Caste System

 A co-worker at the garden center and I were talking about the bloom leaving the gardening profession. Pun not intended.  She related one of her experiences:

"I was working for this ninety-something woman who had a huge estate. She was a southern-belle type, and had me in for tea from time to time when I was done on her property. On one of these occasions, she mentioned that she wanted to 'buy some of my time and give me to her daughter as a present.'  I felt like a piece of property."

Yup. While nothing quite so blunt has been my experience, I have found that for the most part people who hire gardeners think they do nothing but relax by some shrubbery until summoned to do something with little notice.

Working for other gardeners buffered me from the constant reminder that people who can't pick up the smallest hand tool think it's your birthright to jump to some dirty job they decided needs to be done tomorrow. Even the nicest clients frequently have no concept of Your Time, and think nothing of expecting you to drive twelve miles to install ten annuals that they decided to purchase that day.

I've gotten good at saying no. In fact, most of what I'm saying this year is no. No more large projects. No more big installs. No more yards that have been neglected for years that they suddenly need napalmed this month. I'm open to pretty much maintenance only.

My joint issues have kicked into overdrive, and I'm sore and stiff, and oh yeah, nobody wants to work right now, even though I'm willing to pay an insane hourly rate. I've been through two people already. The first was someone I knew through other activities, and while he seemed knowledgeable and smart when ensconced in the local version of Grey Gardens with his elderly mother, in the field he became a mansplaining, slo-mo nightmare. On the last job for which I used him he was so slow I had to return alone the following day and work an extra 5 hours. Oh yes, flat-fee job. So.

The other candidate had experience, but while she started strong, I suspect depression issues began to play out, and while I'm a sympathetic person, I just need my assistant to get the job done and not spend twenty minutes on something that I can do in about 75 seconds, and I should not be able to move three wheelbarrows of mulch in the time it takes them to mulch the bases of three rose bushes.

I finally connected with someone I'd been in the program with, and with whom I'd worked. He's no longer in the hort biz but is going to work with me on the last large job I have, hallelujah. Ex-marine, martial artist; sling me some mulch, bad boy.

Truth is, I don't like it any more. I work way too hard to be this tired and poor, and I'm losing the interest in detail that makes a good gardener. My joint issues are also front and center, and I'm getting very sore and stiff. A former colleague from Chicago wanted to pick my brain about starting a business and I said, "Don't do it alone. Have someone to bounce things off of, share the pain, share the work. Don't go to bed every night with your head spinning with every thing you have to get done, knowing all of it - every last thing -- is on you."

I have learned a lot. And as a business owner, I've gained a deeper appreciation for being an employee. At the garden center I bumped into a very problematic former employer, but I did thank her for everything I'd learned from her, and I apologized if I ever made her life hard. I think she was blindsided.

Some people love the notion of saving people, of fixing things for them. I like helping people, but, I don't know, there's too heavy a whiff of servitude, of toiling over the weeds while your client is vacationing on the Cape for a month. I raised my fees dramatically, but as another gardener said, "I won't work in this area. All these Yankees are tight-fisted and don't like to pay."  I could make large money if I were miraculously able to get a crew, really expand, and try for the high-end clients with large estates, but at my age, that holds zero appeal.  I just don't want to work that hard anymore. As it is I rarely see my sister, have little time for housework and my uncle, let alone my animals. I'm not complaining, although it sounds like it; I'm re-evaluating and learning from the experience.

I never thought I'd dream of a desk and being paid even if I go to the bathroom as a consummation devoutly to be wished, but there you go. It will be a big adjustment, but I think of it as my next adventure.

My most favorite job will be retirement.  

 

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.

Is that the Star of Bethlehem?

The news says that this year is the worst for the flu since the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009. Explains why the cold I caught a month ago has been about as ephemeral as a Cher farewell tour.

My Christmas present was a house to myself. My uncle, parents, and sister made their annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, also known as a casino in Connecticut, and the visiting relatives spent the day with their daughter and her family.

In our culture, the icon of loneliness is the person facing Christmas Day in solitude. To that I say: it's all about context. Besides, with  a house full of animals, I'm not exactly alone (ammiright, BabyJesusInAManger?)

