19 "Have An Otter Hand-Off A Clue" and "The Middle-Aged Lesbian Goes To Car School"
Speaker 1: [00:00:00] So much of my job is just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. And sometimes I'll just go to a breakfast place and be like, hi, I want to send a couple here for breakfast and pay for everything and have you hand off an envelope. And they're like, absolutely not. Like really? Like, okay, fine. And then other times I feel like, hi, can I send a woman here via private helicopter and have an otter hand-off clue? Like, actually. Probably, yes. All of my disasters, for the most part, are just like freak accidents. It's not if something's going to go wrong. It's when. And so at this point now I've gotten very good at realizing, like, this is a really risky gambit we're trying to play here.
So how do we. Right the ship. What's our eject button? What's the rip cord that we pull to make sure they get back on track? Oh, man, I had one. It was a margarita themed adventure. It was very early on in my career. I think it was like adventure number 18. Everybody knew that they would be drinking. The player had gotten a tease, letting her know that she'd be drinking, and the friends that were all in on it knew that they'd be drinking. And the whole crux of it was she had friends that were peppered all throughout San Diego, California. And each friend was at a bar, and she would figure out which bar to go to get to the bar, and then have a margarita with the friend. This was a very busy Saturday, and a bunch of the bars would not let them in because they didn't have their ID, and so I had to rebuild the event as it was going. And it's also the last time I ever involved a location without having them have an intimate knowledge. Right now it's I go to the bar, talk to the manager a week and a half in advance, get the okay, double check everything, make sure it's fine. Talk to the bouncer, tip the bouncer, tip the bartender. Get them all set. But since this was early in my career, it was such a low budget adventure. I didn't have the funds to do all this. So I rebuild the adventure as it's going.
Trying to find bars that I can send them to, ripping open envelopes re wax, sealing them like in the parking lot. It was a disaster on my end. They had a great time. Thanks alcohol and it was just I learned a lot of lessons. It was a very stressful. I do a lot of marriage proposals. I do a lot of decade birthdays. I'll do a lot of days for bored rich people, and I'll do a lot of corporate team builders or promotional things. So essentially people hire me like Puppet Master this day for a loved one, usually where it's one part just sexy, sexy logistics, one part arts and crafts and one part exercise and extreme thoughtfulness. There's always that moment early on, an adventure when you see someone with just like a huge smile on their face when they see a wax sealed envelope in the hand of a statue that's waiting for them, or an actor comes up to set this day off. And I've got now that I've done 114, those little voices are like, this isn't going to be good. Shut up. It's fine. It's going to be great.
They're going to love it. But I do say I'm really lucky to be in a job where it's just about trying to make people happy. You know, my last call I was on with a client teaching him how to basically put together a puzzle using a coffee cup thing because him and his wife are going to fly down to San Diego in May, but we have this whole drip feed of puzzles and actors and little things that drop, you know, every couple weeks or something new. And so she's going to go to a yoga class and she's going to get a coffee cup sleeve with holes cut out of it and like a puzzle to send her to a coffee shop, or she's going to give a password and they're going to give her her favorite cup of coffee and then have the cup with letters written on it. And she uses the sleeve with the holes to figure out what the password is for a hold on……
We're on a podcast, so this visual thing is not going to work at all. But for a cryptex, which is like Da Vinci Code, and then she's going to open the Cryptex and there's going to be plane tickets. And so it's like those fun little things throughout the day. Like my previous job, I just got yelled out of the phones all the time and that wasn't fun. I was an account manager. Basically, my job was I worked for software companies where, you know, the sales person would make the sale and then the client would now be the account manager job. And the account manager job is basically to keep them from canceling, right? Teach them how to use the product, make them happy, etc., etc. but the bottom line was keep it from canceling and it was fine. I wasn't it wasn't very fulfilling. But it was easy enough that I could start this business and do it as a side hustle for two years before jumping full time to now do this all the time. The downside of it is, am I good enough? Are they going to like this game is always such a scary thing. You know the night before in the morning of any adventure and I've now run 114 is always the most terrifying experience because I'm like, they're going to hate this. They're going to hate everything. This is so stupid. Why would they like this? You know, this is awful. And then, of course, they love it. [00:04:44][284.7]
