Last week I finished the temp job I had working with our school's literary journal (Gulf Coast - check it out, everybody! The latest issue has a great selection of new poetry and prose [shameless plug]). I have some money in the bank, but if my calculations are correct (and since my calculations are addition and subtraction, they probably are [probably, anyway {I really like the brackets within parentheses thing}]), then I need to make five hundred additional dollars to get through the summer. That means job time!
So I've been scouring Craig's List, which I guess is 99.9999% scams, and reminiscing about terrible jobs I've had. Well, maybe the jobs weren't terrible, but they had terrible moments. No, on second thought, the jobs were terrible.
My first job I ever had was working on the farm behind my house when I was ten. My brother, some friends, and I went over, and these twenty something year olds said they'd pay us $2 an hour to help them with field work. To me as a kid, $2 an hour is like a million dollars an hour. I was just as good as math then as I am now. But to be fair, if I worked for ten hours, that was twenty comics, because back then comics were a buck. So we laid out hay on the strawberry field for 6 or 7 hours. Then I wanted to die I was so tired. But they said come back and help them at the farm house and they would pay us more. So the next day we went to the farmhouse, and they paid us to chase and kill rats. It was pretty traumatic because 1) I thought rats were small, 2) I didn't realize rats lived in our food before it was shipped out, and 3) I didn't like killing animals. Anyway, that was terrible. The next day it was more field work. By that time, they owed each of us like $40, for twenty hours work. But then they said they would only give us $10, total, and we had to split it between the four of us. That was total bullshit. My father went over and talked to them, probably to let them know they were breaking a billion or so child labor laws, but he didn't get any more money from them. My parents felt bad for us and gave me and my brother $5 additional dollars, which bought one issue of Darkhawk and like maybe two X-Men comics. I don't really remember what I was reading back then. It wasn't DC.
After that I did some babysitting for my parents in exchange for the opportunity to rent one PG-13 movies. I saw a lot of awful movies. Like The Rocketeer, and Death Becomes Her. Also, I dog sat my friend's horrible german shepherd that tried to maul me on multiple occasions, fostering my current fear of large dogs. But when you're a kid, you like money. In high school I was not allowed to work during the school year for some reason, which sucked, because that meant I never had money. But in the summer time I worked at my dad's office doing odd jobs. I guess that wasn't really a terrible job, apart from roaches in the records building. But I already told that story on this blog once before. Long story short, I don't like roaches, they like me, my cat Xerxes likes them for dinner.
Teaching 7th grade sucked, but everybody knows those stories. Working for three days at Service Zone (a Dell service center in Lake City) also sucked, because they lied about how much they were going to pay me. Also, it sort of felt like the place people went when they failed at everything else in life. I don't know if I can explain that to anybody who isn't from Lake City. In the few days I worked there I ran into a lot of people from high school I barely knew, but they were all super excited to see me. Most of these people flunked out of community college, or never really saw any point to get any learning past high school. Maybe I'm a total asshole for saying all this, but I felt like at any second the dinner scene from "Freaks" was going to break out once they saw me, a college grad (well, in creative writing, anyway), in their training class, like it justified all of their opinions of the world outside Lake City, that it was unimportant and overrated. It is after all, the town that will survive the end of the world.
Anyway, my last story involves working at Publix. Lots of terrible stories surround that place, like whenever I tried to quit and the manager teared up and guilted me into staying. Or the fact that I was two years out of college and a bagger at Publix working for $7 an hour. But I'll tell the story of the time I was working one fateful Sunday morning. I was a bagger at the time (which meant that customers would talk about me like I was stupid and deaf to the cashiers, but rarely acknowledge my presence unless it was to tell me not to put their bread on the bottom of the bag, as if I was from some alternate dimension in which bread could not be crushed by six cans and would be astonished that they would not want their bread on the bottom of the bag, but it also meant I had the lowest amount of responsibility, which was cool), and I was called over to the office counter. They told me the men's bathroom needed to be cleaned (another duty of baggers for some reason), which wasn't a good sign, since it was Sunday morning. That probably meant something was up. And indeed, something was up. Piles of shit all over the bathroom floor, and shitty footprints leading out of the store. I walked back over to the counter and asked what would happen if I didn't clean it up. The supervisor said I'd be fired. So I just sat there for a minute, and the supervisor repeated that I'd be fired. I said I know, I'm just thinking. Well, I guess this story would be cooler if I quit right then, but instead I cleaned up the mess by dumped a gallon each of the strongest cleaners we had on the bathroom floor and mopping up the mess. Well, that sucked. And then I worked there for 8 more months.
Then I worked at a T-Shirt factory, which was a pretty good job, and now I teach college, which is also a pretty good job. Except I need a summer job that preferably does not involve human feces in any shape or form.
So share your terrible job stories! Sorry this post is a million words long or so.
