Different types of luck

As a kid, any time I played Monopoly I would go back and forth from Free Parking to Jail, over and over. Extreme highs and extreme lows. We always said if anyone was going to win the lottery in my family, it would be me. Once, as a hanukah present, my brother gave me scratch-offs. I won. Something like $15, that I collected at a gas station.

There are some people who lose their job, spend a couple of months sleeping late, going to the matinee movies, having long lunches, taking vacations, etc., before they get antsy and want to get back to work. So they buy a new interview outfit, send out a slew of resumes, and within three months from when they started their job search in earnest, they are again gainfully employed. Or they temp somewhere, and do such a stellar job that their supervisor finds or creates a position for them. I don't have that kind of luck.

I find pennies in the street. That's my kind of luck. Last week I was talking to Golden Boy about luck, and we realized something. In April of 2009, the thinking was that I would go to Mexico for his wedding, and practically straight from the wedding have to give up and leave San Francisco. Instead, I came home from Mexico, moved in with Wooffers, and less than week after moving had a temp gig. It's now over a year later and I'm still in San Francisco, so maybe I am lucky after all. Guess I just have a different type of luck than what I expected.

I Will Help

I am in the minority in this apartment building. My guess is less than a quarter of the tenants are white here. The landlord treats most tenants like shit. Not me though, because to an unintelligent person, I come across as whip-smart. It takes effort not to yell when I catch him treating other tenants like shit. He gets away with it because a lot of them don't (or barely) speak English.

One interesting thing I noticed about living here is that the non-white tenants are much more friendly than the white ones. They hold doors open. The other day an old black man using a cane moved past me on the stairs to help me haul a laundry cart up the staircase. I felt so guilty letting someone with a handicap do something physical to help me. They always say hello. With eye-contact and everything. They move out of the way on the stairs. If I drop something they rush to pick it up. Last week when I was going into my apartment a little baby going for a walk in the hallway rushed in behind me.

His mother zoomed up and started apologizing to me. I laughed and said it was okay, and waited for the baby to go to her. She was standing right in front of my doorway, looking strangely hesitant, and for a minute I couldn't figure it out. Then I realized - she wouldn't come in because I hadn't invited her. She really thought she couldn't go after her own child? Obviously I encouraged her in, and we exchanged a flurry of "I'm so sorry's" and "Oh it's okay, he's so cute's" while she got him to walk out.

The other day - the one where the heat was out of control - I went to Trader Joe's. I was shopping for myself and a friend who's out of commission. Walking home from the bus stop, sweat was pouring down me as I carried four heavy bags. My friend's little girl had come with me and she was carrying the two lightest bags. For me, they would be light. For her, they were heavy, and we stopped to rest every third of a block or so.

When we were about three blocks from home, a Vietnamese woman came up to us. "Do you live at 123 Willow?" she asked. Surprised, I said yes. She pointed at the girl and explained that she recognized her and also lived there. Then, she took the bags from her and said to me, "I'm going home; I will help." I was so shocked. I was blown away. Who ever does that?

She carried the two bags all the way up to my front door on the second floor. I almost hugged her.

Help When Needed

Recently, a girl I know from high school was complaining about being hot on Facebook. It seemed she had a window air conditioner but was too afraid it would fall out the window if she put it in herself, so she needed help.

I knew for a fact that she has a good relationship with her parents and is often at their house (not too far away from where she lives) doing laundry, sleeping over, having dinner, etc. So I asked if she could ask her dad to come by and help. If my dad lived as close to me as her dad lives to her, I'd ask for exactly that type of help. But she said she couldn't ask, as "my parents still live on Long Island, and I'm in Queens." Um, Valley Stream is like, the last town before you HIT Queens. WTF? But okay.

I felt bad for her though. Because my dad would absolutely come over to help. He's the type who, on the very first warm night in early May, would say that the following weekend he would put air-conditioners in. Now, my parents got central air before my brother and I moved out. My point is, my father would help. I felt bad for this girl that she was so scared of accidentally killing someone that she was sweating her ass off in her oven of an apartment. Because, for whatever reason, she couldn't ask her father to help. Yes, maybe her parents don't have a car (although, everyone living on Long Island has a car). Or maybe her dad only has one arm. Or a bad back.

That's just not the impression I got though. I got the impression she simply could not ask that of them - it is not one of the services they provide. Free use of washing machine? Yes. Hauling ass into Queens to lift something heavy? No.

Then, a different friend broke her foot. She needed to go to a hospital. She happened to be staying at her mother's house (also in Queens, and yes, had she not been broken I would have asked her to go help the high school friend put in her A/C because I'm too far away to do it myself). This friend told me the hospital she was planning to go to the next day. I was not pleased, and made a phone call to find names of better hospitals near her.