Speaker 2: [00:04:48] Hey, folks. It's Naty. We'll be back with more right after this break. [00:04:52][3.9]
Speaker 3: [00:04:59] What the hell is my job? I'm a social worker by training. I have a master's degree in pastoral ministry. And then when I was 38, I went and got an automotive technology degree, and it was me and a bunch of 18 year old boys, which I could fill. Three podcasts full of stories about that. I envisioned it as a children's book. The middle aged lesbian goes to car school. What the hell is my job? I think of poverty like a giant Jenga game, and it's just very precariously built. And when one piece, the wrong piece gets pulled, the entire thing crumbles. And what I have seen time and again is, for so many folks, that wrong piece is a broken down car that can no longer get them to their job, and then they lose that job, and then they have no money to pay their rent, and then they lose their housing, and then they're living on the streets, and then child protection gets involved and it just becomes this whole downward slide or vice versa. It can be such an important building block and building that tower. You're living in a shelter for homeless folks, and now that you have a car, you have a stable job, then you can rebuild your life. Economically at least. There are certainly metropolitan areas that have really comprehensive public transit systems. Minneapolis, where we are located, is not one of them. I went back to school, to get an automotive tech degree to try to help folks who didn't have money to get their cars fixed. So when the lift started almost 11 years ago, it was just me. I don't fix cars much anymore, but in the beginning I was fixing the cars.
I was raising the money, I was writing the estimates, I was, cleaning the bathroom. I was and now, almost 11 years later, I almost never work on cars. And when I go out to the shop, if I'm, I get called in to work on a car, all the techs tease me and say, oh, we've had to bring in the DTM. We were subletting one bay, one repair bay one day a week. Now we have, a building that we own and it has, five repair bays and some office space and a staff of 15. We've got auto technicians, and then we've got social workers. And the amazing thing is we are all looking in the same direction, which is how do we make not only this person's life, but is right in front of us right now better, but sort of in my bigger vision, the left becomes an essential part of alleviating poverty on a systemic level in our area. The shop part is all trained and experienced auto technicians, and we pride ourselves on low barrier access to working at the left. We don't do background checks, which is a common practice in the US.
I believe that we have to be humans that allow each other some grace. I know we have to protect each other and the organization, but I am confident when I say that we are all so much more than the worst thing we have ever done, and trusting that how people are showing up in my garage today is maybe different than the worst thing they have ever done. And I don't need to know that. We also try to create a very inclusive culture, that isn't always prevalent in, male dominated, auto repair shops. And so we've had women techs, we've had trans techs, we've had folks that just don't necessarily always culturally fit in other garages. And they are attracted here because it is a safe place for them to be. And a couple of my techs are techs who worked in the traditional industry for many years and just got to a point where they didn't like how the industry ran and what they felt like it was doing to their souls. And so to come and do good work, use their talent and their skills and their training to do good work was, a conscious choice that they made. So what I have found is once we hire them, they rarely leave.
My job now is almost exclusively fundraising and administrative. So I do all of the human resources, I do payroll and things like that, making sure we have insurance benefits. I do a lot of public speaking about the lift, a lot of calling to donors. We rely heavily, exclusively on the goodness of others to pay our overhead because the amount we charge customers, it's only about 12% of what it takes to run the place until the rest of it has to be fundraised. So I spend a lot of time doing that now. It's hard to keep raising money. I mean, we have to right now to keep our operation as it is. We have to raise about $1.8 million a year. And that is challenging. And as economies change or presidential campaigns are going on or whatever, it can shift people's giving. So to be able to maintain and build is challenging. How do we raise money to keep this operation going, to think about how we might expand to meet the great need that we see and live with every day? And that's those are the things keeping me up at night right now. [00:09:51][292.8]
Speaker 2: [00:09:52] Hope you liked the episode. Please help us out by rating us, sharing with your friends, or buying us a call. Be at buy me a coffee.com slash. What the hell is my job? It costs us money and time to be here for you at the start of every single week. So please consider supporting us. See you next time. [00:09:52][0.0]
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