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8 comments:
Like many people who have spent time in Lake City, I too have worked at ServiceZone. I worked there for six weeks in order to fund my 2002 trip to Costa Rica. Even though it was only for a short period of time, and even though I was doing it in order to fund something really fantastic, it was hell.
Glenn is so right about all the people who worked there seeming to feel justified about "the world outside" when there was straight-A student and college grad Jane Keeler working there too. Plus, most of those people were those who I desperately wanted to avoid, for various reasons.
Additionally, as Glenn mentioned, ServiceZone was a Dell computers service call center. After working there for just six weeks, I will NEVER do business with Dell ever again. Talk about an unethical business. (Although as a side note, Dell is finally being sued as a result of said unethical business practices. I'm just surprised it took so long.
Was that my horrible German shepherd? Or did you have another friend with another horrible German shepherd?
My most horrible jobs have been at call centers. Not because they were all full of losers and crystal meth addicts, which they were, but because I had to sit in the midst of 100 cubicles that all looked the same with a headset beaming people's verbal abuse directly into my head via my ear canal. People hate telemarketers, so outbound was the worst. But inbound is bad too, because by the time people get to you they've been on hold for 40 minutes and they're always angry. I lasted 3 days signing people up for credit card scams, and 3 weeks taking people's car reservations.
One shitty thing about call centers is the propaganda that makes it sound like the horrible telecommunications coroporation that hired you is giving you a career out of the goodness of its heart. Also, I hate the sales pep talks (which can all basically be summed up with the words, "Sell more, guys!"). And how on Friday afternoon some smug middle management asshole would always come out with a bunch of sombreros and suddenly the soul-sucking, inhuman work was supposed to be a lot more fun because all the drudges were wearing Mexican hats. It was humiliating.
But most of all, I hated the lying. The people I was signing up for credit cards had to believe I was actually from the Bank of Montreal. The people in the American south whose car reservations I was taking had to believe I was right down the road from whatever little town they lived in. In training they were like, "We're not legally allowed to tell you to lie, but we basically want you to lie." I hated that. It's one thing to act immorally, which I do all the time. But it's another to have some fucking douchebag in a tie who doesn't care about me in the least tell me my job depends on it.
Grr.
Amen Brother-Squid-Faced-Hermit-Dude!
At ServiceZone, which everyone in Lake City knew was a Dell service call center, we were told on our first day NOT to tell anyone what company we were accepting calls for. You know, because it might look bad for Dell if it became public knowledge that instead of that happy "dude your gettin' a Dell" guy and those annoyingly happy interns who went along with him were in fact a bunch of low-lifes in Lake City, FL.
Also, the people in sales were encouraged to do whatever it took (erm, lie...) to get people to finance their computers. I had the misfortune of working in the financial services part of the call center, meaning that whenever people found out what interest rate they were being raped by, they would call me. You can imagine how fun that was.
This makes me sad.
Maritimer on Martimer exploitation. You want to help, but those people can't even help themselves. How do you separate the good ones from the bad?
I've managed to avoid call centers, but I worked on an assembly line for seven weeks. There's nothing like having to raise your hand to use the washroom as an adult.
I too had a summer job on a farm like Glenn. I had to pick rocks out of a field. There were three of us, my friend Walter, me, and a big for his age farm boy who chewed Copenhagen chewing tobacco. Common in Montana.
One guy would drive the tractor which had a big bucket on the front and the other two would bend over and pick up rocks and fill the bucket. When the bucket was full the driver would drive off and empty it into a dump truck. We each took turns driving the tractor.
It was a very hard job, but to make matters worse, the farm boy decided to pester us all day by adding a twist. He made "balls" out of the dirt and manure that was on his boots and the tractor, and then he'd spit on it and yell "spit ball!" and throw it at you when you had your back turned. So you had to watch your back all day, and hold your own when it was your turn to drive the tractor. It was hell.
This went on all day, and I took my licks and dished out a few. But the farm boy had the most advanced weapon system, the "spit ball" with the chew juice warhead.
Reading my first comment the second time around, it seems I have made woeful butchery of verb tense expressing past habit. Which wouldn't be a big deal if I wasn't such an insufferable grammar snob.
Sorry about that dog. We really loved her, but she was a menace and had to be put down. She was so neurotic and wound up that she wouldn't eat for days at a time, and this one time she bit this woman uptown through her leather jacket and drew more than a few drops of blood. The woman called the police (it was like the third time someone called the police about our dog) but they didn't do anything. Every time my mom would say she was taking the dog to get put to sleep we'd all start bawling. Finally mom and I went to do it, after she left like twenty toothprints in my uncle's ass. It was like one minute she was breathing, and the next she wasn't. That was the first time I had ever watched a higher order mammal die. It struck me as absurd that they disinfected the spot before they administered the injection. I was like, "What, are you worried she's gonna get an infection when she's dead?"
If roaches and Lake City are the only thing that will survive the end of the world, I would avoid it like the plauge. Your kitty may enjoy it though :-)
Christopher
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