ugh.
Thus far I have only blogged when I had a rare few moments of peace at work. Soon, you will hopefully be virtually PLAGUED with my endless rants (thus, hopefully, you'll get more of the good stuff, too).
After 2 years of failed attempts to earn, scrimp, save, and beg at holidays and birthdays...
First and foremost, I direct your attention to the center ring…
Last Friday I went to work at Blockbuster and was greeted by my shift manager with, "You better call Scott," referring to our district leader. One never likes to be told to call one's superiors – especially the ones a couple steps up on the chain of command. I wasn't too nervous, but a bit perplexed.
I called him up, knowing that despite my unorthodox behavior as the "Active Seller" at the (now only) Royal Oak store, he couldn't say much that was bad about me. I don't adhere strictly to my job description as set forth by company policy and standard operating procedures. I joke, I come in costume, I play my ukulele on the job between customers, I bring in my barbershop quartet on occasion, and generally have as much fun with my job as the management will allow (or at least pretend to ignore). This has turned me into almost some weird kind of local icon in the neighborhood and with our customers. Despite my unusual ways, I've never had a serious customer complaint in my 6 years with Big Blue and I have quite likely the highest sales rate of any individual in the district, perhaps region, even given my meager (until recently) 10 average hours a week.
Apparently, he emparted, a columnist from the Detroit Free Press had caught my "act" after being clued into it from a coworker and wanted to do an article about me and my offbeat ways at Blockbuster! I agreed, gave a call to the Media Relations guy from corporate and got the rundown on what NOT to say (basic stuff like don't talk business trends and corporate policy). I then called the reporter to schedule an interview.
He came by this past Tuesday, watched me do my usual weekend routine on a weekday (for show), and asked me some innocuous questions about why I play that darned thing week after week. The article itself is brief, but good and in its proper context. He left out a few key details I had hoped he'd leave in like a plug for my quartet, mention of my other endeavors, and a quip praising the Blockbuster online program (per my district manager's suggestion), but the picture is nice and big!
You can purchase a copy of it here:
Detroit Free Press Archives: A Few Minutes With a Blockbuster Ukulele Player
A bit of background…
I started at the Clawson Blockbuster, after one of my occasional 2-week bouts of unemployment. Back then (late 90's, pre-kids and mortgage), finding a 'job' was easy. Each new job I took was a little better paying and my stints without one were brief. My friend Anthony, who was the store manager at the Clawson Blockbuster mentioned that he needed an assistant manager, so I figured I'd give it a go. He mentioned good benefits, quoted a decent hourly he'd suggest to the mucky-mucks that I start with, and the free rents were a nice perk, so I took the job.
It was a good job. I've always said the work to pay ratio at Blockbuster was great, even if the pay itself was not. I was well respected as an assistant manager and was often asked to transfer when there was a store in need of some shaping up in that regard. Managing is not my cup o' tea, per cest, but I got to relate to customers, talk movies, watch movies under the pretext of work-related research, and enjoyed most of my time there.
I took a year off after getting a job at Mars Music in the band instrument department. Those of you who know my theater résumé, know that "selling band instruments, AAAND instruction books, AAAnd u-nee-forms" is right up my alley. Deciding I needed to have health insurance with a family, and when that job proved to suck due to poor promotion of the store as a band instrument store as opposed to a drums/guitars/sound equipment store, I went back to BBV.
I continued to manage for a few months, but got tired and burnt-out quickly, as I was also working my new day job as an instrument repair tech and working with a few marching bands in the fall as well. I started to suck at my job and had less enthusiasm for it every day.
I had actually decided to quit when my store manager called me to a little meeting. He confronted me with my lax performance and ennui as of late, and I confessed my intentions. To my only slight surprise, he and the district leader had discussed firing me, but couldn't justify it, as I was the only one keeping their sales goals on track. He suggested the newly created role of "active seller" – someone on the floor during peak shifts whose express purpose is to promote the newest sales priorities and assist customers on the sales floor. No paperwork, no cash handling, no conflict resolution – just customer service. It would mean a bit of a pay cut and being stripped on my management authority and computer access, but would keep my benefits and relegate me solely to my strengths. Bingo.
After a few lulls during a few on my shifts, I asked my manager if I could just run to my car and grab my ukulele when the place was empty (which would happen occasionally even on a weekend night shift). A few regulars would come in while I was dabbling on it and I'd blush a bit, tuck the instrument aside and help them. A few were rather impressed, however.
