My blogs are already farther and fewer between, but hey, I’m in charge here.

First things first.  Your girl got a job!  Commute is alright, the pay is alright.  Advancement seems legit enough.  Most of all, they’re nice, down to earth people.  Sometimes you’ve got to go with the vibe above all else.  That’s what kept me at my last job.  I just really loved working for the guy I worked for.  Most of the time I literally hated everything else.  So a good impression and a positive people experience?  Teach me your recipes and watch me go.

Deep down I just want to write a few best sellers and play Fallout 4 and go see Hyryder every weekend, though.

However, I digress.

Today I was handed a giant binder filled with at least 250 pages of training material.  It even had a cute little pencil bag zipper pouch inside with a complimentary highlighter.  My eyes probably dilated like an absolute fiend and I flipped through it immediately, marveling over being handed something on paper and complimenting their use of multi colored dividers.  I even sniffed the paper and said “smells like marketing materials” like I was Lorelai Gilmore smelling the first winter’s snow.  I could have wept with joy.

I’ll take that over a malfunctioning app any day of the week.

Now, I’m 37 and I consider that youngish, verging on middle age. I am a millennial through and through.  I grew up without internet until I was in middle school.  Maybe even high school.  I watched cable TV and adjusted the rabbit ears for some fuzzy HBO or out of state channels.  I got my first cell phone at 16 and didn’t text in class until I was a senior.  And only in French class. I’ve grown with technology.

But something about this post-Covid, high-tech, everything-AI world has me flummoxed.  I’m not sure when it happened, but it’s like everything (and as many would say, everyone) stopped working.  Or at least properly.

Now, I’m not decrying “no one wants to work.”  I’m not taking this down a political road.  I’m not even going to go in hard about work ethic because everyone is different and I do believe that there’s almost a nature versus nurture situation with work ethic.  Anyone can be taught to do a job.  There aren’t too many jobs outside of ones requiring extensive higher education that can’t be taught in a reasonable time frame.  Believe me, I have spent the last six weeks insinuating this to potential employers who are under the impression that I’m only capable of tossing a pizza.

I spent the last 10 years of my life in upper management and I learned real quick how to motivate people to work.  I wanted to do a good job and work well because I respected that man I worked for.  I’d had shitty bosses before who demeaned me (looking at you, Jeremy from Steak ‘n’ Shake – something about you being the armpit of society and all of your underlings the stinky hairs?).  I’d watched other employees who were good people be treated poorly and say screw this job and quit.  I wasn’t on the side of management in that situation.  I was no boot licker.  So when I got my shot at running my own store?  I made it about the team, not about me.  I hired in some new people and tried to build a new team in addition to the existing employees (who hated my guts for replacing their old GM).  In part, it was because I was scared to be the heavy and have everyone hate me and if they hated me, they might look close enough to see my secret: I had no idea what I was doing.

I figured out what to do, though.  We made the pizzas.  We delivered them.  Rinse.  Repeat.  I let the team establish their own dynamic and I followed suit.  Hell, I even started smoking cigarettes just for the social bullshitting with them.  Running my first pizza shop is still, to this day, my favorite thing that I’ve done.  It wasn’t easy, but man, it was fun.  I only had to bribe them with McDonalds frappes maybe twice before they were good and bought in.  Molly’s not going anywhere.  The job is the job.  It’s okay to have a smooth, fun day in the restaurant, collect our check, and go home.  Molly’s not that bad once you give her a chance.  Plus, sales are up and everyone went home with more tip money.  Win-win?

I had a lot of employees over my time there that probably could not “hang” in another shop.  Or they’d been fired from other places or weren’t getting calls back.  I found something for them to do and found a way for them to contribute.  Almost all of them were amazing employees for me.

So.  Does no one want to work?  Or do employers not know how to hire or train or work with people?

