Every writer’s dream is to quit their “day job,” but I personally love reading about day jobs! Whether it’s an actor-turned-corporate-spy, the unlikely pet euthanasia businessperson, or the late-blooming ironworker, there’s something immensely satisfying about getting an intimate, unexpected look at someone else’s work life. And often, our worst/weirdest/hardest jobs are the funniest ones to write about (even if we need a few years of distance to be able to laugh about them).
Think about your first job. Or your worst job. The one that paid minimum wage. The time you burnt all the hair off your forearms in the pizza oven, or when you threw papers onto lawns before it was light outside. When you had just enough money to pay rent and buy ramen. Where you suffered through terrible bosses and bonded with new best friends. How did this job change you? What stayed with you from this experience? What do you regret or laugh about years later? What will you never be able to laugh about?
Don’t think about this too much; just write. You can write four words or 400 words. Whatever this prompt inspires you to think of, drop your response in the comments. The response that gets the most likes will win a free Narratively tote bag!
“AMBER ALERT!” Chad yelled. At me. Through the company branded megaphone on Amber’s desk.
“AMBER IS OUT TO LUNCH!!!” I yelled back.
He was already back to giggling with ‘large guys’ on speaker phones, who were giggling to other ‘large guys’ about how much their large speaker phones cost.
Chad was the only one who thought the Amber Alerts, or the occasional air horn thrills were still funny. No matter how many times I knew to expect him and tried to prepare, most weeks didn’t pass without one air horn blow startling a little pee out of me. Usually, moments I was nose to computer screen doing something crazy again, like generating revenue for Chad.
Chad’s office was the same size as the adjacent office that held all 10 of the rest of us barn animals and all 10 of our custom, double-wide, wrap around stables. The wrap arounds were presented as luxury cubicles.
They were there to provide aesthetic barriers between Chad’s Billion Dollar Uber Friends and the scowling faces of Chad’s 3 Accounting Hens that loyally squawked at him for 30 years and were stuck here now RE zero transferable skills in the real world.
The Hens somehow navigated Chad through a $2.7B public merger- acquisition but they couldn’t navigate Excel. Even though I was just salary…same amount…every time…week after week…year after year, the odds of getting a frantic call Friday ordering me to not cash the wrong paycheck currently in my purse, until Monday, were 50/50.
"It takes all 3 to make 1," Chad reminded them daily. While they flipped him off in unison.
Chad couldn’t get rid of them either.
They knew all the secrets. And their faces threatened to expose them if you dared look directly at them. Hence, the barriers.
“Questionable Aesthetics…Call the Paramedics!” Chad sang while straightening up all 3 of their barriers himself, while The Hens executed a synchronized flip off, again.
“AMBER ALERT!” Chad yelled again. Laughing.
“Amber is out to lunch.” I said. Again. Not laughing.
Amber had been out to lunch for a year now.
It took me 12 weeks and 50 interviews to offer Amber the role. She was the 3rd we met and an instantly perfect star. Chad insisted I confirm that, by meeting the other 47 Executive Assistants available on the DC market too, just to be sure.
It took a 10-man team, a crane, and roof access to install Chad’s billionaire dry erase board. He himself, polished it like the Mona Lisa at night. The designers arrived at dawn to hand paint the life-sized logos of the day’s scheduled ‘large guy’ lineup.
I forgot to warn Amber no one goes out to lunch on a weekday. Ever. And everyone else assumed Amber assumed we didn’t ever leave. Since we didn’t ever leave
.
Amber escaped HQ at noon on Wednesday. Day 3. She did leave a humongous note none of us could miss, to be fair.
She wrote: AMBER IS OUT TO LUNCH!!!!! In big black block letters. On Chads billion-dollar board.
‘Success is an ability to move on from failure to failure without losing one’s enthusiasm’ I read on a wall hanging in a two-star hotel somewhere or other when I was about halfway through this list of shit jobs you can read below.
First job - waitress for a wedding party - aged 16 - creme caramel in little glass dishes - sliding around the tray - oops - one landed on a man’s shoulder and the cream pudding splattered like a custard tart. That was my first and last shift.
Second job - ear piercing on Brighton pier - failed to disclose fear of needles, so avoided having to do any terrifying body piercings by lying to customers; ‘not today’ I said. And I said that every day until the days got shorter, and I was back in college.
Third job - after graduating with a degree in history, I worked as a literacy teacher in Chelmsford prison. My approach was collective learning, not teaching as such. Inspired Dave Foreman’s book Ecodefence, I produced a handout on possessive apostrophes entitled ‘How to disable a motor vehicle’. I got fired.
Fourth job - lining up cars for auction. Yes, I was hired to park cars in impeccably neat rows like a 5-year-old with box of matchbox toys. It was very cold work in winter. I heard that the company next door had a subsidised canteen and an inside toilet. I quit.
Fifth job - a warehouse operative on minimum wage at Penguin Random House (next door to the car auction). My job was ‘picking and packing’ books. It was fine until one day it was announced that the company had made 56 million pounds profit. Exploited and angry, I became a Marxist and started writing. I went to trade union meetings. Then the bosses discovered my blog. I got blacklisted.