As I got a bit better and taught myself some more chords, I started teaching myself songs that I felt lent themselves well to the idiom. I started with "Tonight You belong to Me", the duet with Bernadette Peters and Steve Martin in the Jerk. From there, I added a few Monty Python songs, and several other movie-related tunes – pretty soon I had a repertoire and started unabashedly playing them when there were folks IN the store.
It became my gimmick.
When I was transferred to the South Royal Oak store after my home store was unceremoniously closed, I asked if I could do the same there. I was met with a shrug and a, "why not". I serenade fussy kids with "Rainbow Connection" or "You've Got a Friend in Me", sing "Happy Birthday" when I'm clued in to the appropriate situation, and even start learning the songs from film on the in-store trailer tape (hence my ukulele rendition of Abba's "Dancing Queen" mentioned in the article).
It's gone over well with customers, overall. Most smile as they walk in, a few roll their eyes, and now I can't work a shift without a dozen people asking where my uke is if it's not immediately in my hands! I've never been confronted directly with someone who doesn't like my gimmick – only a couple relayed from folks at the register.
So that's the in-depth story BEHIND the story in today's Freep. If you'd like a print copy with a nice big black & white photo of Yours Truly, go check today's (Thursday, Feb 8th, 2007) Detroit Free Press and turn to page 2 of section B.
If you do the web version, leave a comment for the writer! Nice guy and treated me very well, I'd say!
**WARNING!!***
Incredibly whiny blog ahead!
Is there ever a time of the year when I'm NOT incredibly busy?
I just got 5 hours sleep after being up for about 21 hours straight and working for 17½ of them. Money's crazy tight right now, so I'm picking up extra shifts at Blockbuster. I'd pick up extra hours at Custom Music (it pays almost double what I make at Blockbuster), but the place is only open 38 hours a week and I'm already there for pretty much every one of them. So this means that pretty much every day this week, I have virtually every moment booked from top to bottom. I'm working both jobs 3 days this week, and one or the other on 3 other days, giving me about 61 hours this week. Sunday is my only day off, and that will likely be spent on chores.
On top of that, my Barbershop Chorus has its annual show coming up on Feb 23rd & 24th, and as I'm in the front row, have missed several rehearsals through the fall marching band and holiday seasons, and one of the few tenors, I kinda have to be there and catch up on the songs and choreography.
The only respite I get is occasionally in the mornings after dropping Liam at school at 7:30 or so. I head to a Caribou Coffee in Royal Oak until Custom Music opens to sit, organize my planner, and maybe read a few pages of a book. Usually gets me about 1 to 1 ½ hours to either relax and/or think (rarely both, because if I think about things to much recently, I can't relax - I start to panic).
So far, to give you an idea, this is what my life's been like this week:
So far…
Monday:
7am – wake up, shower and get Liam ready for school
7:40am - Drop Liam at school
8am - Head to the coffee shop and read for an hour
9:45am - Work at Custom Music
3pm – Pick Liam up from school
5:30pm - Home for dinner
7pm – Off to Barbershop Chorus rehearsal
10:45pm – pick up some groceries
11:30pm – Arrive home, clean cat box and surrounding piles and refill, mop back room floor and replace papers, tidy living room, empty garbage, clean cat vomit off of stove and sterilize surrounding area
12:30 - make snack, go to bed.
Tuesday:
7am – wake up, shower and get Liam ready for school
7:40am - Drop Liam at school
8am - Head to the coffee shop and read for an hour
9:45am - Work at Custom Music
5:30 – Work at Blockbuster
10:30 – leave work early, as Sonya has been called to a birth
10:45 – Arrive home and do some minor chores
11:15 – go to bed
Wednesday:
10am: Wake up and shower after forgetting to turn on alarm (Sonya got Liam to school on time, thankfully, and I got a little extra sleep! Yay!)
10:20am – get to work late and get crap from annoying coworker
5:40 – get home and help with dinner
7pm – Sonya is called to ANOTHER birth
7:30pm – give kids a bath and ready for bed
7:45pm – Cresta pops by for a visit (Some actual socialization time for me!)
8:15pm – kids in bed (yet awake and whiny for another hour)
10pm – after a nice long conversation and much-needed catching up, Cresta leaves.
10:45 – after making myself a sandwich and a White Russian, I catch up on my e-mails.
11:30 – Sonya gets back, fills me in on the birth, and I go to bed.
Thursday:
7am – wake up, shower and get Liam ready for school
7:40am - Drop Liam at school
8am - Head to the coffee shop and read for an hour. Lou shows up the last 1/2 hour, we catch up a bit and I play Dr. Phil to him about women.
