Working in Tennessee

Before we were married and moved to Tennessee I had sent my resume out for several jobs I looked up online in the Knoxville newspaper. I had gotten one call back and that was from a temp agency, so I was kind of worried when we went out there. Well on the last day of what should have our honeymoon we were just chilling because I hadn't felt well enough to go to the cabin I got a call for an interview. The next Monday I went out and interviewed at an apartment complex that was doing renovations and they needed someone to oversee the renovations so the regional manager that was doing that could go back to doing regional managering things.

I was hired that day and started the next week. The regional manager ended up doing most of the overseeing because they kept changing their minds about how they were going to do things and what they were going to do. I ended up doing the paperwork for the accounts payable for the renovations and for the regular day to day goings on of the running apartments.

Then a nearby apartment complex that was run by the same company had their manager go out on maternity leave. I had like 3 days training and they had me manage the place for the summer. Fortunately I never had to evict anyone, because they never taught me how to that. On my last week there the regional manager (she had finally figured out what she was doing renovation wise and had hired another lady to run the renovations), and the vice president of the company came by to see how things were going at the complex I was managing. I showed them around the complex, I only had one vacancy and someone was moving in the next week, and I only had three late rent payers, and I knew them by name and apartment number and when they planned on paying. The vice president was so impressed that he told me if I ever wanted to he would find me a permanent managing job. I felt pretty good about that.

When the manager came back I only had a couple of weeks left until we left for Utah again. The managing company had a third complex in the area whose manager had left and had not been sending in the bills to be processed and paid. I spent the next couple of weeks there teaching the new manager how to deal with the accounts payable paperwork and trying to catch her up on the piles of bills laying around.

Brian had a harder time finding a job. He couldn't start work until about 10:00 because he was taking a calculus class in the morning. He also had to stay close to either where I was working or to where we were living because we only had one car. He eventually found a job at Kneaders. The good part was we could get decent food at 1/2 price and sometimes he would bring home something left over from the bakery (not very often though because they donated the leftover food), the crappy part was a lot of the time he didn't start work until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon, and I got off work at 5:00. He would work until 10:00 or 11:00 at night and sometimes I would fall asleep outside Kneaders in the car waiting for him to get off. He had a lot of lonely days and I had a lot of lonely nights because of the opposite working schedules.

Brian once had to help a secret shopper. When he got the report back he found that he got a perfect score. He did a good job for them, but he was happy to get out of food service when we moved back to Utah.