Ok, so I’ll admit sometimes I enjoy “Keeping up with the Kardashians” and I even follow some of them on Twitter. Over the past few weeks I have been seeing tweets from Khloe Kardashian about her new radio show on Dallas radio station, Mix 102.9 (a Clear Channel Station) and for some reason every time I see one of these tweets I get super annoyed. Why? I have no idea. I lived in Dallas for several years and all I wanted to do when I lived there was escape so I am not annoyed because of my loyalty to the city of Dallas. I still didn’t know why this bothered me so much until today when I was taking a shower and it dawned on me…
I worked at Clear Channel for five years in Dallas. I did my internship there. I made a lot of friends because of my job at Clear Channel. For five years I worked there part time for $8 an hour while I worked a day job hoping for a full time job to open up for me. A full time job never happened instead my job was eliminated because the station I was working for changed to a Spanish format and I didn’t speak Spanish. Around that same time many of my friend’s jobs were also eliminated and some were even let go and hired back with serious pay cuts. Luckily I had a full time job to fall back on. Even though this happened several years ago many of these people who lost their jobs at Clear Channel are still struggling to make ends meet and to find full time jobs.
Since then I had moved to NYC and a few years later I was laid off from my full time job where I was making $55K a year. I was on unemployment for about a year making $435 per week struggling to make ends meet. I was forced to leave New York City because I after going through my savings I was running out of money to live on. When unemployment ran out I scrambled to find any way to make money. I sold stuff, I was a mascot for children’s birthday parties, I cleaned friends’ houses but none of those things were ever enough to pay the bills so eventually this left me couch surfing at 36 years old, so humiliating. All the while the phone isn’t ringing and I have no job leads to speak of. Finally I had to swallow my pride and ask my family to help me. Now I am living in my Grandparents old house in rural PA trying to pick up the pieces one by one. I am currently working three part time jobs struggling to just pay the utilities and feed me and my dog.
Having three part time jobs doesn’t guarantee you hours or much of anything so it can be very stressful at times especially this week since my hours and many other peoples hours were drastically cut due to three interns taking the hours of part time associates while they are here training for their job working at the corporate office of the retail store where I work. They were recruited right out of college and I hear they are making about $50K while they are doing their internship and will make significantly more once they graduate and officially start working. So now while working my 15 hours and making $8.50 an hour I am expected to help train these kids who are for the most part lazy and constantly have something to complain about. I want to have a good attitude but it is extraordinarily difficult. Why is it difficult because I have the background, talent and experience to do the jobs they were hired to do and no one will give me the time of day?
So back to the Khloe Kardashian thing… it annoys me because she is taking away a potential job from someone like me or a friend of mine who needs that job to pay the bills. She’s famous and doesn’t need to make money to make ends meet and I don’t want to even think about how much money she is making to do her little radio show. I am not trying to hate on others I am just tired of trying keep my head above water and having doors slammed in my face. It makes me feel worthless to work with 20 something year old interns training to do jobs I am absolutely qualified to do. What does a girl have to do to catch a break?