9:45am - Work at Custom Music
5:30 – Work at Blockbuster
Midnight – picked up a few extra hours doing inventory at Blockbuster
4am – home and bed
4:30am – actually fell asleep
Friday (Today):
10am – Wake up and shower after hitting the snooze alarm a few too many times (Sonya agreed to get Liam to school so I could have nearly 6 hour sleep)
10:45am - Sneak out of work (so as not to get docked ANY time) to pick up Liam from school and drop him home after an increasingly rare bad day in class
10:15am – work at Custom Music
5:15pm – run by bank and deposit paychecks, replenishing it from the big Goose-egg the mortgage brought it to
5:30pm – Work at Blockbuster
11:30pm – Home, chores, and plan weekend
12:30am - bed
Saturday:
8am – wake up, shower
9am – All-day rehearsal with the Barbershop Chorus
5pm – Work at Blockbuster
10:30pm – Home..
Sunday:
The kids will hopefully be in Ann Arbor all day with their grandparents, so we can get some cleaning done and maybe even shampoo the carpets like we've wanted to do for months now. Most likely the day will be filed with chores, with a brief diversion to watch the commercials during the Super Bowl. We usually have a few friends over for it, but we're flat broke, so no money for munchies, and the house needs a lot of work before we can have guests (well, maybe Leigh, since she's seen our house at its worst plenty of times). I dunno – we'll see. Don't be surprised to get a call from around 6pm saying, "The game's on in ½ hour! Come over and grab some beer on the way!"
Even my commute time is spent listening to the learning tracks for the chorus songs on my mP3 player in an attempt to get the few remaining notes in my head and wipe the bad habits out before the next rehearsal.
Next week has much the same schedule, without the inventory shift, all-day rehearsal, or Super Bowl. I'd like to say this will have me rolling in money, but Blockbuster pays just over $8/hr, so it doesn't add up quickly, if at all. Usually it's just enough to pay for the insurance premuims for the family on the company health plan. It will, however, help us barely claw out from the financial pit we're in, just before the gravedigger would cover us in the soil of collections litigation.
I'm exhausted, but keep going on pure panic, adrenaline, caffeine, and the hope that it will all calm down eventually. Getting the taxes done early and getting our (hopeful) refund may ease my mind a bit, but it's a band-aid on the problem. It doesn't solve the problem of being over employed, underpaid, immersed in debt and projects to be completed, and financially strung-out.
Realistically, this winter is going to suck, but I have little choice but to do what I have to do to keep the lights on, food on the table, and the heat pumping through our under-insulated house. However, I will maintain my hopeful and optimistic attitude and press on with the knowledge that "this too, shall pass".
Seems there's been a litany of things to blog about the past month, each worthy of a complete entry unto themselves. Problem is, they come and go so quickly and are so numerous, I don't get the chance to sit down and get my thoughts down about them before the next blog-worthy incident occurs...
Those of you that bother to waste your time reading through my overly-verbose, rambling, and often incoherent musings, know that I rarely just jot down a word or two about any given subject. I practically deluge them with similes, anecdotes, details, background, and clever (at least to me) witticisms, turning what could easily be a couple sentences into a novel of epic length...
Oh well, you're the suckers that decide to keep scrolling down your screens!
Anyway, I write more for myself and my posterity. I like my style, my vocabulary, and my subject matter – while not necessarily anyone else's cup of tea – is extremely interesting to me...
But now – ON TO THE BLOG!..
Disclaimer: The following blog is not kind simply because I know he will be reading this (Hi Paulie!), but because these are my honest feeling and thoughts. Yes, I will likely leave out any horrid details about the seething, dark underbelly of his habits and personality, but I won't cloak any negative thoughts in a veil of flowery, backhanded compliments. If my tone seems to disguise a negative perception of him at times, rest assured you're reading too much into it. I have nothing but love and respect for the guy...
I've been voyeuristically following my friend Paulie's life and blogs from a distance for several months now. The first thing you must understand about Paulie is that he is, for all intents and purposes, the incarnation of my inner-child. He and I have a lot in common creatively, perceptively, and spiritually. While we have lead very different lives and upbringings to the point when we met, the only real reasons we are currently different in many ways are due to a combination of several minutely different choices in life paths. I went the way of the hard-working family man, trying like hell to become a positive influence on the world by setting a good example (most of the time), and he the rout of the more free-wheeling bachelor, trying to inspire the world to be free-thinkers and create happiness by fulfilling your own dreams while respecting and encouraging others' dreams as well. We share similar values, tastes, and passions...
