Beth. My last flight of the day, I sat next to Beth. She was on the heavier side, black hair, and giggly. She admitted to me (in confidence?) that she was drunk and always gravitated to he bars in airports. She was probably in her mid to late thirties, single and doubly employed. Her first job was in HR for a municipality of a suburb of Phoenix. Her second job was with Lowes--which went hand in hand with how she spent all her free time as repairing the townhouse she lives in.
She used to work in database management, but hated it. A friend of hers worked there and used to tell her all about it, so she knew the lingo but didn't have a clue about what was actually going on. When her friend left the company, she recommended Beth, and since she didn't have a job at the time, she took it. The first few years she squeaked by with questions like, "How would you go about doing this?" Making it up day by day and slowly learning what to do.
Eventually she go a job consistent with her degree--HR. Beth loves working in HR, despite the bizarre problems that come up: "You were supposed to be out checking meters, but instead you were at home watching television and screwing your neighbor's wife. Now you're being fired, I can't help you, you brought this on yourself." Makes me glad for my job.
Government work doesn't pay well, but the benefits are good. Her second job is at Lowes, where the work is light and enjoyable. I didn't have he heart to tell her I was a Home Depot fan.
Working on her house takes all her spare time--all her discounted supplies and information come from her work at Lowes. Recently when she pulled up the old carpet (blue-green, her sister is an interior decorator and she learned how to see slight color variation while mixing paints at Lowes), she found a fuzzy cylinder embedded lengthwise in the concrete. She pulled it out and identified it as a construction worker's cigarette butt.
She talked the entire flight sans bathroom breaks, but those are the highlights.
No comments:
Post a Comment