Rebecca Mix’s 58-year-old dad, Jeff, lost his job at a hospital a year ago due to COVID-19-related cutbacks. For the past year, he’s spent his time hunting, fishing, and doing countless DIY projects around the house.
With the pandemic receding into the rearview, Jeff, like many of us, was ready to get back to his regular life and that meant finding a new job.
Late-in-life career changes aren’t easy, but Jeff thought that he’d do well working at Costco. He wanted a job where he could work with people face-to-face and he heard the company was good to its employees.
Costco has a people-first culture, pays better than most big-box retail stores, and consistently ranks among the country’s top large companies for employees.
“I want to work on my feet,” Jeff said, according to an article Rebecca wrote for The Guardian. “I want to work somewhere that appreciates me until I can retire. Can you help me apply?”
Rebecca thought that her dad’s career choice was amusing. She made light of it with a tweet and then logged out.
While Rebecca and her boyfriend got to work updating his resume, the tweet went viral. She updated the thread by noting that he was qualified for the job because of his amazing attitude and nacho-cooking abilities.
he is but a constantly cheerful man, extremely good at making nachos, who merely dreams of working for costco.
co… https://t.co/3P13CAvVvF
— rebecca mix would die for ted lasso (@mixbecca)
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The tweet made its way to the desk of Costco’s CEO Craig Jelinek. He reached out to a manager at a Costco location 40 minutes away from Jeff’s house and they contacted Rebecca through Facebook.
via Rebecca Mix / Twitter
“I called my dad, who didn’t answer, texted him a screenshot, and called him again. As someone who only FaceTimes by accident, he didn’t really understand why I was freaking out,” Rebecca recalled. “The sheer ridiculousness of a random tweet making it to the desk of the Costco chief executive mostly escaped him.”
Soon after, Jeff had an interview at Costco and the tweet was never mentioned. They called him for a follow-up interview but Jeff didn’t hear anything for a few weeks.
Then, Rebecca received the most amazing text from her father. A simple “thank you” with a picture of his new work badge.
GUYS. https://t.co/uLpo5av5QF
— rebecca mix would die for ted lasso (@mixbecca)
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Jeff was hired as a part-time employee and things appear to be going well. He told Rebecca he liked his new co-workers and was excited to have a new job working on his feet. One of his coworkers joked, “I wonder when they’re going to hire the Twitter guy?” to which he replied, “I am the Twitter guy.”
For Rebecca and Jeff, the new job is about a lot more than a stable source of income. It’s a jolt of positivity after a difficult time for the family. It was also a welcome break from the usual outrage that happens on Twitter.
“Mostly, after a nightmare year of record unemployment rates and unprecedented grief, it seemed people were just happy to share in a moment of weird, collective joy on a website often aptly described as a cesspool,” Rebecca wrote.