Her just gets to have more fun than I do…..
Paulie has always wanted to be a rock star. Well, honestly, who the hell hasn't? Paulie, however, has been striving towards it as long as I have known him. He's played bass in a few working local bands, written songs, and now he's actually working on preparing an album and saving the cash to have it properly fleshed out and produced in a studio...
He's gotten a lot of criticism for it, too. He's 28, gainfully double-employed working as a waiter, living in his parents' attic, and though he has a degree, is not using it (though I know SEVERAL people that can't find a use for their degree other than hanging it over the hole on the wall – but that's another blog entirely). Many (notably several in his own family) view him as a directionless lay-about, sponging off his parents and rapidly going nowhere with his life...
I SORELY contest this conclusion. Within the past year, Paulie has made several very big decisions to change the momentum of his life, while maintaining the (often ignored by many) direction in his life. He's moved back home from a rather poor financial situation in Atlanta, working more, drinking less, exercising, saving money, assessing his priorities with a critical eye, and generally decided to take a pragmatic look at his life without quashing his dreams in the process. You have no idea how much I admire him for that...
So many of us, when in our early twenties, are staring down two paths: dreams and responsibility. Very few are lucky enough to have a career in mind that we actually have a passion for, as opposed to a mere tolerance to do to get by. He has chosen to forge his own path in between the two, working as is necessary, but towards an end he has a passion for. I applaud Paulie for giving power to his dreams, while not sitting on his lazy (and he most certainly is that) ass, not ever giving thought to bettering himself or making his own living...
Recently, while taking one of my twice/thrice weekly self-imposed exiles to the coffee shop to read and chill between dropping Liam at school and heading to work, I got a call from dear 'ol Paulie B.. He said his album's going fine, but he need some work on his vocals and was wondering if I could be his vocal coach...
"Um…ahh.., ME!?"..
Sure, I sing barbershop and have a good music ed. background, but I ain't no friggin' Pavarotti! My solo voice sucks, and I rarely dare more than a drunken Sinatra song at the karaoke bar, all by my lonesome. I cannot be center stage vocally and only thrive as part of an ensemble. However, after thinking it over a bit, I agreed and we set up an evening to meet up...
Over the next several days, I found myself thinking, "what the hell can I teach HIM about vocal technique?!" I started rooting through the exercises I have picked up in barbershop (corny and cheesy, the lot of them ) and found that there were fundamental aspects of them I could use, as well as realizing I'd have little idea what he would want or need to sound like until I heard his songs...
We met on Wednesday night and he played me his stuff, and to my surprise, much of it was just plain great! Not that I was expecting them to be suck-ass garbage, mind you, but I was expecting some decent lyrics with simple melodies, centered around a single note, with very similar chord structure, that MAY have a radio ready track in there somewhere once it was fiddled with enough. ..
He played me his rough "blue prints" with only bass, guitar and his solo vocals, but what I heard in most of them was MOUNDS of potential. Most didn't need much more than percussion to fill them out. I listened to the chord structure and melody lines, and found a subtle complexity to them that was just begging for studio refinement...
Then I listened to his voice….
Paul's like me (or at least me 4 years ago): he has a bright, nasally sound that could cut glass, and while he can hear pitches well and tune a guitar relatively well without mechanical aid, he doesn't have a ton of pitch control in his voice. I sat and though, "Oh my God… I can FIX THIS! I can rebuild him! Better than he was before! Better. Stronger…MORE IN TUNE!" My mind began racing around a million and one fairly simple exercises to shore up his weaknesses. His head must have been a blur, because I was throwing one suggestion after another at him and giving him things to work on for the next week. All of the sudden, I FELT like a good (well, at least adequate) vocal teacher!
He offered me money for the lesson, which I gladly and greedily accepted (though in my heart, reluctantly at first). I wasn't sure going in that I could be of any help, and taking money from a friend for a favor is not something I'm in the habit of doing. Unfortunately, my time is sparse and I need to justify anything that isn't job, family, or household related with money in order to scale my ever-increasing mountain of bills. After our little get-together, though, I didn't feel so guilty. I have ideas that can and will work to get him closer to where he wants to be! I'm still not crazy about taking money to do something I enjoy for a friend who I don't get to see enough anyway, but while I feel a bit guilty for it as a friend, I don't have the added burden of professional guilt as well...
I'm genuinely excited about helping Paulie on this. He's open to ideas, eager to learn, humble about and aware of what he doesn't know, and appreciative of the input he gets. He's got some great songs, and a drive that'll ram through a brick wall...
I can't wait till our next lesson!