I watched an on-demand movie ("Birdbox." Meh) and organized my bedroom, which included some tough love regarding clothing I'd bought while having a good day ("I can SO pull off a stretch zip-up magenta top with chartreuse spots!" "Black corduroy mini skirts are ME!") all the while thankful I thrift shop, so the experiments carried more chagrin than real financial regret.

I got my estate-planning documents in order and emailed copies to relevant people ("On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me..... a Durable Power of Attorneeeeeeeeey!")

I visited my 92-YO great-aunt ("Auntie, have you been naughty or nice?" "Naughty!" "THAT's my girl!"), and took a hike in a state park where, true to form, I spent a half-hour walking some really weird paths that seemed to just run behind houses, then through a cemetery, until I returned to the parking lot to realize the trail heads were ACROSS the street, so I walked there until the sun started to go down, which only made me more manic with desire to buy a house in Maine with some honest-to-God Nature right out my back door.

And I coughed. Constantly. Maybe because of my asthma, which in turn may be because of allergies or may be just another side-effect of the stupid B-list autoimmune disease I have that nobody ever heard of because nobody ever dies from it, they just get really, really annoying symptoms, or maybe because of the lingering Cher-cold, or all three.

Last night I coughed a nonstop cough so classically dry I was sure an olive would fly out of my mouth, which meant I could not keep my CPAP mask on, so it was a free-for-all to see whether the coughing, congestion, apnea, or the cats who thought it therapeutic to encircle me in a claustrophobic cartouche would deprive me of the most oxygen/sleep.

Before I go on to the next part, some background.

In my 30s I was sitting in the South End apartment of a friend, and, while she finished up some things, I passed the time by opening  a copy of Whitley Streiber's Communion. This was a big juicy book about his supposed experience with alien abduction. I figured it would be fluffy enough to pick up and put down with no regrets when it was time to leave. How deliciously, mindlessly sensational.

Twenty minutes into it I was in a pounding sweat. Whitley was describing in detail an event that had also happened to me when I was five.  Now, I have no memories of abduction, but I do have his memories of gray men in my room, of being touched on the forehead by a wand and being paralyzed, being terrified almost to the point of hysteria while these beings moved in and out of my line of vision, of feeling their touch (never intimate) without being able to move from it. Experiencing the kind of terror that, if you were dreaming, would cause you to wake up. Only I never did.

I have no recollection of being taken out of my room, but I do remember having this experience with minor variations several times in my childhood. I'd chalked it up to being a nightmare-prone kid, and forgot it as an adult. Until Whitley brought it all back down from the dusty mental attic, cold terror and all.

I'm not saying it was aliens, but how did he experience the exact same things? Is there some Jungian effect at work here? Some strange default the mind takes when our sleep paralysis doesn't quit?

I mention this episode because last night I managed to doze off, finally, but was woken abruptly by a low, very loud thrumming. The head of my bed is in a corner of the room, with a window directly to my left, and one at my feet to the right. We live by a wooded area.

I felt my whole body vibrate with the thrumming, and saw a blindingly bright light (like LED headlights) through both windows. And -- this is important -- the cats jerked to attention.

I could not move. I could move my eyes, but not my head or my limbs or open my mouth.

The first thought I had was, "They're back." This time I wasn't so much terrified as nervously curious, and hoped that if they were going to do anything particularly unpleasant to me they'd have the good manners to knock me out first. So, not unlike a visit to the endodontist.

And then the lights dimmed and suddenly it was morning and I was looking out not at a blinding light but at daylight with a very confused sense that something had just been erased like a badly edited film. If you've had surgery you know the feeling: "100, 99 98...hey, how'd I end up here and yes, I will have that ginger ale!"

What bothered me most? I still had the cough.  If they could manage interstellar travel, inflict paralysis at will, and erase memory, couldn't they have at least given me some advanced goddamn Space Robitussin?  Or would that have been the metaphorical butterfly wing-flap that tore the fabric of space and time?

Stupid aliens.

Don't break it down for me

I work with a  crew member whom I adore, and who also sometimes drives me nuts, and at one point had me considering looking for a new job. But I decided to make it work, figured out her hot buttons, and learned how to accommodate them. And practiced being less impatient. It helps that it's obvious that she cares and wants everyone to be happy, and is essentially a kind, generous soul.

Our communication styles are diametrically opposed. I'm direct, usually too much so; she is deferentially circuitous to the point of abstraction.  An example of how our styles contrast:

Me: "Those shastas look like crap; I'll cut them back."

