My Year of Bliss: the job

February of last year I left yet another meaningless job that I hated going to in the first place. Nothing too special about this one… nothing to write home about… I was managing the office services department of a law firm that practices almost every type of law but an interesting one. I didn’t like the company, the work… well… just call me Sisyphus. About ten months in I realized that my boss, though he talked about it often, was never going to leave. And therefore the position I was hired for and was waiting to fill was not going to be mine after all. Goodbye.

So there I was unemployed. I had one month rent in savings and could wait maybe 3 weeks tops before starting a new job not to mention finding one. I went to all the usual agencies and submitted my resume to all the likely employers, but my heart just wasn’t in it. A line from this song I know kept playing on a loop in my head and it was all I could do just to tune it out during interviews.

“I want to live beyond the modern mentality, where paper is all that we’re really taught to create.”

I didn’t know what I wanted to do except that I didn’t want to be stuck in a soul killing office again, doing endless meaningless paperwork for someone else. I just don’t get it… there are jobs upon jobs upon jobs that exist just so that people can have a job and make money. They don’t enjoy them, they don’t like the work, it makes little to no impact on humanity, and people spend their ENTIRE lives doing them. It is not what I consider living life.

So I started telling my friends this opinion and I looked for some office job that might prove to be the exception… I did not find it. What I found was the best job I have ever and may ever have; courtesy of my friend and chorus conductor Stephanie.

The Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco has been for over thirty years a rock of faith for the gay community. If I were ever to attend another church in my life, it would be this one. It is a unique environment that says we don’t care what you believe, just THAT you believe.

Stephanie told me to apply for the part time position of Program Director, I did, and they hired me on the spot to run their Simply Supper program. My new job was feeding the homeless, the elderly and the destitute twice a week.

We had two programs when I started; Prevention Point needle exchange, at which we gave out bag lunches, sandwiches and soup; and the Simply Supper meal on Friday afternoons that was a gourmet vegetarian meal that even I (a die hard meat fanatic) couldn’t resist devouring. Over the year we branched out and began feeding the AIDS Housing Alliance and The Living Room, a place for homeless gay youth to get care, food and rest. At its height the programs fed over four hundred people a week on just over $2 each.

Then the other shoe dropped.

It cost roughly 40k to run this program each year. They hadn’t gotten more than two grand in grants in as many years, so the entire cost of the program was coming out of the savings account. May 15th was my last day with MCC. After ten and a half hears of service, we hung up the pots and pans and closed the doors. It was a sad experience though necessary to the bigger picture. So now, MCC is doing better and not constantly running in the red, and I am out looking for a new job. I know I won’t find one like this again… I’m just hoping to find something that keeps me interested... After spending years in thankless company jobs it was like breathing in happiness to be able to say "your welcome" four hundred times a week and truly mean it. I dont know how often you come by a job like that...

Shane J Kroll