In Which One Job Becomes the Other
I don’t write a lot about my years at the hotel. Maybe it’s having a mindset for so long about not burning bridges, or maybe it’s that my mind has blanked some of my memories from my time working there to protect me from insanity. I enjoyed a lot of the people I worked with, but the job itself was crazy, especially as I carried my responsibilities with such a personal level of attentiveness that I couldn’t let myself “take it easy.” My work ethic and my expectations exceeded my own common sense – a problem that I can’t ever seem to let go of.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to have 80-90 hour weeks at the hotel. That’s not an exaggeration, unfortunately. There were times where I literally only got three or four hours of sleep between the time I got home from work and the time I had to go back in. Thankfully, it wasn’t the norm, but working six days a week or twelve hour shifts were pretty common. It wasn’t unusual for me to be greeted by people as I entered the building with the query: “Don’t you ever go home?”
For the longest time, the joke was that I didn’t. It was a hotel, after all. It wasn’t hard to believe that I had a room somewhere I could sequester myself for a few hours of sleep in between shifts. The “barn” (our audio-visual office) was private enough with few enough holding keys at the time that it was completely believable that we could have a cot set up in there. Frankly, there was a time or two (or a dozen), when I was in “hurry up and wait” mode, awaiting a room with little a/v requirements to finish so I could reset it for early the next morning, where I did grab a quick nap in the office, uncomfortably positioned in the office chairs.
As I entered management, I would find myself covering last minute pop-ups where things weren’t scheduled or the event didn’t justify the cost of bringing in a staff person. I was, after all, a slave of salary. As this became more and more frequent thanks to poor meeting planners, the exchange became something out of Clerks:
“Don’t you ever go home?”
“I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
It’s unfortunate not enough people recognize Kevin Smith’s debut film, since it’s so easily quotable. Still, at least the response was true, if not as clever as most people understood.
Fast forward to present time. I’m arriving at school around 7:30. I usually stay afterwards to prepare my materials and check in with other members of the department. At the beginning of the year, I determined I would stay until 4pm each day in an effort to get more done at the school and less that has to be done at home. Even that’s been unrealistic, as it’s uncommon for me to leave before 4:30. With very little prep time during the day, and an almost constant need to meet with principals, guidance counselors, other teachers, etc, I almost always have things to do once students leave.
On top of that, I was “volunteered” to run a new digital scoreboard our school has installed as part of the ongoing construction. This week was one of two games I said from the get-go I couldn’t participate in, but due to a comedy of errors (or, at least something I’m trying to call a “comedy”), I wound up having to go at the game.
So… get to the school at 7:30am. Leave around 5pm in order to come home and grab a quick bite to eat before getting back to the school before 6:30. As I walked up to the gates to enter the football stadium, what am I greeted with? One of the other teachers, who asks, “Do you ever go home?”
And before I could even think about it, the response came out: “I’m not even supposed to be here today.”
It’s funny because it’s true, but in that brief instant, this school year became something reminiscent of my time at the hotel – an experience that I don’t write much about, either because I don’t want to burn bridges, or because my mind has blanked things out to protect me from insanity. There is one key difference: this time I carry an unparalleled love for what I do, even if it does slowly drive me mad over the next year.
As good, old Norman Bates once said: We all go a little mad sometimes. It worked out well for him, right?