Pour Me A Story, Vol. 40
the Work Edition
greetings pals, and welcome back to Pour Me A Story. this week I’m flying solo because I had some Stuff To Say (and also I was disorganized). it turned into a lengthy one, partly because, well,
so let’s get stuck in to it huh?
Working-Class Man
over the past couple months I’ve alluded to some tough weeks and some work-related shit going on in the background, but wasn’t in a position to gather my thoughts about it (and it was ongoing anyway.) as of 5 p.m. today, that’ll no longer be an issue, so I think I’ll talk about it a little.
for context, right before the pandemic hit (like…the week before) I started a new role within my existing employer and moved onto another internal team that put me firmly in a position to combine some things I love: writing, sneakers and tweeting.
we basically immediately got sent to work from home on March 12, 2020, and I’ve worked remotely every day since then, save for a brief visit to Indianapolis last week. this, of course, is less by choice than by necessity. it’s still a raging pandemic out there, and any situation indoors with other humans is a situation in which I might contract and bring the virus home to my kid, who’s too young to be vaccinated against it.
in any case, despite not working in the same room or even zip code or state as my new teammates, I thrived. the business had a record sales year, and I saw solid success with the duties I owned in my role. early this year, after more than eight months of this work-from-home thing and with the end of our lease looming, Alex and I began to kick around the financial realities of remaining in Denver versus moving to somewhere a little more affordable.
because of the continued success of the company and the work-remote arrangement, my boss had made the offer that anyone who wanted to work somewhere other than near the office could do so. this was encouraging to me and became the root of our eventual move to Cincinnati: that I could keep my job rather than having to look for another one. I called him and ran the broad plan by him, and while he said he didn’t like it, that I had permission to do it.
so we started to plan around that, and I let my manager know what we were thinking, and there was no problem there. so imagine my absolute shellshock when I made time on the calendar to give my bosses a courtesy rundown of the logistics of me moving and working full-remote (again: approved by my manager, in accordance with HR) and was told that if I left Colorado and didn’t move to Indy, I was no longer a member of the team, because full-time remote work was unacceptable.
this hit me like a ton of bricks because, for the past year-plus, I’d been working from a small desk in our bedroom. I took ownership of the company blogs and grew their reader traffic 101% in the first year. I’d never run into performance issues, I had had unprecedented success in my part of the role, and I felt I’d proven that it didn’t matter where I sat, the job would be done and done well.
but at a basic level, all I was doing was writing about shoes on the internet. I didn’t need anything beyond an internet connection to do any facet of the role. I could do the exact same job from my bedroom in Denver or Cincinnati as I could in an office in Boulder, but without the stresses of two and a half hours of commuting every day and having to leave Alex to parent solo for 50-plus hours during the work week. the office didn’t need me in it. my e-pal Ed Zitron has covered this at length over the past few weeks in his newsletter and has done a better job of explaining why forced office attendance is essentially bullshit, so do check that out.
and at an even more basic level, all I wanted to do was write about shoes. I have a long journalism background and I fucking love sneakers, and I got paid to combine both of those things. that’s about as close to a dream job as you can get. and I was being flat-out denied that dream job because I wanted to give my young family more room to grow.
anyway, I spent months aggressively interviewing for roles both full-remote and in Cincinnati. funnily enough, my work never suffered and continued to thrive despite making time for that length process. imagine that. a few almost worked out, others weren’t right, still dozens more never even responded to the application. but better still, I was offered another role within the company, and accepted.
the contrast couldn’t be more stark: my new manager is perfectly fine with me working remotely (“I don’t care where you work, as long as you get it done!”) and my new leaders, who were my bosses before 2020, welcomed me back with literal open arms (really. one hugged me) and appear to be excited to have me stay at the organization. meanwhile my previous superiors haven’t spoken a word to me since early June. it dawned on me last week in Indy at happy hour that for the entirety of this year, I’ve been gaslit. I felt like I was the black sheep, the squeaky wheel, the team malcontent. now I’m surrounded by folks who seem to value my contributions and glad to have me.
so that’s a relief, right?