When I called her back with these hospitals, she got upset. She was at the mercy of her parents, and they were only willing to take her to this one crappy hospital. I was frustrated and upset. I was angry at her parents. Had my parents still been living in New York I would have asked my own father to go into Queens, fetch my friend, and take her to a good hospital. And you know what? He would totally do that. He's just that kind of person. And my mother would take her to the drugstore to fill whatever prescriptions needed filling and also buy her a lollipop.

In my family when people were so sick or injured that they were immoble, they were given a little bell to ring when they needed something. And everyone in the family checked on you. Multiple times. They brought you things to play with throughout the day and night. Sometimes they just came and kept you company. Once, when I was stuck laying on the floor, waiting for an ambulance, my brother gave me his Gameboy to use. The EMS guys arrived to put me on a body board and I was playing Tetris.

I didn't grow up with a tv in my bedroom, but the couple of times I had long illnesses, one was brought in. I have a very clear memory of waking up in the middle of the night, turning on the black and white tv my father had put on my dresser and watching a movie where Gary Coleman was an angel (strange timing, I know). You knew you were seriously sick when the tv was brought in.

We're not particularly mushy about medical problems. There's very little "Oh, you POOR THING! I feel SO BADLY for you!" But there is a shit-ton of practical help, with a big dose of realistic reassurance. So there's no "You'll be FINE, don't worry!" but there is a lot of "We can deal with whatever the new reality is, because we will research the shit out of it and find the best people to help."

When my friend got angry at me for suggesting alternate hospitals she could ask to be taken to, I was hurt, confused, angry and frustrated. In thinking about it, I realized that she felt frustrated too. Because not only did her trip not turn out the way she'd planned it in her head, but because she couldn't take care of herself, and she's fiercely independent.

I don't care that my friend lashed out at me in anger. I'm angry at her parents though. She didn't get dropped off in front of the emergency room doors. She wasn't made comfortable. One of her parents didn't even ask how everything went when she left the hospital.

Of course everyone is different and has different experiences. But sometimes it takes seeing how people deal with things to realize how huge the differences are. Hearing about my these friends experiences with their parents makes me that much more grateful that my parents could be counted on to help. I hope that I am the kind of person others can count on to help.

East Coast - West Coast Rivals

At 10am this morning I got a call from one of my temp agencies saying they needed someone to do some "legal admin work." To those not in the legal industry, all the non-lawyer jobs probably sound interchangeable, but they're not. A receptionist is not capable of doing a paralegal's job, and a paralegal would be highly insulted to be asked to do a receptionist's job. In New York, there are legal secretaries who work for judges, but there's also a job called "judge's secretary" and those people are required to be lawyers. Confusing, I know.

You can understand now why I asked the agency guy for clarification. I am a rockstar in certain aspects of my job, but most definitely not in others, and I didn't want to set myself up to fail by arriving at a firm and not being able to do what they needed. Somewhat luckily, this particular firm just needed a receptionist (which I haven't done in over a decade, but the real key is not to freak out when ten lines ring at once, and to not drop any calls), so off I went to the Financial District.

I asked the agency guy what the hourly rate would be. He asked what my minimum was that I'll accept. Screw that. So I told him that when his co-worker Tony sends me on jobs my usual pay rate is blah. We'll see what happens - hopefully I'll get more than unemployment pays.

This was an East Coast-based firm. Having now worked on both coasts I can tell you with certainty that West Coast-based firms are better. East Coast firms require more formal dress. No business casual for them, except maybe on Fridays. They're more likely to block websites. Quite frankly, overall the people are less friendly. I will lost all my New York street cred for saying this, but it really doesn't take any extra time to smile and say hello. (All the Southern states just started jumping up and down and waving to me.)

I hand-wrote this blog post while at the job today, around noon. At that point six people had walked by the front desk where I was sitting. One person stood at "my" desk looking over a package that was over-nighted to her and then tried to hand me an empty UPS box to throw away. Another asked if there was a pad of paper at the desk, but didn't greet me or introduce herself. The next three completely ignored me, not even making eye contact. The sixth actually introduced herself.

By the way, I was sitting at the desk of a woman who has been at this firm well over a decade. I can tell, because there is a three-foot lace doily laid across the desk, with various trinkets on it that involve teddy bears and angels. Not to mention the jar (the cover of which has a 3-D farm on it) of obligatory old lady candy.

By the end of the day the most shocking thing to happen was when the guy training me won the award for Least Politically Correct Person In San Francisco. First, he referred to the lawyer who handles immigration law as "the Korean." Then, he told me the receptionist was useless. I was so shocked that I said, "What?!" and he clarified that she has cerebral palsy and her right arm is completely useless. Oh. My.

The thing that struck me as especially weird is that you want to think that someone who would say such things is mean. Like grumpy and cruel all the time or whatever. But this guy was very nice to me (of course I'm white, like he was, and am not handicapped). People are so strange.