Back to education - I worked in a school as a teaching assistant for £13,00/pa and read the brilliant David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’. Questioning, I googled the salary of the CEO of the academy chain where I worked. Mr Drinkall’s annual salary, I discovered, was £270,000, double that of the Prime Minister at the time! Furthermore, I discovered he’d received a bonus of £200,000 - he found my blogpost with his name on it - and I got disciplined for bringing the academy chain into disrepute!!
I got another job.
And another.
Now, I don’t even know who my employer is, I’m still working in education, as a tutor for kids who have been excluded from mainstream schools. I was recruited by an agency on a zero-hour contract, but I’ve never had a contract. They say, they are not my employer, I know my rights and demanded a statement of employment. Turns out my employer is Thorpe Spring Ltd. nature of business ‘general trade’: and, according to Companies House, the business hasn’t filed any accounts, ever. I have some questions.
I'm picturing your opening quote with an upside-down cat on the poster. :) What a list of beginning jobs! Love that you have included great sensory and place details to immerse us in the memories. Being 16 and having the creme caramel fall or being 36 and having the same thing happen might both result in termination, but the age is important.
‘Success is an ability to move on from failure to failure without losing one’s enthusiasm’ I read on a wall hanging in a two-star hotel somewhere or other when I was about halfway through this list of shit jobs you can read below."
First job: "creme caramel in little glass dishes - sliding around the tray - oops - one landed on a man’s shoulder and the cream pudding splattered like a custard tart
Second job: ear piercing on Brighton pier
so intriguing - the book!
Third job: Inspired Dave Foreman’s book Ecodefence, I produced a handout on possessive apostrophes entitled ‘How to disable a motor vehicle’.
Fourth job - Yes, I was hired to park cars in impeccably neat rows like a 5-year-old with box of matchbox toys.
Interesting to see how these last two jobs were when you became more of an activist, finding out money details. There's a different confidence level and investment in the jobs/leaving the jobs.
Fifth job - a warehouse operative on minimum wage at Penguin Random House. Exploited and angry, I became a Marxist and started writing.
Back to education - read the brilliant David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’. Furthermore, I discovered he’d received a bonus of £200,000 - he found my blog post with his name on it - and I got disciplined for bringing the academy chain into disrepute!!
I got another job.
And another.
Now, I don’t even know who my employer is, I’m still working in education, as a tutor for kids who have been excluded from mainstream schools. Turns out my employer is Thorpe Spring Ltd. nature of business ‘general trade’: and, according to Companies House, the business hasn’t filed any accounts, ever.
It was truly unfair and a really shitty thing he did. I think karma did ultimately catch up with him, which was sad as he did not live to be an old man.
Oh, it's been fifty years. And it was the worst job inside of a worst job. Kind of like the Russian doll of worst jobs.
I really don't like groundskeeping work and knew that even as a teen. I'd been encouraged to spend my summer productively (adult version), doing an immense amount of garden work at a local famous tourist location (I won't name it -- even now, somebody might be nursing a lawsuit). Grounds work. Only good thing was that, for an introvert, you had a swatch of land you could call your own and work by yourself. A plot. Like a cemetery. At least you could lose yourself in thought, pulling endless rows of weeds and minimizing awkward interactions with other, inevitably larger, guys in boots.
That is, until you were pulled onto a special assignment. This one was a doozy, even by their standards. We were to clean out the second-floor loft in the famous founder's birthplace barn. A loft chock-full of pigeons, who had been living and pooping and cooing and pooping and dying and pooping and molting and pooping and eating and pooping and pooping and pooping in there for what must have been thousands of years. I had not, until then, and will never see again (nor will you ever, dear reader) that much pigeon crap in one place in my life. Piles of it. We're talking six inches deep when it wasn't in piles. And littered throughout with carcasses, as generations transferred their pigeon-y wisdom to younguns before expiring.
All we were given were brooms and bags.
Here's the thing about pigeon crap. (Yes, you really want to become instant experts, like we did.) It ossifies. The ejecta turn into these little white crusted sculptures of infinite variety. I don't know, maybe some evil wind cuts holes in them, something like snowflakes. And the minute -- the minute -- you touch this stuff with a single spare bristle from your broom, it crumbles. Nay, it ignites, or seems to, creating tiny puffs of what you instinctively understand to be noxious, toxic dust. We're not geniuses, we teenage boys. Even we understood this.
The whole day. The whole long, dusty, hot, choking summer day we did this. Of course, not until later were my suspicions confirmed, that pigeon guano can carry lovely diseases. The most common is psittacosis (or, as we might have called it, "pissed-off-cosis"), parrot fever, most commonly transmitted through inhalation of "dust containing dried bird secretions." No shit. We didn't just breathe it, we became it, for a whole day. I think the reason we didn't get sick is because the germs died of overpopulation.
There you have it. Thanks for letting me dredge up this gem of a childhood memory.
