solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
My new job and my personal vibecession
This is an update to an ancient (back in the Reddit days) comment concerning being financially drowned by deadbeat roommates. I’m not trying to get too culture war about the economy, just remarking on my local, personal situation. I am well aware that I am a fuckup who spent most of his time/effort in college, his early 20s, and beyond drinking and delivering pizza instead of figuring out a career. Many of my problems are my own fault. That said, here goes:
Long story short, until recently I worked (I still do, a few dinner shifts a week, but it’s summer and they’re apocalyptically dead right now so I’m averaging 2 nights a week.) at a locally owned Doodash-style (We were around first, so not a clone.) food delivery company in an SEC college town (We’ll call it University to Go.), and did so for 8 years. Averaging $20/hr to drive in circles during the mid/late 2010s was crazy money for the low cost of living in my area at the time (I was paying less than $500/month in rent, for perspective.), better pay than a lot of “real” jobs. Sure, 1099 taxes suck and I became a part-time auto mechanic due to running my car into the ground for the job, but it was easy, genuinely fun, and it’s hard to beat being a small business owner’s favorite crony. In short, it was easy to stay comfortable, say “Fuck it, one more semester.”, and keep going.
Over time (Covid bought us a few years.) Doordash and Uber Eats ate us alive (It’s hard to convert students who enter town having already used one or the other for years, are already sunk in with subscriptions to Dashpass, etc.) while post-Covid inflation/labor shortages hit us from every angle (Anything to do with buying or running a car was hit especially hard, a lot of our restaurants went under or quit offering delivery due to short-staffed kitchens, and a lot of our customer base ran out of money quickly once the stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment ran out.) such that we’re more expensive and have a worse selection (In particular, the sort of fast-casual restaurants that used to be our bread and butter have nearly gone extinct.) than we used to (Still cheaper than Doordash, but we don’t deliver fast.). Stagnant income in a low-inflation environment was one thing, but this town is a lot more expensive to live in than it used to be (A process that was occurring throughout the 2010s, but Covid put it into overdrive.).
During 2020-21 (because I have no backbone, make bad decisions, and apparently acquired a friend group filled with terrible people during my 20s) I managed to acquire not one but two roommates that don’t pay their bills (I’ll get to one of them in the second comment.) and wound up paying for two apartments while going through a string of more bad decisions/luck with vehicles. Needless to say, my easy existence with plenty of spare cash transformed itself into an endless grind of working seven day weeks, picking up a second job as a barback and later bartender, and still being broke. Adding fuel to the fire, the bottom seems to have fallen out at University to Go and my potential as a bartender is not unlimited (I kind of hate bartending, have zero passion for cocktails, and am not a woman, so I’m going to be stuck working mediocre gigs or barbacking.), so I needed another job
In comes an old friend of mine with a job she’d just been promoted out of and thought I’d be a perfect fit for. How convenient, right? It seemed so, like a bit of a pay cut but survivable, more stable, and without the hassle of 1099 taxes and maybe I’d open some doors in a new field (alcohol distribution) that seemed like a logical step from bartending. I mean, I had to complete a 90 minute harassment training from HR, so this is a real job, right? Enter, being a draft quality technician, aka. beer line cleaner.
The Job
Pros: The hiring process was quick and relatively straightforward, management is relatively relaxed and hands-off so long as you do your job, and in 10 weeks with the company I’ve lost 25lbs (and wasn’t obese to start with, but was getting closer to that than I was happy with). Weekends off are nice, and I’m finally catching up on the backlog of stuff I have to do at home (My car is now fixed and has a radio installed that had been sitting in the closet for 6 months, the roommate’s car has a new fender installed, my apartment is passably clean, etc. Now I just need to get moving on getting my inoperative vehicles running so I can sell them.).
Things that annoy me about the job: The company phone and carrier get worse reception than my T-mobile ghetto android (and now every time I hear an iphone notification I think I’m getting a message from my boss) and the company app we use for logging tasks is glitchy and has to be babysat to make sure it doesn’t miss a stop that you actually cleaned. Bad cooler and line management are as rampant in food and beverage as bad cable management is in IT and there are few things as fun as wrestling the coupler off a keg in a tight space that was installed by a barback with the grip of Thor showing off his gains at the gym, having to move a bunch of produce stacked on the kegs, or coolers so nasty that I gag every time I walk in them (Thankfully the latter is rare.). The job is not technically challenging (If you can change your own oil, you can do this.), but it is boring, tedious, and heavy on details. The equipment we have to carry is heavy and unwieldy (~100lbs if my water and chemical tanks are full; you quickly learn to fill them all the way only when necessary to save your back) and the line cleaner is a lye-based caustic that makes gloves mandatory and will burn thin skin if not quickly neutralized by dumping beer on it.