OR.  Bear with me.  Have we diluted the day to day human experience so much that none of us really know how to work or hire or train or function?  Instead of picking up a paper application and calling the number on it, did we let the AI assistant look for keywords and for an additional $99.95/month, the AI would reach out to applicants for you once a week from a private number that looks like a scam and doesn’t leave a voicemail and then the human is locked out of that account and never sees anything?

Even after I left the GM job and was bumped up to multi-unit supervising, I found a way to get people to work for me.  Despite the dozens of Indeed applications, it was always the people who wandered in and asked if we were hiring that worked out the best.  Of course, those people usually didn’t have cars or had a checkered background, but there’s something about meeting someone face to face and saying “sure, come in tomorrow and we will get you started.”  And they do.  “Molly told me to come in and train with you” was all you needed to say.  You didn’t have to clear five personality assessments with the bot.  If your personality sucked, we’d figure that out on the first day.

Now I’ve tried not to be arrogant during my job search.  No one wants to hear me pontificate and after getting canned, I should eat some humble pie and put my head down, right?  I applied to jobs I was exactly qualified for and didn’t get a single call back.  I had texts from employers asking to set up interviews and when I said I was an open book and willing to meet/call/zoom whenever?  No response.  Or “I don’t have any openings for two weeks” or the employer didn’t show to the interview or didn’t make the call.  I’d have kicked my own ass for doing something like that on the job.  The first few times I told myself “well, there was probably someone more qualified,” but after this happened over and over and over?  I don’t think it’s me.

I’ve got to say, though, the number of “fake” job ads I saw was insane.  The number of ads just on a repeat loop with automated calls, with callback numbers that didn’t work.  The pay posted was not accurate (or just downright silly- 30k-100k?).  The job description not accurate.   The position maybe didn’t even exist.  I chatted with a potential employer back and forth before realizing it was actually a chatbot, not unlike the ones Amazon and Doordash uses for customer complaints.  I asked it if I could set up an interview or chat with a human and it didn’t respond.  Thanks, Charlie-bot.

It was before the job search, though.  I worked through Covid.  I was “essential.”  Covid forced the remote work and the zoom calls replacing meetings that really could have been an email.  It forced doing things online or on an app instead of in person.  We had to start doing the work for ourselves, with McDonalds ordering kiosks and an AI assistant taking our order at Wendy’s and of course the self-scans at Walmart.  We toured apartments remotely.  We interviewed on Zoom.

I literally interviewed on Zoom for a job WITHOUT WEARING PANTS.  AND I GOT THE JOB.  I didn’t take it, mind you, because they bait and switched the offer. And the pay.

Is this what we’ve come to?  It seems like such a silly little thing, but if I have any coherent thought in this blog, it’s that putting on pants should be the first step to employment.  Or going out into the world.  If we’ve somehow eliminated that possibility, it’s no wonder nothing in our world functions right. We’ve figured our way around pants and now it’s mayhem.

It’s not that no one wants to work.  It’s that we need real training, real humans, real motivation.  I adored working for my last boss of 13 years.  I couldn’t even hate him after he fired me.  I wanted to, but I couldn’t.  There was too much respect there and it’s not like either one of us did anything wrong.  I was told constantly how rare that rapport was, though, so if that was what kept me going all that time, how is anyone out there functioning with at home work they don’t care about or making $14/hour at Taco Bell where they were remotely hired and thrown in after watching some training videos on their phone?

I doubt I can say or do anything to change this trajectory.  The era has probably long past and we are too far gone.  Maybe.  At least if we acknowledge it, we can try to do better.  The best I can do is just go back to who I was when I ran that pizza shop and made as many human connections as I possibly could and still authentically be that person and that manager. 

I can’t change the world, but I can change my little slice of it.

Music you should be listening to:

Satan’s Song – Bella’s Bartok
Otis – Houndmouth
Kid – The Revivalists
Frank Sinatra– Cake

As always, this panhandling starving artists works for tips.  Think of it like busking.  With text.

Venmo – @Molly-Finch-7
Cashapp – $mfinch09
Paypal – @molly2009