This is gonna be a long read, and I’m not even sure if this is the right place to post it, so thanks in advance if you take the time.
I spent almost 20 years, basically my entire adult life, working for one of those national chain style pizzerias. I worked my way up from just answering phones, to delivering, assistant management, and eventually to general manager. Along the way, I learned the technical aspects of the job (Making pizzas, handling inventory, working with and for my crew) and the practical aspects (Putting up with coworkers you can’t stand because you need the bodies, overlooking the horror stories that come from other stores, finding creative ways around your owner asking [read: telling] you to do something super shady.) but I never really learned how to budget myself as a person so that I had the time to enjoy all the stuff I was supposed to be doing this for.
Once I became and manager, I easily cleared 60-75 hours a week. I slept little. I missed important things like my kiddo’s school events, or my friend’s social stuff. My body got slowly turned into swiss cheese by how surprisingly physically punishing running a pizza place can be. My partner and I rarely did anything other than watch a little tv together before my brain turned into jittery sludge. All of the people that I used to be close to kinda drifted away from me. Like, we’re still *friends*, and we see each other every once and a while and we’ll chat and cut up some, but none of it really feels meaningful anymore. And I feel like that’s on me, because I put my job ahead of the things in life that made me happy.
Except…
Except putting that job ahead didn’t get me or my family ANYWHERE. We were living off just my income as a manager (My partner has had a troubled time with some chronic illnesses. It’s made holding down a job difficult, and the medical bills are major income suckers.), and always still seemed to be just one bad month away from disaster. Every new pay increase I fought for seemed to come bundled up with a new set of stuff that needed money devoted to it. I kept taking on more responsibilities and stress and it never felt like the reward was worth it. But I kept going because we all need to eat, and because during one of the occasional franchisee changes I wound up with a boss that mostly seemed to be on the level. He talked to me like I was a person, and listened to me when I gave my opinions are day to day operations, or whether I thought it was safe to deliver in a hurricane, or whatever other bullshit my old frannies would talk over me about. For a little while, I at least felt like I was being heard.
And then… He sold the store to somebody else.
It did not take me long to realize this guy was as shady as a palm tree. The very first meeting that we had between the local managers from stores being sold and our new owner, he assured us that nothing was going to change. Pay rates were going to stay the same, bonuses were going to stay they same, or get better, he said in a lazy drone that I *think* he meant to sound laid back and chill, but really just sounded like he was disinterested in talking to the rank and file. About a week later he removed our ability to track P&L sheets. “Don’t worry guys, I’ll handle that for you.” No thanks, my dude, I want to be able to see how the money is coming in and shaking out so I can properly make decisions on how to run my store, and to see how much money you owe *us*. Soon after that, he started replacing managers with new guys, and those new guys were pointely not shown how the number worked in their stores. They didn’t need to know that, new owner man had them covered, you see.
But I think the thing that truly showed me that I wasn’t in the right place anymore was ServeSafe class day. For those of you who aren’t aware, Servsafe is basically a crash course in food safety that teaches restaurant workers how to give people food without accidentally killing them. You learn what temperatures are safe to store food at, how to properly clean up vomit without giving half your town dysentery, whether or not it’s okay to lick somebody’s food before you give it to them, all that kinda stuff. It’s required in most states that at least one person on site be certified for a restaurant to operate, and that’s usually the general manager for the company I worked for. And, as luck would have it, my certification was expiring the same year that new boss man took over. So, I wind up in this class, with alllllll these new manger types, and our instructor is… A training instructor that was privately hired by new owner. Like, she was a fully bought and loyal member of *his* pizza company, not an independent instructor. And her method of teaching the Servsafe class was to have us all sit around a table and read passages from the textbook like we were in third grade. And the *reason* that this was all she did, was because once the testing began she not only told everybody to keep their books out and use them to answer the questions, but she LITERALLY ANSWERED QUESTIONS IN THE TEST IF ANYBODY COULDN’T DO IT THEMSELVES. She just gave them the answers. To the test where if you don’t legitimately know the material, you could get somebody sick. Or dead.
