The Chocolate World Job

My mental struggles have once again cost me the chance at a job. It likely would not have been a great job, but it would have provided us with some much-needed additional income.

Exhausting all job possibilities in the Lebanon, Pennsylvania area, I expanded my search to Hershey, including Hersheypark. The Hershey area has an abundance of retail, so much more than Lebanon, so I had hoped that I could find a manager job somewhere. I cannot say I want to be a corporate retail manager again, but we need to pay bills and I would like to prepare to take the next steps with my own business, which requires money.

I had no intention of finding a job with Hersheypark but looked at the listings for The Hershey Company for the added features of Zoo America and Chocolate World. Chocolate World was in need of an area supervisor, starting at $17 an hour, based on experience. I debated it for a day and considered the idea of someday moving to Hershey, a much nicer area than all of Lebanon County. We had talked about this idea before, but Hershey is an expensive place, and we seem to be stuck in Lebanon. I briefly looked at housing costs and was not happy with the results. Despite this discovery, I applied anyway, a little excited about the idea to work in a place filled with candy and toys.

A woman from human resources called me a couple of days later to ask me a few questions and set up an interview. She was an impolite woman who reminded me of human resources at the bank where I briefly worked: old-fashioned, judgmental, and lacking in people skills. She asked to which position I applied, and I responded with “it was an area supervisor,” unable to remember the exact wording of the long job title. I apply to so many positions that it is nearly impossible to remember the exact job titles that go with which company. She said “we don’t have an area supervisor” with an attitude before asking if it was a retail position, as if I knew that they had other management openings within Chocolate World.

She then asked why I thought I was qualified for the position and I started to talk about my management experience. She rudely told me I needed to slow down, expecting me to know that she was typing what I was saying. As the brief conversation went on, I started to get a gut feeling about the job and the company. I am not the type to make decisions based on my “gut,” preferring to use reasoning and logic to make a choice. However, my gut was starting to feel off about the entire situation. I set up the interview for a Wednesday and our phone conversation ended.

Tuesday night, I struggled with sleep, uneasy about the job interview. I don’t typically get nervous when it comes to job interviews, especially not after conducting so many myself as a hiring manager. Between the phone conversation with the terrible human resources woman and the forty-minute drive to Chocolate World, I was starting to have doubts this was a good idea. Before I applied, I had checked the distance and Google said it was about a thirty-minute drive. That must have been during slow traffic because when I checked it after the phone call, it had bumped up another ten minutes.

A lot of people will say that forty minutes is not a long drive. Even my husband says that. But forty minutes is a long drive when you have travel anxiety and are unable to drive due to medical issues. My husband would take me there and back, but I was not liking the long commute. Sometimes I struggle just to go across town in a car, or even to the grocery store and back. This would be much farther and it would be five days a week, forty minutes to and forty minutes back. Someone would have to drive me to and from every day, and though the idea of working around candy, being a manager again, and making a decent wage was tempting, my anxiety about being in a car for so long was starting to get the best of me.

I got maybe five hours of sleep that night, making my anxiety worse in the morning. I forced myself to get up and get ready, only it did not work as planned. My brain was not going to allow me to go to the interview, my anxiety overtaking me and sending me into a mild panic attack. I lay on my bed, crying, knowing that I was unable to do something so simple as go to a job interview less than an hour away. My husband tried to calm me, but nothing will work when my anxiety takes over — I just have to wait for it to go away.

I didn’t call to cancel or to tell them I was no longer interested. I just lay on my bed and told myself that I did not HAVE to go. I fell asleep then and slept for maybe a half hour, feeling a little better after I was able to accept that I was not going and nothing bad would happen. My responsible personality fought my unwillingness to go, and again when I decided to not call to cancel. People did that to me all the time when I was a store manager, so I told myself it really is not that big of a deal. And even if it was, I needed to take care of myself more than anything.

I do not feel guilty about the entire situation, and now I know that I cannot manage a long commute, even if the job sounds like something I would like. This anxiety was a big part of my decision to leave my job as a store manager of a Joann Fabric and Craft store, but I will tell that story another day.

The job search continues.

Originally published on the author’s blog, Chicken Soup with Rice.