Nearly a year after he’d been laid off because of Covid, my dad – a jubilant, always-smiling, 58-year-old Michigander best known for befriending everyone he meets – told me he wanted to go back to work.
Specifically, he wanted to work at Costco.
“OK,” I said, thinking: that is weirdly particular. “You’ll need a résumé. And, God, a different email. Not that Yahoo one you’ve had since before I was born.”
“I want to work on my feet,” he told me. “I want to work somewhere that appreciates me until I can retire. Can you help me apply?”
We’d been in Florida for a week, caring for my grandparents, and I’d started waking up at ungodly hours to accompany him on his five-mile morning walk. It had been six years since I’d moved out, and I missed him. Helping him find a job felt like the least I could do.
After a year of unemployment, Dad had hunted, fished, landscaped and DIYed himself to death. He was bored. He had worked all his life – first as a newspaper delivery boy, then a grocery store clerk, an automotive plant supervisor, a janitor and, for the past decade, a materials coordinator for a local hospital, until last April, when the hospital initiated mass layoffs facing a budget deficit from Covid.
There were other places that seemed ideal to him: delivering packages for UPS or FedEx, he reasoned, meant he’d get to move around. But he’d grown up only 15 minutes from our local Costco, and had heard their reputation for treating their employees well. With no college degree and a lifetime of working thankless jobs, a big-box store offering healthcare, paid time off and a decent work culture sounded like the dream.
“OK,” I promised. “We’ll apply tonight.”
And then I opened Twitter. I fired off a few funny tweets explaining my dad had been laid off due to Covid and really, really wanted to work for Costco.
my dad has been laid off due to covid and now that he's vaccinated he's itching to go back to work, so i told him i'd help him with his resume. i asked him where he wants to work, and he said, SO earnestly, "costco seems like a nice place" i'm gonna cry lol
— rebecca mix, proud daughter of a costco employee (@mixbecca) May 6, 2021
In retrospect, I probably should’ve asked my dad if it was all right to tweet his job-hunting status.
I was hoping people would get a kick out of it. At best, maybe someone might have connections to a local store. I added a few more tweets to the thread, fondly joking about needing to fix his resumé, and included a picture of him in all of his Costco-hopefulness.
And then I forgot about it.
Until I logged into Facebook, and had a message request from an unfamiliar name.
A manager of a local Costco had contacted me. The company’s chief executive, Craig Jelinek, had somehow found my dad’s tweets, emailed several Michigan stores, and suggested they bring him in for an interview.
He ran a store 40 minutes away, but, he said, if my dad wanted to work at a different location, he’d be happy to give their store manager a call.
I freaked out.
I called my dad, who didn’t answer, texted him a screenshot, and called him again. As someone who only FaceTimes by accident, he didn’t really understand why I was freaking out. The sheer ridiculousness of a random tweet making it to the desk of the Costco chief executive mostly escaped him.
“Dad,” I said. “This is nuts. They’re going to hire you.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m not sure. But I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
The next day, while jumping between meetings and client work, I refreshed my phone obsessively. When I got a text from my dad, I leapt on it, hoping to hear interview news. He had an interview.
“And do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t put that in a tweet.”
I laughed and promised I wouldn’t.
He called me after, bubbling over with excitement. It’d gone well, he thought. He was impressed by the fact that many of the staff had stayed on for years. He told me – somewhat maddeningly – that he’d avoided the subject of the tweets because he “didn’t want to get into all that” which was Dad-speak for “I am still very confused by that part, so I figured I’d best leave it alone”.
I congratulated him, and in his trademark style, he said: “Well, I might not get the job. But at least I tried.”
They called him in for a second interview, and then we heard nothing. But last Tuesday, a text from my dad popped up from my phone. It was just a picture, and the words: thank you. A picture of his new Costco badge.
He’d been hired part-time, starting in two days. I asked his permission to share on Twitter.
“Sure,” he said. “Not sure why people would care, though. It’s just a job.”
The social media explosion that followed was surprisingly pleasant. Some expressed that their parents had also, after a lifetime of working, found joy in working for big-box stores where they had the freedom to move around and talk to customers. A few hundred informed me the story made them cry. Some asked for his walleye fishing spot. (They’re out of luck, because he won’t even tell me.)
Mostly, after a nightmare year of record unemployment rates and unprecedented grief, it seemed people were just happy to share in a moment of weird, collective joy on a website often aptly described as a cesspool.
During his break on his first day, he called to tell me it had gone well. He liked his co-workers, and was looking forward to having a job working on his feet. The past year has not been a kind one to my family; like many, we didn’t emerge from the pandemic without the loss of loved ones. It’s a gift to have this odd, wonderful, weird spark of joy amid a time of grief and chaos.
It’s extra lovely that it happened to my dad.
Before he went back to work, Dad had one more detail for me. He laughed as he said it. He said towards the end of his first shift, during a tour of the store, a bakery employee had off-handedly mentioned: “I wonder when they’ll hire the Twitter guy.”
To my dad’s utter delight, he got to say: I am the Twitter guy.
from Lifestyle | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3iHCmIA
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