How A Blue-Collar Job Is Saving My Life
“Work from home” just wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be
By Kirk Klocke
The short version: Work from home felt lonely and the work itself constantly needed to prove its value to the funding source. Working in-person, on my feet, around other people – most of whom are in some sort of mental health recovery – leaves me with the feeling I’m part of something tangible enough that if I didn’t show up, I’d be sorely missed by coworkers and customers alike. That straightforwardness and lack of any ambiguity about what good performance is plays right into my current need for a simple, stable existence.
The long version:
My parents encouraged hard work since the day I was legally old enough to get a job. So I’m no stranger to manual labor. At 15, I’d put on my white button-down shirt, black pants, and tie and have myself dropped off at Econo Foods, a budget-oriented grocery store that emphasized speed and volume over quality and hospitality. Summer was the time to earn money -- $5.50 per hour to start – and at the time, I felt flush with cash every time I took my $63.55 net pay to the bank. I generated the money out of pushing hundreds of shopping carts from the parking lot out of the hot, humid summer sun and back into the store vestibule, where they’d be snatched up almost as fast as I could return them.
The position demanded physical strength and tolerance of the elements. Between pushing rows of carts, me and my fellow cart boys would help load groceries and 40-pound bags of water softener salt into cars. About once a month, someone would slip me a $1 bill as a tip for the three carts of groceries I loaded into their Suburban. “I can’t really accept tips here,” I’d say, as I slipped the dollar into my apron pocket.
This was sometime around 1999 or 2000 – also around when the cult classic film Office Space, starring Ron Livingston and Jennifer Aniston came out. The late 90’s/early 2000’s were the tail end of the heyday of “go to a good college so you can get a good office job” culture, so the film’s counterculture premise – that one could intentionally shun everything about the office lifestyle in favor of a straightforward trade, trading lower social status for greater happiness – was both outrageous and weirdly captivating. My Econo Foods era self read into the film at the time that the vast, gray cubicle world was filled with mystery, intrigue, and lunchtime romance and excitement. I wasn’t drawn to the office work itself, in fact, I initially didn’t even want to go to college. As I bagged groceries, sold Western Union money transfers and lottery tickets and cigarettes, and lifted salt block after salt block, I yearned for perceived social status and the cushy trimmings I thought might someday come with a cubicle: Leisurely sit-down lunches, red Swingline staplers, playing games when the boss wasn’t looking, and trying to figure out if that cute new intern was single.
I was defiant about taking college entrance exams and applying to colleges. I thought I could skip college and go straight to hitting it big as an award-winning photographer. That first summer after senior year, I tried hard to make a go of things, working up a sweat in the Econo parking lot by day and slaving away in my ad hoc darkroom at night, honing my craft. But the only thing that really came into focus was that working 40 hours a week for $250 take-home pay wasn’t going to propel me into the realm of success and independence that I had dreamed of. And if I were to keep living in the basement at home, my folks insisted that I be enrolled in school.
Life initially forced my hand on the college thing, but I quickly discovered I enjoyed being a liberal arts student. That first year at community college, I made music, writing, photography, and started to curate a life that included my first adult friends. The positive feedback I got from teachers there helped shift my mindset back away from the trades and toward seeking white collar professional success.
I transferred to a university and dug deeper into a communications and writing career path. My ambition to achieve something ‘special’ grew with each passing semester. The validation – that I could succeed as a writer – kept flowing in from all directions. Pride got to my head, as did the rising temperature of an inflated ego. Midway through college, I started to have to use alcohol to calm my racing thoughts. Without some sort of numbing agent on board, my overactive, insecure mind would have me practically jumping out of my own skin.
It was then, when my drinking career started to take off, that my fantasies of becoming a successful reporter and a published author became stronger, yet the likelihood of any of that actually ever happening dimmed with each bottle of Skyy or Absolut.
As what I thought I was got further and further from what I actually was, depression started to set in, and my attempts to feel better via more and more drinking took on a life of their own. I was finding ways to condense my school work into smaller and smaller increments of time so that I could maximize my time at my favorite Grand Forks, North Dakota bars: Whitey’s (of course), the Blue Moose, The UNDerground, Suite 49, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Sanders 1907. Nine times out of ten I’d be sitting at those places by myself.
Back then I was still at the “high functioning” stage of my addiction illness. I could drink til midnight and still be up at 6:30am to go about my day and satisfy my professors at least enough to earn “B’s” and a even a few “A’s”. Some of the side hustles I had to do to hold up my nighttime bar & grill lifestyle affirmed my drive to escape the blue collar working world in favor of being an information-based professional of some sort. My side gigs ranged from mowing campus greens to serving as a medical model at the medical school. One day I volunteered to have 10 prostate exams in a row by 20-somethings who had never done one before on a live person – in exchange for $300. A few weeks later I ran into one of the young women who was in prostate exam class in line at the bank. That was awkward. I donated plasma, washed dishes, wrote articles for the school newspaper, and interned in the university’s medical school public relations office. And probably more I don’t even remember, all just to make minimum payments on my credit cards so I could keep drinking the way I wanted to drink.
Despite the gathering storm of madness, I kept it together enough to graduate cum laude and went on to work in human resources at Disney for a year. Getting to ride a Segway through the tunnels beneath Magic Kingdom Park to deliver my communications creations to the various restaurants and attractions affirmed what my ego wanted me to believe, that I was somehow special and headed for something great.