After that, I kinda deflated. The stores around me started to get worse as the new boss tried to get us to cover up rat and bug infestations, harassment scandals, and who knows what else that I just didn’t hear about. My store started to suffer to, but that’s on me. I was beat the hell up, emotionally and physically. I started slipping. Started to get some unhealthy thoughts bouncing around in my head as I got more and more wore down. My partner took me to a doctor one day after I expressed some pretty self-harmy thoughts, and in the middle of all that they told me that my heart was jackhammering so hard if I didn’t slow down I was gonna have some problems. Which is a weird thing to hear when part of you thinks that might be a best case scenario. But he told me that I had to stop working so much, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to say no to that if I had doctor back up on my side. I cut my hours back and beefed up my management staff (Doc said 40 hours a week, but anybody who’s run a pizza place knows that’s never going to happen.), and tried to find something to latch on to that would make me give a crap about my job and life again. Then, in 2019 and a couple of days before Christmas, the brass stops by my store. I’m in the middle of working 16 hour shift. They tell me that the 50 hours a week I’ve been working is not enough. I tell them that my doc said I had to slow down. They say my store is suffering. I say that my store still has better numbers then any other store in the franchise. They say that doesn’t matter.
I walk. Like, four days before Christmas.
At first, there was a feeling of euphoria like you wouldn’t believe. I didn’t have the car that day, so I was just walking down the street with my stupid little work polo in one hand and my phone in the other while I tell my partner what happened, and it felt AMAZING. I was free. No more covering up health hazards that somebody else made. No more getting screamed at by customers because the coupon they want says “online only” and they want to order it in the store. No more trying to wrestle a several hundred pound cart of food up a busted up ramp that the boss doesn’t want to fix and having an entire row of gaint boxes of cheese fall on my head.
Then: How am I going to pay the rent? How am I going to pay the insurance? How am I going to feed my munchkin?
I had a full on “what have I done?” meltdown. My partner, Chancellor Martok bless her, calmed me down, and we eventually came up with a plan. We moved out of our house, and stayed with a friend for a while, while we both started doing gig work just to keep the bills paid. She really came through in spite of her health issues. We eventually got a much smaller, much cheaper place, and started our own business. (What that is isn’t important, this isn’t an advertisement.) We started putting feet to the streets, and building a list of clients and in way less time than I would have thought possible, we were making enough that neither one of us were picking up Uber Eats orders for $5 a pop. Which is good, because our dedicated little Nissan is doing the best it can on borrowed time. And I got to build a career doing something I cared about, with people I cared about, on terms that I cared about. It’s just the two of us. We started reaching out to friends again, and doing things that were not purely motivated by survival. We weren’t exactly poopin’ on solid gold toilets, but for a while there we weren’t worried about how the phone bill was gonna get paid that month.
‘Course, nothing good lasts forever. We aren’t making enough to be putting money away yet, and the last two months were reeeeeeeaaaaaally slow for and we’re definitely hurting to make ends meet at the moment. My depression hasn’t gone away (I don’t think it ever will), and I took the loss of business really hard. I started doing the kinda panic mode planning that I used to do in the old days, and “useful idiot” my way through a day just to feel like I’m doing something. It did result in a more or less workable website that might get us some more people to serve than word of mouth and knocking on retailer’s doors, though.
Anyway, I think I’ve lost track of where I was going with this. But the POINT of it is that, even as worried as I am about the past couple months, I’d still take this over working for some low grade corporate sleazeball who’s gonna whisper promises he won’t keep in one ear, while trying to convince you to do actual crimes in the other.
I’m not gonna go back.
I can’t go back.
Restaraunt management killed my soul, but breaking out of that mold and building something new with my family is helping to put it back together.
Thank you for reading.