Route management is the actual challenge of this job (Much of the technical stuff I thought I would be doing was omitted from my job title, training above what it takes to clean the lines was minimal, and I don’t carry anything more than a coupler and faucet, so even if I were to correctly diagnose a problem in a system I probably can’t fix it, and not being able to fix things drives me nuts.). In theory there’s a fair amount of flexibility as to which stop you hit when, but in reality you’re very much captive to time windows (Big places need to be done before 11AM as a rule, some spots have narrow time windows, and I have four days every two week cycle that involve driving an hour or more out of town because the local area doesn’t have enough taps to make a full route.) such that the workload is uneven (Some days are a cakewalk and others an ugly grind that leave me beaten down by the end of the shift.) and it’s hard to switch from racing the clock (In particular, I have one heavy day where I I could get one of my first three stops to show up before 8AM it would be easy, but that isn’t the case so I’m always behind on that day.) and feeling like you’re always 30-60 minutes behind to needing to slow-walk it and milk the clock for hours just to get 40 a week.
I don’t like this job, but the real dealbreaker is the pay. It’s $17/hr plus a $2/hr bonus for completing 100% of the route, and vehicle compensation that was supposed to be $500/month plus a mileage reimbursement that covers fuel (This sounded pretty generous so I asked several times about it during the hiring process. On the other hand the position used to come with company cars for everyone and $500/month is presumably less than what they would spend to lease and insure a car, so I believed it.) but is actually “in the neighborhood of $500/month” with fixed compensation plus mileage. The difference is about $200/month and I’m driving about 1800 miles a month for this job so much of that is eaten up in gas, let alone tires, commercial insurance, etc. The completion bonus should be consistently achievable moving forward but is easy to miss (I got docked last cycle because of places that were closed on Memorial Day in spite of taking pictures of closed signs and apping them as instructed in the meeting the week before. I was the only new guy at the meeting so I guess it was just taken for granted that I would know that I needed to make them up later, in which case I don’t see the point of taking pictures.). Before being hired I was told that they don’t care about overtime (and every other hourly job I’ve worked since college meant 45-50 hours a week, not 40). Welp, turns out they initiated an overtime crackdown and that if you get more than either 42 or 44 (I don’t recall which.) hours in a week you’re ineligible for the bonus. Including the fact that company policy is to clock out an hour after you left home and an hour before you get home on out of town days (which makes for 7 hours of unpaid driving every two weeks) and I’m struggling to hit 40 hours a week. I can’t afford the health insurance anyway, but it’s of the malicious compliance variety with a carrier that has no network in my local area in addition to being vastly more expensive than what I had through Obamacare. Adding to the suck factor, from what I’ve learned the jobs within the company I could gun for getting promoted into don’t pay much better than my current position (I’d get a company car, but that doesn’t pay my other bills and leveraging my mechanical skills to run a car cheap is something I’ve been doing for over 10 years at this point so I’d prefer even the mediocre vehicle reimbursement I’m getting.)
In short, adjusted for inflation this is worse money than I made delivering pizza for Papa John’s in the early 2010s (and my rent is twice what it was then), and dinner shifts at University to Go have been a bust because it’s the slowest part of the year in addition to the usual issues with them dying. I’ve picked up a few bartending shifts (As weird as it sounds, right as I put in my notice something “clicked” and I don’t hate bartending as much. I’ll never have the passion, but I play a character and it works well enough.). I’ve cut pretty much all of the lifestyle inflation fat I can cut, and I’m still going to be broke. I’m not going to starve, and if I have to tough this job out for a while I can, but I feel tired, defeated and like all the enormity of the mistakes I’ve made in my adult life are hitting me at once. I feel poor, afraid, and frankly angry and resentful. I’ve made my peace with the fact that this job isn’t going to work, have my backup plan in place (Go back to my old jobs; with my reduced expenses I can start getting ahead again and I think I can squeeze one last school year out of University to Go.) and am looking for better work (I have precious few friends who aren’t stuck in the service industry, but one I’ve helped in the past recommended a manufacturing plant and told me to use him as a reference to get over the “we want plant experience” hump.). It’s one thing to work a dead end job if it pays well (University to Go) or is stupid easy (barbacking and later bartending at the place I was a regular at and was probably going to be at that night anyway), and a different story for a rough grind with benefits that are worse than what I already had. I’m going to break my supervisor’s heart when I quit, but I’m trying to quit being a codependent/martyr in my personal life and damned sure can’t afford to do it with a job (because I have to pay for doing it in my personal life).
