For several years now I have wanted to work for the Chicago Cubs. They are my beloved team (yes, more than the Packers) and I love all the time I've spent at Wrigley Field, its a great place to watch a game, win or lose.
I had an early morning customer at Starbucks at Broadway/Lawrence who worked in the Crowd Control area and she would tell us stories from yesterday's game about silly drunken fans or general craziness. We, in turn, working in Uptown would share stories with her from the previous day as well and it was a general giggle-fest about how crazy our various jobs were.
Then last year I was talking to her and decided to apply for a position in her department on a part-time basis. However, I applied too late and then moved stores and couldn't ask her to get me in on the DL.
This year I was not going to miss my opportunity to work in the ballpark. I emailed the Cubs a few times in the early new year and eventually got a phone interview for the Crowd Safety position. Now, if you know me at all you know that I HATE phone interviews. I can't decide if I hate them more if I know they are coming (at least I can pre-drink to get relaxed) or if its a spontaneous call and I don't have time to get anxious. More on the phone call parts of stuttering to come in a later post.
So I had the interview and it went well and I was scheduled for a face to face interview at the ballpark. I had that interview in Mike Quade's office (no, he wasn't there. They just use various rooms in the old ballpark as needed) with two senior employees and that went really well. I was very relaxed and barely stuttered at all. They actually offered me a 3rd interview on the spot.
The 3rd interview was a group interview (double-gulp!) in the player's locker room with 10 other applicants. This one went very well too and I was funny and spoke fairly clear throughout the interview as well.
They called me a few days later and offered me the position with Crowd Safety. I was very pumped and excited for the opportunity to attend all the Cubs home games and get a little extra money too! I went in the next week to fill out all the proper tax forms and employment stuff... Before I did all the paperwork and got my uniform I had to sign in at reception. I had a little trouble saying my name (the hardest thing for stutterers to get out is their name, I don't know why) and before I could, a manager came up behind me and said "you must be Kevin." I didn't think anything of it, I suppose it would be important for him to know that a new employee had a stutter, makes sense. But then when I was signing all my paper work I noticed a rather large Post-It on the front of my file that said "SEVERE STUTTER" I sort of made a jab comment that I was famous and thought nothing of it after. But then while I was getting my uniform I noticed that my job description said Parking Attendant and not Crowd Safety like I applied and was hired. I asked the manager guy about it and he got a really worried look in his eyes and took my file and asked me to wait while he went and talked to his supervisor. I noticed that the Post-It was still on the file and was starting to get suspicious.
He came back and said that his boss would like to talk with me to straighten things out. I waited for him for 20 minutes and he called me into a very large office. I could tell he was a big wig in the Cubs. He asked me what the problem was and then explained that the only positions available were for the Parking Attendant and that I couldn't work in Crowd Safety because the spots were full. I asked him why then was I told that I was hired for that position and asked if the sudden change had anything to do with my speech impediment. He got very nervous and fumbled with his words for a minute and then said that of course it wasn't because I was offered a job with the Cubs so it couldn't possibly be because of my stuttering. So I asked him about the fact that I never interviewed for the Parking job and then brought up the Post-It that suddenly wasn't on my file. He looked around for a few seconds and acted like he'd never seen any Post-It and started asking me when I saw it and where. I explained, again, that it was on the cover of my file, 10 minutes ago when he was handed the file from the other manager. He got up and said that he would ask the other people in the office and "get to the bottom of this". After several minutes he came back to the office and said that nobody had seen any Post-It and was sure that the position had nothing to do with my speech. But just to make sure, he was going to talk to my interviewers and then I could come back on Wednesday to talk with him again.
I was MAD, let me tell ya! I've been bullshitted (sp?) about speech and jobs before and gotten the run around about how "we're equal opportunity employers" and your speech has nothing to do with being hired or not... Bullshit!
So on Wed. I came back ready to crack some skulls but actually ended up having a very nice conversation with the two people that interviewed me in the group interview. They assure me that the positions in Crowd Safety were filled at the time of my initial interview and based on my experiences with Starbucks and all, they felt good about offering me a position in the customer service area of Parking and likely moving up to a manager-like role for cash-handling experience. I didn't feel good about the different position but at least it wasn't because of my speech... or so they said. We actually did talk about the speech aspect and I felt good about being offered a job at all.
As it turns out, I couldn't have done either job any way because of my current schedule at work. They were nice about that too and discussed logistics with keeping both jobs but it wouldn't have worked out because you just never know how long a baseball game will last and I would've had to stay the whole time and that wouldn't work with medications or cooking dinner at the current job at NFC. They wished me luck and then said I could come back if I got a different job or a more flexible schedule and wouldn't have to go through the whole interview process again.
I thought this story was about job interviewing at stuttering and not being hired because of my speech impediment but I guess it turns out that it wasn't. The cynical part of me says to stop being naive and just admit that they weren't going to offer the job because of my speech and there's no way they would've still interviewed for a position that was filled.
But I'm not going that route, I feel good about this process and the fact that I was at least offered another job. Its a good start. And like Kristin Lee reminded me, now I can just go to games and not have to yell at drunk fans.
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