Managers and family.

My husband did well as a restaurant general manager; his district manager liked his work. My husband had gone to district gatherings a couple times a year. He told me his district manager had bought everyone drinks on the last night there, including Pepsi for my husband. The district manager had my husband include the cost of drinks in his restaurant expenses, which the district manager approved. I think the district manager thought it was funny to hide the party expenses in the reports of a manager who didn’t drink alcohol.

When the district manager moved to another position, he encouraged Shawn to consider moving up to district manager. This position covered several restaurants over a large area of Ohio. Being a district manager entailed a lot of travel. It meant time away from the family. I didn’t say no; I asked my husband to consider what the effects on our family would be. We had made a point of continuing to date each other as often as we could get babysitters, ideally every week. Our four children were elementary age and preschool. Our eldest son was in Cub Scouts; there were father-son camp outs. Homeschooling took most of my time and energy, including setting up and running group activities.

My husband gave it a lot of thought. We discussed pros and cons. I had joked for years that I married my husband because I wanted to spend time with him, and then we spent most of our waking hours apart. He decided he wanted to be more involved in our family. He was already salaried instead of hourly, so working more hours did not increase income. But a restaurant manager has to cover shifts for people who don’t show up, and has to be available all the time to deal with problems. It’s akin to babysitting, in that the employees average young and volatile; the environment is urgently time-sensitive, with the illusion of making great food easy to get. The logical next step up would be either restaurant ownership or higher management within a restaurant company. Neither appealed to him.

So he turned to further education: an MBA, Masters of Business Administration. He gave me a couple reasons for this. He harked back to the public school of his youth, how he wanted to become a teacher. He said he had worked with good managers and with bad managers. He wanted to increase the number of good managers.