Back Of The House Blues

Job interviews and the slow churning of potentials have been rattling my week with ups and downs that seem as strange as life has been this year.  I had have had at least two people tell me they are now employed or their children are employed at Whole Foods Coddingtown or as I like to call it, The Queen Mary.  For me, along with a certain surly potential co-worker, the universe seems to keep reminding me that life is not easy though I often think it will be.  My naive springboard.

Anyone who knows my story knows that The Queen Mary was being built last summer while I began dreaming of doing something that I love in life.  I watched the photos on the bulletin board at my local corporate monstrosity store and began to twirl in my head thinking of making the oranges and apples into those perfect pyramids.  I have always been someone who has an extreme sense of spacial organization and a great desire to make things look pretty. 

I was one of the first people to apply for The Queen Mary store team and they never gave me the time of day.  They hired young folks out of the depression economy-let us call it what it is-and they gutted the remainder of their four stores of at least 1/3 of the current employees.  They then began hiring at their other four stores.  The rest is a travesty of an entire year spent trying to get an entry level job at Whole Foods.  I will let go of it soon, I promise, I promise, I promise.

Whole food, whole people, whole pack of lies. 

What I really want to write about is the idea of the "back of the house" that holds offices and employee break rooms in retail stores. I had an interview in one of those this week at a department store and it was strange, like a secret door at Disneyland, that is usually rundown with lots of stuff shoved into spaces with old chairs and workers shoes and used cups and food.  It destroys the illusion you might have had about the theatre space that retail presents.  Here is the bright, shiny thing and here is the back of the house where the dream dissolves.  In other words, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" I think this could be applied to hiring policies as well, don't you?

So while I wait for The Sorting Hat's choice to come to fruition, I am going to go look at some art with a friend who is one of my superheroes.  We shall Mini to "the city" and see what Picasso holds for us tomorrow and that may just wash away my back of house blues.