...in which doors are closing and I'm looking for windows.
I mentioned that I am applying at the Valentine (see the last post). Fact is, I’ve been dropping applications and résumés all over town, because Assanté’s is no longer a viable job.
When I first started working at the pizza place I was working nights, as you’ll remember. The shifts were ten to twelve hours long, which sucked, and the place was crazy busy, and at the end of the night I’d be beat to shit. But, I also made crazy money, and three shifts a week would give me more than enough to live on, and four in effect made me rich, by my own standards (which I admit are not very high).
I wanted to work days, though. First, the place manages to do great business in large part because we deliver to neighborhoods that other places refuse to deliver to. Some of these places are pretty dangerous, and in fact last week two drivers were robbed at night, in separate incidents. Also, although days do sometimes get quite busy, they generally aren’t enough to make me crazy, whereas at night I’m crazy pretty much from the moment I walk in the door.
I managed to convince Chef, the old GM, to switch me exclusively to days. I was working four days a week; obviously I would prefer to work only three, but day shift drivers work shorter shifts, so we need more of them. If you work four day shifts, you can kind of scrape by. I haven’t spent money on anything but groceries and bills since I moved into 1644, but I’ve been making it.
We have a new GM now, though. The new guy is keeping me on days, but he’s only giving me three shifts a week. There’s another day shift driver who used to get two shifts, but she has convinced him to give her another, so I’ve lost one. I noticed yesterday that she was asking him for a fourth day, so I might possibly lose another shift.
By my calculations, I need to make $284 per week in order to eat, drink, smoke, and pay my bills. I would like to make more, so that I have money to buy DVDs and things to furnish my lovely new apartment, but that’s the baseline that I need just to survive. Working three days I make only about $250 a week, and that’s only if business is good and folks are tipping; on slow weeks (like this past one) it ends up being closer to $200. That obviously is not going to work, so I’ve been looking for a new job. I haven’t made a judgment as to whether I want something I can do a couple of days a week, between driving shifts, or something full-time so I can quit the joint altogether. I might be restricted by what jobs are available and what hours they want to give me.
I’ve been a few places this past week, and nothing has looked particularly promising. However, I did get an application for a video store, just a few blocks from my apartment. A job in a video store would be perfect for me, given how much I love movies. I love working in libraries because I’m surrounded by books all day, and being surrounded by movies would be equally groovy. Also, my extensive knowledge of lesser-known pictures would let me recommend things to people that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise, so I would be as good for the place as it would be for me. I’m going to take the application and turn it in tomorrow.
I hope that the same woman is there that was there when I got the application. She is, I would guess, a year or two older than me, attractive, and seemed very charming. She was slender and graceful and dark with just a few strands of grey, and her eyes were lively and merry, and maybe she loves movies as much as I do. I will try to be very charming myself, because I need the job, but also because I really just want to charm her. I will wear a button-down shirt, because I don’t want to look like a bum, but I will wear it open with one of my many B-movie shirts visible under it, to advertise my love of the obscure, the overlooked gems and diamonds-in-the-rough of independent film. I would be happy to work there five or six days a week, but at the least I’m hoping that I can wrangle a shift or two. Even if I got the job at the Valentine, I would want to be able to put in a few hours at the video store.
I am hoping for the best on a couple of fronts, you see. Once again, wish me luck!