Three days later, I was eight hundred miles away, back in school and sitting in the front row of the classroom. A year later, Amy Joy and I were married aboard a ferryboat crossing the San Francisco Bay.
Then, while I was studying for a semester in Amsterdam, we were enchanted by that city’s many bikes and ferries and progressive attitudes. In all my years of trying to find a place to settle in the United States, it’d never dawned on me that what I was looking for lay beyond its borders. We decided to stay forever.
Gaining my Irish citizenship made it legal for me—as a European Union citizen—to remain indefinitely. But now my education was rather useless. Any employer who needed a transportation planner or cyclist/pedestrian/transit-rider advocate would obviously hire someone who spoke fluent Dutch before they’d hire me. Simply put, getting a desk-sitting job in Amsterdam was out of the question.
Amy Joy was living in the country and supporting us (as a nanny) illegally. In order for her to gain a residency permit and to be able to get legal employment (all via my Irish citizenship), I had to have an income. So I signed up as a job seeker at the government-run employment office.
Reading the descriptions of the hundreds of available jobs was even worse than when I was sixteen years old reading the “Help Wanted” classifieds in the newspaper. I still had no experience and no skills for any of the listed positions. Worse, my Dutch didn’t exactly wow people. No jobs were to be had.
The situation became desperate. We couldn’t last much longer on Amy Joy’s under-the-table wage. If I didn’t find a job soon, our European adventure would be over and we’d be back in the United States, where I’d not only still face the job-finding quandary, but I’d also be racked with the old predicament of where to live.
Going to the employment office and coming away empty-handed every day was a mess of stress. It got harder and harder to walk into the apartment and report to Amy Joy that I was still unemployed. My new role as breadwinner wasn’t going well. I cursed myself for never having learned a trade when I was younger. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. After all, I had been a Dish Master.
Dishing, I thought. There was always dishwashing.
I made up a batch of flyers that touted my qualifications and handed them out in restaurants around town. Many boss-types told me they had no openings. Others said they’d hang on to the flyer. One remarked that the flyer was “cute.” Whatever the case, no one showed the slightest interest in hiring me.
Then, after several days—and dozens of restaurants—without any luck, someone finally set me straight.
In an Australian-themed restaurant, the kitchen manager told me that even if he had a dishwasher opening, he wouldn’t hire me.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because even if you are the world’s greatest dishwasher—as your little note claims—I simply can’t afford you.”
“I’m not asking for much,” I protested.
“Look,” he said, “it’s safe to say you’re older than twenty-three, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and then some.”
“Then according to Dutch law, I’d have to pay you the full minimum wage. But if I hire a sixteen-year-old to wash the dishes, I pay him a minimum wage that’s half yours.”
I nodded while he explained the “graduated minimum wage,” how it increased with an employee’s age until topping out at twenty-three.
“All I need is my dishes washed and—no offense—I don’t really need the world’s greatest to do it when I can get any teenager to do it for cheaper.”
My nodding slowed as I absorbed what he was saying.
“And you’ll hear the same story from every restaurant owner in this city.”
So it’d come to this. Not only was I not qualified to do anything else, but the one thing I could do, I was now overqualified for.
In the city where many Americans go to indulge in their vices like pot-smoking and legalized prostitution, I found myself cut off from my own vice, cold turkey.