Take this job and ...

by tess

Dissatisfied with the status quo, we might reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going. This is a brief trip down my occupational memory lane. I would advise you take a seat, fasten your seatbelt, and keep all of your limbs inside the vehicle. -gretchen.

My first job was busboy at an ice cream shop. I was particularly ill-suited for it since I wasn’t strong enough to lift anything and couldn’t have mopped a filthy industrial kitchen to save my soul. Fortunately the job lasted just long enough for me to buy the jeans I wanted for an upcoming Mixer.

Waitressing looked easier. Wrong. My one and only shift lasted four hours. At Pappy’s Pizza, waitresses received a “bank” at the beginning of the day and they made their own change, adding their check totals and tips to the bank. At the end of the day, you returned the original bank along with check totals, then kept your tips. By 3 PM my bank was $76 lower than it was before I had “sold” any food or received any tips. Bet they threw a party when I didn’t return the next day.

Perhaps Hostessing — still food service-related and, really, how hard could it be? Very hard! During the first day of training, I was overwhelmed by watching someone else answer the phones and move a penny around a map of the restaurant to show who was up next for tables. Terrified, I never attended day two of hostess training.

Anybody who’s ever worked in a mall (or seen those late ’70s/early ’80s teen movies) knows about “mall rats”, the subculture that provides the infrastructure to any mall society across the country. Rat rules determine what you wear, when you eat, where you sit, and who you date. Basically the Lord of the Flies of retail.

Next job: nanny. Four boys, cooking, cleaning, driving. ’nuff said.

My first job out of college was labeled Bookkeeper. Because the chain restaurant hired lots of ex-cons, the actual function of my job was to count how many of each dinner was ordered, and then compare the total orders to how much of each food item was missing from the freezer. So basically I counted. Given my impressive degree in Theater Arts and successful job experiences to that point, counting was clearly as much as I could have handled.

At my interview, Dragon Lady informed me that my new bookkeeping job would include balancing the checkbooks of several accounts. I had never balanced a checkbook and had no idea how to do so. The fact that 24 years later I still don’t know how to balance a checkbook may serve as an indication of my early success in real estate.

Retreating to a position more administrative and less numerical found me working for Tidy Bowl, aka Priscilla the Priestess of Sanitation. At home this fur-free fanatic vacuumed her dog to remove as much mess-in-progress as possible, but at work the scrubbing zealot forced me to scour every work surface in the entire laboratory with individually wrapped alcohol wipes on a daily basis. Can you spell OCD?

There were so many reasons to leave the dot-com: the CEO was an idiot who drove a seven year old Kia, we were frequently evicted from our shared “office” that was really just a conference room for another company, everyone got to wear scrubs but me, I’d have to take calls from elderly sick people. Really any one of those circumstances was plenty of motivation to run for the door.

Mac (short for Machiavelli) was my manager at the deeply corrupt “investments” firm. Positives: I have no hard evidence that he ever actually murdered anyone; he didn’t micro-manage the order in which I shredded the corporate files. Negatives: he was superior to using the phone or intercom so he shouted the name of the person he wanted to see over and over again until he or she appeared; he motivated his “investment team” by terminating faithful, long-term employees and hiring hot young blondes unencumbered by morality. I’d like to say that I wish Mac well.

And so here is my homage to Willie Nelson’s To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before:
To all the jobs that caused me strife
Whose blades of shame cut like a knife
I’m glad they came along.
I dedicate this song
To all the jobs I’ve loathed before.