices is maddening.) Invoices are then created from these entries -- but these require two separate transactions. Of course. Then for each bill, one must go to the shelf of binders, find the PO printout, remove it from the 5-inch-wide binder, which entails hefting all the POs over the huge binder ring to get to the desired PO, and attach it to the bill so that the person approving it can see it. Once the bill is paid, the PO is re-inserted into the Unholy Cumbersome Binder.   

Wait, you ask. Can't the POs be scanned and saved to a network folder, where they can be easily reviewed by the approver?  Yessiree, Bub, they sure can. They can also be scanned into the accounting system for people like me who have to process bills that about half the time have incorrect POs on them.

But they aren't. Because change.

Most of what I know is from inference, because most communication starts with an assumption that you have had some prior informative conversation on the subject at hand with an extraterrestrial source.  

Take the office manager, who is one of the nicest women I've met, and one of my favorite people there. Unflappable, helpful. Also the worst communicator ever. A master of the seeming non sequitur, which is the result of spitting out the last sentence to a long internal conversation, or assuming that you live in her head.

"Did you get the things from the book?" she asked me on my fourth day.

"What 'things' exactly, and what book?" I asked.

"The PO Book."

"There's a PO book?"

"The ones in the room."

"Any particular room?"

Another time she said out of the blue, "I'll bet she took them from the folder before putting them into the other thing. Did she record them?"

I considered my many possible replies, and decided that "I don't know," was safest. I also consulted the Internet for symptoms of dementia.

It became my own personal pastime to decode her arcane statements. One day she asked, "What do you do when your printer has no words?"

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking the printer had run out of ink, and that's a good guess, so don't be too hard on yourself. What she meant was along the lines of, "When your printer has an error and has only icons and no display screen WITH WORDS, how do you know how to fix the problem?"

Then there is the filing. After looking in the umpteen places a document might be, I gave up.

"I've been looking for the Staples PO for this bill we got. I checked the books in the room and the new ones in A--'s office, but I can't find it. Do you know where else I might look?"

"Did you look under 'S'? A lot of people do that by mistake."

"I did actually, what with 'Staples' starting with -- you know. An S."

"It's a corporate charge account so it goes in the credit-card book."

You know how in school you and your friends whine about the dubious real-world utility of what you learn in a classroom? This is the first time I've had a working knowledge of the alphabet prove useless.

But I'm appreciated, it's an easy paycheck so far, they're going to put me in my own office to help with a special project, and things that would bother me if I were invested in the company as a permanent job are just things I'll be walking away from in a couple of months. 

If ever I am tempted to fall back on my mad office skills and get an office job where I'm not struggling financially, the rapidity with which my joints are seizing up is reminder enough that I do not want a desk job. It's frightening how quickly the aches and pains set in. It's fun to wear my cute blue boots and kicky skirts, sure, but I do miss my garden boots and mud gloves, and I feel naked without my pruners.

Pruners. Filed under P. Dammit.