So Rick some questions if you don’t mind:
Not at all.
How did you end up in the Puget Sound area anyway? Last time I heard you were living in Portland and working at Costco.
Back in 2010 when Foster Farms eliminated our MPQA department, my intention was to go work for Costco as food safety auditor. I submitted several resumes to the Bay Area Regional Costco Office. For sixteen months, I was out of work because of the 2008-09 recession lingering effects. Yes, Foster Farms laid me off in the middle of a recession. I finally got a job at a school district and they made me sign a year contract. A week later after accepting the school district job, Costco called me. I told them that I just accepted the school district job and signed a year contract. Costco said to call next year. Next year, turned into another year, and into another year. Not because of Costco, it was because of me.
Now it's 2014, and I'm sitting at my school district job desk. My morbidly obese Food Service Director with only a high school education, is riding my ass. The fat phuck is relentless. He is also bitter because Michelle Obama's 2010 Healthy Hunger-free Kids Act was requiring, on the federal level, that all food service directors needed to be college educated, and fat phuck isn't. He and his ilk try to get a waiver of being "grandfathered" in. He was going back to school and he had not been to school since high school. He was never a good student. This requirement is going to be burden on him.
The federal government could do that because every school cafeteria program is not part of the school district - it's part of the USDA program. One-hundred percent of the funding for school food programs come from the USDA, it's not local money. States manage the funds for the USDA and the funds cannot be commingled with school district funds AT ALL.
Anyway, this was July 2014.
Fat phuck went on a two weeks vacation, and even while he was on vacation he was tasking me. The Sunday before the Monday he was to come back to work, I was just felling lousy. On Monday I called in sick. I went to the doctor to only get a doctor's note to return back to work on Tuesday. During the visit, my blood pressure is really high...like 159/100. I knew exactly what the reason was.
While the doctor was out of the room, I impulsively made a decision. I asked him for a 30 days leave of absence. On July 1st, I just received all of my vacation and sick time for the year and it was all front-loaded into my account as it was for every school district employee on July 1st in Cali as July 1st is the start of Cali's fiscal year.
I used that time to get my house in the Bay Area on the market, sold it, with the intention of moving to either Portland or Houston and settled on Portland because Houston is too red statey and to go work for Costco, as I had heard the only way to Costco Corp was through a warehouse.
So, I sold the house in less than a week, the lady buying my house, bought the furniture as she liked the style and most Realtors thought I had staged the house. It was just how I lived.
Boxed-up the things that I wanted, sold everything else, or just left it in the house for the lady (Hallmark Christmas ornaments for example) shipped 32 boxes via UPS to an apartment that I rented sight unseen in Portland. Arrived with Sammy dawg on September 26, 2014. NWP's son was getting rid of a futon, I went and picked it up. It took me six weeks to get a Costco job at a local warehouse as I was only going to work for Costco. I told them that too. I went there four or five times and kept bugging them.
I was hired on Sunday, November 16, 2014.
While at Costco I kept on the lookout for Corp job postings in my field, none ever did come up. I accepted a "facilities" job at Corp and moved to Puget Sound. I could only afford to live in Tacoma, 41 miles southwest of Corp, because everything north was more than I can afford, and because I literally took a 50% cut in pay to go work for Costco at $11.50/hr in 2014. Today's starting pay is $16.00/hr.
I was making $23.00 an hour at the school district or $46K a year, while the high school educated fat phuck was making $108K - and am the one with the bachelors of science degree in Nutrition. I had the degree and he didn't. He didn't like me because of the degree, and I didn't like him because of his salary - for only a high school education. When I first went to the school district, his staff wasn't even completing food production sheets correctly because no one there knew how to complete them.
I went to Corp on August 1, 2016. Never did get the food safety audit job, but I'm ok with that and with what I am doing now. I'm good with all of it and I'm comfortable and I'm paid very well and have great benefits. For example, Costco provides a public transportation benefit of $90 each month that I use for the vanpool/ferry. Previously, just for the vanpool. I am always the driver of the vanpool because I don't like other people's driving and I can go to work, 20 days a month, for 27.00 each month because the vanpool was $117 per person and Costco pays $90 of it. It's the BEST benefit, in my opinion, because I use it every day. I use medical maybe three times a year and dental twice, and vision once - and those benefits costs me several hundreds of dollars for my portion.
I am in awe of the beauty of the area. I live in Kitsap County which is all hills, a plethora of trees on every square inch of soil - and I am surrounded by lots and lots of water.
Do you miss California at all?
I've been to Cali at least 8 or 10 times since I moved. I am struck by how treeless it is. California is mostly chaparral. When I lived there, I thought it was beautiful, now I think it's barren when I go there. I don't miss Cali at all.
I know you fled California because of lack of water and your timing seems to have been impeccable.
Plus, when I left in 2014, the East Bay's Hayward fault had not slipped in 150 years, and that was in 2014. It had slipped on the average of every 140 years. As of this writing it still has not slipped.
It was the lack of water AND that the Hayward Fault is ready to go is why I left.
...and now you know the rest of the story.
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