The Roommate
Continuing on the previous monster comment, by 2021 I wound up with two non-paying roommates. The first (and subject of this comment) is flat out my fault. I made a drunken promise to move in with this guy (and replace the last sucker that was letting him live more or less for free), felt bound by honor to do so in spite of knowing that it was a terrible idea, and did so. He’s not an awful roommate (lazy and useless, sure, but not all that difficult or disruptive aside from his annoying chihuahua that isn’t housebroken), but the place I moved into was as close to a third world slum as you’re going to find in an American metro area, complete with idiot upstairs neighbors doing laundry in the bathtub upstairs and leaking water everywhere (causing water to leak in and eventually collapse my bathroom ceiling, which took ages to get the slumlord to half-assedly repair), a junkie adjacent neighbor with the nastiest, most roach infested apartment I’ve ever seen (which meant that we all had an unkillable roach infestation), zero sound insulation or insulation at all (This made for obscene electric bills during the winter and I was still cold.), and everything was just so old and rundown that it was impossible to clean/keep clean; even the air perpetually felt dirty and humid (probably because of all the mold and because it was located in a swampy area; I suspect that the whole place and surrounding roachboxes have only been spared from demolition because the owner would have to spend a considerable sum improving the ground before constructing the three over ones favored by developers here), and a non-functioning stove. But hey, at $400/month for a two bedroom in a fairly nice neighborhood close to campus you get what you pay for, and I didn’t spend enough. I left and kept paying the rent rather than keep living there, the roommate inherited some money and paid me for a year up front, and all was fine until that money ran out, at which point I didn’t have the heart to kick him out because he makes basically zero income and has nowhere else to go (His parents are gone, he has no siblings, etc.). It was easier to eat the rent and utilities than to provoke the drama storm that kicking him out would be.
The second roommate (another friend of mine; I’ll never entangle myself financially with a friend again) had just broken up with her boyfriend, I got her a job at University to Go (She really was good and made the most money she’d ever made in her life doing it, but just couldn’t make herself wake up on time and show up when she said she would such that she burned the bridge with dispatch.), and for the first few months she paid her share and everything was great even though the apartment we moved into was a bit spendy for my tastes at the time ($900/month when I’d never paid more than $475 in my life. Three years later, that now $950/month is actually a pretty nice deal relative to what’s out there now such that it isn’t worth the costs of moving to downgrade.) until she just quit working/paying. I was already stuck with the lease so I just dealt with it and let her run up a tab that’s now over $10K in back rent that I’ll never get because she’ll never have it unless she wins the lottery. She did eventually find herself a rich boyfriend (a screwup/slacker whose daddy owns a coal mine) and moved in with him, so it was relatively low effort to kick her out, and now that the lease is ending at the shithole I moved roommate number one into my current place (As annoying as he may be, the marginal cost of moving him into an empty room is basically zero, vastly cheaper than paying for him to live in a shithole and have to hear about it every time something breaks.), so enter the current situation:
Last time I mentioned that he was in bad health (morbidly obese, congestive heart failure, takes more pills than your average 80 year old, etc.) and it hasn’t gotten any better. For reasons I don’t understand he was denied for disability, but the heart failure is probably sufficiently advanced (a high-end stage 2 to low-end stage 3 I would guess) that he really should be getting it (and food stamps, etc.). His condition is his fault (You can be 400lbs or a cocaine addict, but both are not sustainable, and his CHF would be vastly less problematic if he were a compliant patient and heaven forbid drop some weight. I have 70+ year old relatives with CHF, big people at that and one also suffers from COPD, who get around better than he does.), and at times its hard to tell malingering (wearing a fucking CPAP while awake watching TV; for fuck’s sake the oxygen concentrator, aka. smoker machine that he got during covid is less noisy/creepy and if he really can’t breathe sitting still in his gigantic recliner that takes up a third of my living room then he should start looking for nursing homes or call his drug dealers and beg for the strongest hit of fent that they have. Curiously, he doesn’t need that stuff when sitting on a barstool.), but he really is fucked and while I get mad when I see pizza boxes pile up by the trashcan (I guess he makes enough bumming off other friends/selling off his Xannies and whatnot that he can afford fast food and his phone bill.) I don’t have an answer.
My apartment is on the second floor and itself is a two story unit so the stairs (which mutual friends have told me that he bitches about incessantly) may correct this issue in a short time. Either he’ll get fed up and find another friend to crash with or that aortic aneurysm will blow up, he’ll be dead in 30 seconds, and he’ll finally get his wish (I’ve heard more than I care to about his suicidal ideation.). He’s recently developed a mysterious gout-like (but not gout; he has that too and this is allegedly different, some variety of autoimmune disorder he thinks/claims) illness in his knees that renders him nearly bedridden (or, more properly, recliner-ridden; the bedrooms are upstairs). At the rate he’s going he’s going to be immobile soon (One would think that watching his dad die 500lbs and bedridden would dissuade him from following the same path, but I guess not.) and if that happens I swear that I’m gonna call adult protective services or whatever and have him tossed into a nursing home before he can blink because I’m not a nurse and don’t plan on becoming one. I have the local social worker who deals with that stuff’s number saved in my phone.
The only thing I’ll say in my defense (and I really should be defending myself for being so spineless/conflict averse that I let these situations fester, even though the truth is that I don’t have a good enough excuse) is that I don’t hate him; I hate the situation but it can be hard not to conflate the two. I want to toss his stupid fucking yap dog (He does the fake “service dog” thing with it at that.) that he carries to bars to curry attention from women into a woodchipper/off the balcony (I promise that I won’t actually do that because in fact I’m touchy about animal cruelty.) but it’s not the dog’s fault that it was raised by a shitty owner. I swear that he was a much less shitty friend before the heart failure (why I feel obligated to help him, and I’m not the only one) and I remember the man he used to be (a fuckup self-sabotaging train wreck, but he at least worked and would drop anything to help a friend).
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