Terrible Job Stories

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.