As I got sicker and sicker with each passing year, my work history got more spotty and hard to explain. The pendulum swung back and forth between really neat professional writing opportunities to crappy restaurant jobs and day labor for several years. One minute I was at sea, live blogging an ocean research voyage en route from Greeland to Woods Hole, Massachusetts; the next minute, unloading mattresses from a moving truck into a new hotel. I desperately wanted to stay aligned with my writing career and get paid to be the smart person I thought I was, but for some reason life was pushing me back into manual labor again and again, and in the thick of it I had no idea how my progressively worsening drinking problem had anything to do with my bad luck.
Getting stuck with crappy jobs that no one else wanted to do further made me glorify and feel entitled to well-paid, information-based remote office work. Entitlement paradoxically made the prospect of a white-collar existence further and further from a sustainable reality. The less I got what I thought I wanted, the more I drank, and and more I drank, the less I got what I thought I wanted. It was a seemingly hopeless downward spiral, in which I was either thinking about ending things for good or trying to run Karkov vodka through a Britta filter to turn it into something more like Schmirnoff (which, as it turns out, doesn’t work btw).
I kept trying to force something in my life that resulted in closed doors, roadblocks, you choose the metaphor – life just wasn’t going to let me become the well-paid, respected writer and producer I thought I deserved to be. Or perhaps more honestly, it wasn’t life putting up roadblocks; it was my own behavior. Self sabotage, over and over again. Each time life opened the door a crack that might have led to creative success, I brought the situation crashing down through series of benders that would leave me unable to work or in some cases, even get out of bed.
My anger kept growing. I saw peers from my graduate school class sail seemingly easily into lucrative careers in media while I remained in my hometown, getting fired from one shitty restaurant cooking job after another.
A shift happened, finally, when life had beaten me down enough that I decided to humble myself to do literally anything for any pay – or no pay – just to get a foot back in the door. I let go of entitlement, something I should have done to begin with, and doors started to open. I volunteered at MPR News, at The Minnesota Orchestra, and KFAI Fresh Air Radio, and new and beautiful things came to pass. The lack of a paycheck didn’t matter so much, because suddenly I started having the people in my life I wanted all along, but never knew how to find.
When these little successes finally added up to a bigger one – my first true fulltime salaried professional job in many years – I again felt validated in a way I thought would lift the veil of depression for good. I went into the situation thinking I could and would make a difference. But within months it became apparent that I was not much more than a glorified assistant, whose opinions and ideas always sidelined in favor of maintaining the status quo, my heart began to sink.
I had the salary, the benefits, the remote work freedom, and the opportunity to use my writing, podcasting, and visual skills, so why wasn’t I happy? The very thing I always thought I wanted seemed like it was making me worse, not better. Each Zoom meeting and each rejected big creative idea wore down the surface of my soul. Eventually I collapsed back into sporadic relapse mode, burning through sick time with a sickness of my own making. I felt guilty and sad when it happened, because projects fell behind and I tested the boss’s patience. One terrifying night, I wrote a long-winded text to my boss’s boss’s personal cell phone telling her how I thought the place should be run and what I really thought about everything. Needless to say, she was not super pleased, and I got to live with another dose of crushing embarrassment.
As a man in recovery from chronic low self esteem, my ego bruises easily, and critical feedback on literally anything felt like a metal baseball bat to my kidneys. I wanted to do great work, executed flawlessly, but my depression and occasionally flare-ups of alcoholism wouldn’t let me.
I had to make a drastic change. I had to fire myself. So I gave my employer 100 days notice – a timeframe I felt would allow them to replace me if they so chose. I didn’t consciously know exactly why I had to go, just that I had to go. It was one of many instances I’ve had in life where I followed an intense gut instinct to do something big and different.
I left the office job of over two years feeling burnt out on remote office work, and just decided to fall back on my backup career, which has always been some sort of food service. So, I applied at one of the top grocery businesses in the region, a high-end retailer with nearly 4,000 employees, 29 stores, and farm-to-shopping basket vertical logistics. They affirmed the were happy to have me, and quickly promoted me into a full-time, leadership training fast track role, where I’m learning all operational aspects of their retail deli, ready-to-eat, and quick service hot food and salad service.
The simplicity of working with food and serving customers who like to eat and cook immediately started helping lift the multi-year depressive episode I had been in. Not entirely unlike the lead guy in Office Space, I took a hit on perceived social status in favor of the joy that comes from providing undeniable value. Not showing up to this job for a day would have a far greater impact on the lives of coworkers and customers than if the same happened at my office job. Knowing I provide in-the-moment value makes me feel valuable, and on top of that I receive consistent praise for my skill and reliability – something I’ve never gotten at any previous job.
It's a classic case of taking a big step back on paper to take a big step forward in my real-world and spiritual life. Life is currently hard, and some days I come home and my whole body hurts, but I feel like I’m living and I’m giving the joy of hospitality to others, something I couldn’t get hunched over a laptop. Now I’m coming up on 90 days sober, and I have to believe that somehow by acting in alignment with what God and the universe would have me do, rather than what my ego would have me do, I’m getting natural (and I think, well-deserved) relief from addiction and other forms of mental and spiritual illness.
Now, I’m not suggesting you quit your 9-5 day job to come fry chicken tenders with me, but if that’s a step you need to take to find enlightenment, you know where to find me.