You know -- the pay and the hours aren't always the best, but it's interesting work, and it can sometimes even be a bit "fun" (not that I know what that means). Certainly, this is a massive step up from my previous employment experiences. See, over the years, I've had a lot of jobs, and most of them sucked.
The first job I ever had was in fast food. I was 15, and a classic angst-ridden delinquent -- skipping school, destroying public property, and smoking shoplifted cigarettes out in front of a local pizza joint all day. The manager of the Burger King near my house must have noticed me hanging me around, and deduced for himself that I was unemployed, because one day, he just offered me a job without my ever even applying.
"SO, when are you gonna come work for me?" he asked out of nowhere while I was waiting in line for my Whopper Junior combo meal.
"Uh...now...I guess?"
He started me off at a full 40 hours a week, which probably wasn't a good idea, considering that I'd never worked at all before that. A teenager already prone to indolence shouldn't be introduced to the professional world with an immediate full-time immersion into one of the crappiest working environments possible. After a few weeks, I was fed up. Smelling of burger grease, exhausted, and resentful of the fact that my assistant manager wouldn't let me have free soft drinks, I walked off of that job one day while taking out the trash. I used to sneak out back behind the dumpsters to wolf down stolen chicken tenders and fries when the boss wasn't looking, and as I stood there on that particular day, I had a moment of clarity. "Screw THIS!" I said, and simply walked on home. I doubt they missed me.
The rest of my teenage years were punctuated by a variety of menial restaurant jobs. I was a dishwasher at several establishments...I bussed tables at a country club...I worked the register at an A&W for one day -- all pretty lousy. Then, around the age of 16, I got a job as a line cook at a great little pub-grill-deli-type place. The food was amazing (if I ever open my own dining establishment, I will totally steal their menu), and my coworkers were all agreeable. The management at this particular hole in the wall was also highly tolerant of employee screw-ups, so I was able to stay on for about four years before the place finally went under. It was a shame, since I really did put a lot of care into my efforts there.
After that, I worked the midnight shift at a Speedway station for about a year while I was in college. The job almost killed me. I thought I'd have no trouble working nights, since I've always been a nocturnal kind of guy, but I was quickly proven wrong. It's not natural to never see the sun. By the time I quit that place, I was a shell of a man -- sickly, depressed, drained of all life. I was thankful to be offered a position as a merchandiser for Coca Cola.
Now, THAT was a great job. Excellent pay, lots of exercise, and plenty of time to drive around doing the work and think without some annoying boss hounding me constantly. Sure, it was fairly hard physical labor -- dragging pallets of soft drinks around grocery stores and lifting stuff for 11 hours a day -- but I loved it. Heck, at one point, I was making, like, a grand a week there. Too bad I blew it all on a chick (ain't that the truth -- you start making good money, and some woman comes along to squeeze it all out of you???). Anyway, I had to leave the company when it became too hard to manage both the job AND going to school full-time. I look back fondly on that experience, though. I would totally do it again, if it weren't for my bad back.
The WORST jobs I've ever had would be the medical lab, and the satellite dish company. Let's start with the lab:
I was a "Specimen Processor", which sounds much more impressive than it really is. Basically, it was my job to walk back and forth all night with a tray of urine samples. See, around ten PM, I would be locked into an underground complex with a few hundred other grunts, and spend the next eight hours carrying thousands of test tubes from a desk to a centrifuge. Then, I'd carry them back to another desk and log them. That's it. An utterly miserable, soul sucking experience that job was. It was strict, no one had a sense of humor, and we were allowed only one, rigidly-timed, 30-minute break per shift. One night, as I was eating a Snickers bar in my car during break, I found myself staring at the dashboard clock, unable to move. The time hit 2 AM, when I was supposed to go back in, but I just couldn't budge. It got to be 2:10, and yet I still sat totally immobile. 2:20...2:30....I finally sighed, started the engine, and just drove off. I could not bring myself to go back into that God-forsaken hell. Good riddance.
As mentioned, the OTHER worst job I've ever had was at the dish company. Ah, installing home satellite dishes. It SOUNDED like a sure thing to me. As far as I could tell, the position met all the criteria for what I would consider a good job: it was fairly technical...I would get to move around a lot...and there would be little supervision. Almost like working for Coke again. I was excited to quit my low-paying radio job at the time (which is another blog post in and of itself) to go work for the satellite dish folk and be able to pay down some of the debts I'd accumulated while earning 18-grand a year in the tiniest of towns. However, the reality turned out not only to be a huge let-down, but one of the most grueling experiences of my life.
First of all, the training for the job was more of an ordeal than I thought it would be. There's ALL KINDS of crap you've got to learn before you can work in the dish installation field, and the company managed the task of teaching it to new recruits by putting us into groups of about 40 each, and running us through a several-week boot camp of-sorts (apparently, the drop-out rate among trainees is so high that they just hire hundreds at a time, and wait to see who pans out). Now, the first week was actually rather enjoyable, as they just had us sitting in a classroom all day; but after that, it was all field work, and MY GOD, did it suck.