Enough Of That Serious Shit
earlier this week, my e-pal Scott Hines published a terrific edition of his Action Cookbook newsletter that found him musing about how he would adapt to living in (and imagining moving to) cities he’s visited for a couple days.
this got me thinking about potential career opportunities I’ve had over the past eight years since I moved out here, and how my brain did the mental gymnastics of preparing to live in a new city long before a job offer materialized.
coming from journalism, I’ve obviously applied for like 500 jobs since I moved out here, in seemingly every corner of this country. so I compiled some of the fun ones and some thoughts about how life would’ve looked if I’d taken any of them.
2012: Midland, TX
the job: I remember applying for this newspaper digital content job in a friend’s living room in Denver, and almost having a heart attack when the hiring manager responded. I still have the emails and the tone of his replies amounts to “you have an enormous amount of national experience, why would you want to work here?” my replies REEK of “please man, I’m desperate for a job” and I can barely stand to read them.
he told me the salary and it was meagre even by media standards. I did some research and found out that, as an oil town, Midland was expensive as hell and I’d be way better off financially if I worked on a rig. obviously, I withdrew.
what life would look like: well, I’d probably have had three jobs and absolutely no time or money to visit [checks notes] the American Southwest Museum or eat at one of the 17 restaurants (2021 count) in town because I’d need every dollar to cover rent. my salary in Maine was a learning curve of sorts, but it was princely by comparison to the offer in the Permian Basin. speaking of which, I bet I’d have watched a lot of high school football.
2014: Nashville, TN
the job: I had a couple of really great job interviews with Lonely Planet back in 2014 and I felt confident enough about them that I was basically on the verge of applying for apartments and had already mapped out my new favorite bars. in unrelated news, I still have never been to Nashville.
what life would look like: that was around October 2014. I ended up spending the following year in small-town Maine, which was fantastic in some ways and miserable in others. had I ended up in Nashville, I’d have presumably ended up putting on a pile of weight from consuming hot chicken multiple times a week, and loving country music I guess?
2016: Trenton, NJ
the job: seeking my return to professional life that fall after spending the summer bartending and freelancing, my job search led me to a position at a radio station’s news website in the New Jersey capital. the hiring manager seemed wary that I would move to Trenton, which should’ve been a red flag, but what would EYE know about it?
again, I never ended up moving, possibly there because I never heard from the hiring manager again after misspelling his fucking first name (“Lpuis” rather than “Louis”) in a thank-you email. folks have subsequently told me I dodged a bullet by not living in Trenton, but I did end up in West Palm Beach, so…push, I guess.
what life would be like: my gut instinct says that I’d probably end up spending more time in nearby Philadelphia than Trenton, which would be great for 2021 Adrian because now I have approximately 500 Philly pals. otherwise, running social for a local radio station probably would’ve got old quick and I’m sure I would’ve been looking to hit the bricks at the first opportunity.
Worthy Consumables
(you mean apart from the fast-acting edible I senselessly took mere minutes before I sat down to write this edition?)
for about as long as we’ve been together, Alex and I have adhered to a tradition of “Scary Movie Sunday,” reeling off horror movies and thrillers during our shared downtime. the arrival of the baby has meant that we generally no longer have the opportunity to sit down and watch a flick in its entirety until after the kiddo goes to bed, at which point we only have an hour’s worth of energy left in us anyway. this has been discussed before in these pages, of that I’m certain.
anyway we felt a little more spry than usual earlier this week and we decided that Alex would choose the bedtime scary movie. I lean more towards modern stuff, particularly ghost stories, while Alex prefers the classic 80s stuff and the occasional horror comedy.
I’m particularly hesitant about the latter category, because they can so quickly stray into the corny, but after some initial grumbling I went along with the chosen movie, Spontanous, and I was immediately proven wrong. this shit is very funny but not at the expense of the scary stuff. the very basic premise is that kids at a high school are…well, exploding. spontaneously. give it a shot, it’s very much worth a watch.
Parting Note
as an ode to my Australianness as well as the topic at hand this week, here’s ol’ fuckin’ Barnsey (perhaps more recently remembered as the Screaming Cowboy meme.
anyway folks, thanks again for sticking with me. looking forward to doing it all over again next week!
— adrian ✌🏻