Seeing potential and being let down isn’t just something that happens with people. It’s possible to see the best in something and have it completely destroy you when it turns out it’s not how things were. In August I began training for what was the worst job of my life. It wasn’t really a job, it was really more of a cult. No seriously, hear me out.This company has a team of people who go around different states, opening up restaurants, teaching you the ins & outs only to throw you in a venue to realize nothing you were taught matters… then they just leave, never to be heard from again. They just throw you on stage (because it’s essentially a night club themed restaurant) and when you don’t perform like a perfect puppet they dispose of you. Much like Mars 2112 and the T-rex Cafe, my last job was also a themed restaurant. The theme,night club.They have a DJ every night, they have shot shows (or at least they were supposed to but the GM was too busy being bad at her job to remember to do them), they dim the lights, they have security guards and a flower wall for the fire pics… a club. The servers were trained to never mess up their lines. They would have to go thru an audition before they were allowed to perform, I mean serve tables. For 8 weeks we were taught how to be perfect actors for the show of a lifetime. When you attempted to just be yourself, you were shunned, disliked, hours cut, fired even. The managers (not all, let me be clear) had no lives other than that restaurant and they demanded that everyone else would be the same. No seriously, this man bought a chain for 30k with the business name on it because his job was the only thing that made him cool. Okay i’m getting off track, let me start you from the beginning.
I trained for 8 weeks. I was never late, I never failed a test, I missed only one day because my fiance was having surgery. Me and 70 other people embarked on this journey that was supposed to be the best job of our lives. We learned so much, we all became best friends, we practiced our lines and prepared to be the perfect performers. I was a star student, a top performer. There wasn’t one trainer who didn’t absolutely love me and believe I was going to be one of them sooner than later. Scored highest on a test, knew more than my position required me to. Made the best riddles to help the class when the trainers ran out of ways to teach us things. I had high hopes for myself. I fell in love with the job(first mistake). I was on my way to great things… until we got into the venue. This little man, all of 5’2 was the reason for my downfall and hatred of a company I hoped to be CEO of one day. Ok not CEO but you know, I had high hopes. The problem wasn’t me, the problem was the delusion that this man had that he was Ghost from Power and that he was actually a nightclub owner. I have a family, my family comes before anything. He didn’t, his job was his life, he couldn’t fathom that someone could have a life that meant more to them than work. He expected my life to be blood, sweat and tears in that place and for my family to get the leftovers of me, the burnt out version of me. I was overlooked, I was undervalued time and time again. It wasn’t just me. A lot of servers who put on the performance of a lifetime weren’t good enough for him and whatever plans he had. This isn’t an expose, I just think these details are needed to tell you the story of how heartbreaking a job can be if you give it too much and it lets you down.
Once I realized that it was never about being good at your job but about favoritism, my heart broke. I wasn’t as pretty, I wasn’t as young, I didn’t have the look. I was smart, I was phenomenal at my job, but it wasn’t enough because I wasn’t what they wanted. I gave my all to something that was never going to love me back. I stopped working as hard, I stopped being excited to go to work, stopped working overtime, I stopped giving too much. And when I did, they finally noticed me, imagine that. The new manager kept threatening to fire me. Now that guy was a weirdo. He thought he was funny and had a twitch only a mother could love. But his favorite thing was to threaten to fire anybody who wasn’t an opp. Did I forget to tell you that part? No, yeah this man would ask us to write emails about other employees, snitching. If you didn’t he would start being mad rude to you… JAIL. I’m getting off track again sorry.
Anyways, so I finally decided to quit. I know it’s just a job but seriously, I fell in love with the potential that job had. I fell in love with who I thought I could be there. I gotta constantly remind myself, you are a published author, being a host is not your end game, stop it. But I couldn’t help it.I felt like I belonged somewhere. I sound like im whining but honestly, i’m letting you know that it’s true, you can’t give a job too much cause those people don’t care about you. I don’t know if the company as a whole sucks, but I do know that a bad coach will never lead his team to a championship. You feel me?
I did end up resigning. If you’ve read my blogs, you know I never shy away from being open about my mental health. It’s sensitive, I’ve healed from so much the past year so some parts of me are still working on being “normal” again. That place almost wrecked all that I came to Charlotte to fix. My resignation letter was FIRE! I am a writer after all and I used my skills to say FUCK YOU AND SUCK IT one last time. Those threats of being fired had me having constant panic attacks just knowing I had to work. I’m not telling you not to go there, I’m not telling you not to work there. I’m telling you not to give your all to anything that isn’t yours to keep. Don’t give your family the scraps left of you for a job because they aren’t giving you their all back, ever. I am grateful for all that I learned, I am blessed for the friends I made. It’s okay to admit that you believed in something and had high hopes for it and it let you down. It’s okay for something other than a smelly boy/girl to break your heart. I was everything I thought the company wanted me to be, but i’ll be damned if I let a man smaller than me get me down for too long. At the end of the day, I wasn’t the one who went back to an empty hotel room with no real place to call home.
A Collection of Wavy Essays 