She: "I'm thinking that we could offer our assistance to those poor shastas over there, which look a wee bit forlorn, so do you think that you could perhaps give them some attention so that they don't look so yucky?"

While she's giving instructions like this, I'm practically doing a jitterbug of impatience. She also has to hunt for words a lot, so her instructions are loaded with "uhs" and "ums," making it all the more  brutal. I've learned to just wait it out, breathing deliberately, because I get paid either way.

She also constantly forgets two key things about me:

1. I have no sense of direction. Unless the direction is for a location within a block of where I am, please just give me an address I can plug into my phone, or some really unique landmarks to guide my way. Even though I've been to a location a dozen times over the summer, I will not know how to get to it on my own. Do not tell me to go to Main street and take a right on 122 and then left on Wing, because I'm lost already. I've explained that it's like dyslexia, and just accept that I have a learning issue when it comes to directions.

"At any given point in our day," I explained to her, "I could not begin to tell you how I would drive home; I could not even tell you in what direction I'd head. I cannot visualize how the streets relate to one another. My brain forms no mental map as I travel."

After about three of these explanations, she still insists on giving me directions, so I treat it like her learning disability that she can't understand my disability, so, resisting the urge to Lindy Hop, I listen to her directions and say, "Great, thanks! And the address?"

 2. I'm having some serious bladder issues related to other conditions. I have no problem using the outdoor executive washroom, so I usually just give a heads up that I'm heading into the woods/behind a huge rhododendron/storage shed. I've become adept at sight lines and stealth squatting.

No matter how many times I've explained that when the urge hits, I have to answer it pretty quickly, she stops and delays me by offering stammering suggestions on the nearest coffee shops that I could use instead, or, when the location does require me to drive to a coffee shop, starts giving me directions (!!!) rather than let me use my phone.  One day our conversation went like this:

Me: "I'm heading to Dunks to use the restroom--"

She: "Oh! If you want, um, um, there's a coffee shop close by, um, about oh, two miles or so. There's one down by the um - the um --Panera on Route 3, you know that one? You um --go down the street--"

Me: "I've just peed myself."

She: "Oh! Oh, well I'll let you go."

Me: "Thanks; be right back."

Then there are the house descriptions. She avoids the most obvious clues, using streets once again fortheloveofGodMontresor.

She: "The big house at the end of the street."

Me: "Gonna need more."

She: "They have the two containers."

Me: "Still nothing."

She: "They have the little front porch with the tiny boxes."

Me: "You mean the house with the two German Shepherds?"

She: "Yes, that's the one."


Another time:

She: "The house on Main Street."

Me: "Not getting a visual."

She: You cut back all the amsonia."

Me:"You mean the Dead Rabbit house?"

She: "That's the one."

For me,  two big dogs who run up and slobber all over you, or discovering two dead (likely poisoned) rabbits in the bed you were weeding would be the lead. Not "The brown house on the corner."

I also have a much fouler mouth, and I hate maintaining day lilies. So the one day when I looked over to see her yell,  "FUCKING DAY LILIES!!" I knew we'd finally come to a meeting of the minds.

The Adventures of Plant Girl, Part I

[This is a draft I didn't publish at the time it was originally written, in the first part of 2018. I thought it might be interesting to document my experiences as an interior plant technician, and then decided you didn't need to hear about over-watered dracaenas and mealybug. You're welcome.]

Plant Girl is covering a new office today, because the plant girl previously assigned there got tired of being stalked by a partner of the firm whose apparent aspiration is to be the Justin Bateman character from Juno.

Plant Girl has promised her supervisor that she will not get into it with Stalker Man, but in her fantasies:

[STALKER MAN becomes highly agitated at the realization that his stalkee is gone for good. PLANT GIRL closes door to his office and faces him with a cool, level stare.]

PG: You're an attorney, aren't you?

SM: Yes...

PG [leaning on desk, crime-drama style]: So you'll understand when I say: Cease. And. Desist.

SM [leaning back, a cornered rat]: I- I don't know what your'e talking about! I was just sharing some music I thought she might be interested in! I was just being friendly! I-

PG  [silences him with a long stare]: I think we both know that's not true. So. Those pothos aren't going to water themselves. I'll be going.

[EXIT PLANT GIRL, victorious, watering can in hand, leaving STALKER MAN speechless and terrified]