As a trainee, I would get sent out with a different technician each day, and it was always a roll of the dice as to what kind of guy I would get. Some were complete jerks, and others were complete morons. I remember one, in particular, who refused to stop for a bathroom break for any reason (he actually pulled over behind a dumpster one time and told me to pee there). There was another guy who was afraid of heights, and would force his rookies to do all of the roof-climbing for him. If a rookie refused, or was simply too inexperienced to be walked through the work via shouted ground-level instructions, this guy would tell the customer that he "couldn't get a signal", and ditch the job (PS -- if a dish installation dude gives you the "can't get a signal" line, there's a good chance he's lying).
Anyway, the hours were horrendous. We had to report for work at six in the morning, and would usually not get back until ten or eleven at night. It takes much longer to do a satellite installation than one may assume (especially HD ones), and the process with this particular company was further hindered by countless stupid rules by which we had to abide. Silly, cosmetic things which made the job more unpleasant (like, how to loop the cables, etc) took up far too much of our time. The dispatchers had no sympathy for us exhausted techs, and would only send us on additional jobs deep in the bowels of the ghetto if we tried to radio back that we were finished with our work at any reasonable hour. I learned from the smarter guys that when you're done before eight, you NEVER call dispatch to tell them. Instead, just park somewhere and read a magazine or take a nap until it's a good quittin' time. Those wenches in the home office will send you to some crack house if they suspect you've got a half hour to spare.
Speaking of crack houses, this job could indeed be dangerous. I really WAS sent to a few such locations, complete with plates of blow sitting in full view on the coffee table, pit bulls pacing the hallways, and strange characters filing in and out all afternoon with small packages in tow. I started carrying pepper spray at one point. Other houses were just dumps. "How the heck can someone who can't even afford glass for their windows be able to get satellite TV?" I asked on more than one occasion. My favorite such customer was some girl in the ghetto who didn't even have a friggin' TV. Yup. She actually thought that we'd just show up and screw the dish into her roof without needing to hook up any receiver box. Other people were nicer, though. I'll always remember a lovely family from Iraq who gave me a variety of delicious snacks as I struggled to sort out an especially complicated international package set-up in their home. I was there for about eight hours, and those folks never got impatient.
The company itself was poorly-run to a shocking degree. What I suspected were countless labor law violations were regularly committed as a matter of course, and thievery among employees was rampant. I won't go into specifics, but plenty of guys found ways to supplement their incomes by doing things they shouldn't have been doing. The place was so disorganized that when I was offered a chance to interview with another employer, all the way on the other side of the state, I didn't even ask for a day off. Instead, I just failed to show up for three days. I went to the other town, got the job, found an apartment, took care of some other personal issues, and then appeared bright and early for work back at the dish place on Monday as if nothing had happened. And you know what? No one had noticed I was gone. The bosses didn't say a word to me, and I resumed my duties without incident. This place was so badly managed that they didn't even catch it when someone didn't show up for three days!
Anyway, my remaining two weeks there were spent with a GREAT partner who knew about, and fully supported, my decision to move on. Since he realized that I would be gone soon, the guy didn't make me do any work. I got to stand around and hand him things while he ranted all day about how much he hated the company ("This is RIDICULOUS!" was his catchphrase). I really liked that guy. He had the right outlook. I hope he got the heck outta that den of misery not long after I did.
So, yes, my current position is far superior to others I have occupied, and for that I am thankful. I put a great deal more effort into this job than any others before it (even the Coca-Cola gig), and I often marvel at how well-run my current company is. Good place, good people, good times. That's hard to find these days. Relevant work, too. I also get to do fun stuff like review movies...such as this little gem:
Blindness (2008)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/
"After a plague of blindness overtakes the residents of a city, all sense of order breaks loose in the hospital where the victims are being quarantined. It's up to a woman (Julianne Moore) who's keeping her sight a secret to lead a group safely to the streets. Gael García Bernal, Mark Ruffalo, Sandra Oh and Danny Glover also star in this psychological thriller, an adaptation of José Saramago's gripping masterpiece."
What an incredible movie. Blindness starts out like a horror film, but develops into a fascinating, near-epic, examination of human beings under high stress. In the beginning, one random man goes blind. He's just driving one day, and BAM -- totally blind. In the coming days, several others start losing their vision in a similar manner. All of them have had contact with the first guy, so it's obviously some kind of disease spreading. As more victims are reported, the government panics, and rounds them up into a sort of concentration camp, where they're left to fend for themselves, save for the occasional drop of rations. The infected start to form their own tribes within the containment wards, and things go drastically downhill from there.
Blindness is an intense, unpredictable reflection on the horrors of which people are capable when placed in desperate situations. As the world collapses outside the wards, brutality reigns within them. Julianne Moore is like a Mother Teresa figure who goes voluntarily into one of the wards to care for the blind. She's certain to become infected also, but follows her husband in, anyway. The only character who can see, we watch events unfold through her perspective. Others in the wards, though somewhat one-dimensional, are likable and interesting, as well. Mark Ruffalo as the optometrist who first dealt with the strange new disease is probably my favorite, although I tend to like him in anything.
The scope of this film surprised me. Whenever I thought that it MUST be just about over, another major turn in the plot would arise, and by the time credits rolled, I was quite satisfied that all bases had been covered. Many critics felt that Blindness was meandering, but I personally had no trouble staying fully engaged in this excellent movie. Great ending, too. I highly recommend it.
5 out of 5.
b.
Great JEEEERRRRRRRRBBBBB!!!!
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