Picture a bird of prey circling over a dying animal. This analogy isn't too far off, since my boss had quite a beak and frizzy red hair like a cockscomb hanging over her forehead. I was in desperate need of a job since getting married and moving to a new town, so I took a job far below my previous one where I had supervised 12 employees, wrote bids, and handled sales. Now my job was routing servicemen to their jobs. Every day, this raptor stood behind me and corrected me on directions, told me who to send out, and looked at her watch to see if I violated the half hour lunch. She called me incompetent in front of staff and told me, "I can get you fired anytime, I'm related to the owners. Before I was turned into carrion, I found another job where I was appreciated.
What vivid imagery of your boss. I think we might often conjure up images to cope with difficult jobs. This one sounds like it was hard as a job and also in how it demeaned you and your skills.
Great wrap-up from the opening image!
"Before I was turned into carrion, I found another job where I was appreciated."
At fourteen, I washed dishes at a retirement home for priests for $4.15 an hour. The nurses wheeled them in every night and kept me tucked away into an abandoned section of the building with an industrial sized sink. I avoided getting there too early because the cook would sometimes ask me to run supplies down from the attic above the kitchen, where a giant statue of the Virgin Mary stood deep in the dark distance, covered by a sheet, and my little gay ass was worried she’d come alive and eviscerate me.
There's something so ominous in your short recounting of this job - being tucked away to clean dishes, the attic, and the creepy Virgin Mary statue. You do a great job at setting the stage for a job that was hard work for minimum wage, but also how 14-year-old you saw and felt the setting too. The self-awareness. I would love to know how you ended up at this job and what was next. :)
I was working in this startup which was planning to shut down owing to lack of product market fit. The founders had introduced us to other startups in their network who could on-board us if needed.
Since the founders had a good reputation, their referrals were being taken very seriously by others in their network. I got a call from this food delivery startup which used to work with food outlets and help them deliver their online orders.
I didn’t even have to visit their office. The interview was all done over the phone and it lasted hardly 5 mins and I was asked to join the very next day and report to office at 7 am. My father was against me joining there since the work involved working with delivery boys and his experience working with blue collared workers was not very pleasant. He had imagined a better life in corporate offices for me. However, I didn’t listen to him and accepted the offer.
Now the thing was that the office was literally 2 hours one way from my home and they had a rule that no matter where your work for the day is, you have to first be physically present in this office for a daily standup where the agenda for the day would be decided. I reached the first day and the meeting started.
A brief about the role before I proceed with the story - We were ‘Territory Managers’ which meant that we had food outlets and ‘x’ number of delivery boys in a certain pre defined territory under our control. We were responsible for the blue collared drivers who were supposed to deliver from the outlets within our radius. One of the tasks included making sure that the drivers were in the perfect outfit and the cleanliness and grooming aspect was taken care by them. They were not supposed to turn up shabbily to work and had to wear the right gloves and head gear while on the job since they were handling food deliveries.
Coming back to the story, the meeting starts at 7.30 where we were supposed to discuss the agenda for the day. We were barely 15 mins into the meeting that the agenda shifts from deliveries to the personal lives of drivers. It starts with why one driver under one of the territory managers had not reported for work the past 4 days and it turned out that his extra marital affair was caught and he was being held hostage by his wife at home. Rather than move on from this, the meeting became a deep dive on the affairs of other such drivers. This went on for a good 2 hours before we resumed work. I thought of this to be a one off anomaly.
Moving forward, As part of my induction, I went with the territory managers to the nearby driver hotspots. McDonalds was the major client there and the outlet manager called us in right away showing some sort of frustration and anger. He pulled out a thick booklet which was basically printouts of tons of pages and bound together. He started flipping through the pages while showing the same to us…
The pages were basically screenshots of one of drivers who was caught having some sort of tobacco while on the job. The outside camara had caught it. The funny part was that rather than having 1-2 images of him consuming the tobacco, he had created an entire flipbook wherein you could literally see him tearing the pouch and then moving his arm up towards his mouth to the tobacco coming out and falling into his mouth. It was hilarious to think of what he had done to prove his point and became the second red flag in this job within hours.
We stepped out of the outlet and started confronting the drivers about their hygiene habits and the breaking of the no-tobacco on the job rule. The drivers lied to us knowing fully that we knew that they were lying. It was literally a zero sum game. You had to just put up with the lies. That’s it. Red Flag Number 3.
Somehow the day got over and I got back home after a grueling 2.5 hours journey. I got early and reached office again at 7 am only to go through the same malicious gossip in the morning meeting. I realized that yesterday was not an anomaly, it was just the norm. To make matter worse, after the meeting got over I was supposed to now go back to a territory which was located right next to my home. So in a nutshell, I travelled 2 hours early morning to listen to workers gossip about drivers and then come back 2.5 hours to begin real work for the day which in itself would involve handling lies.
I quietly sat in the car with two other territory managers who were go the same way. They would drop me off at my location. The moment, we reached near my Dad’s office, I asked them to stop the car on the side. I got off and told them - “thankyou, I am done. You can let the people know that I will not be joining this office. 2 days was enough for me.” They had that bewildered look on their faces, like they were in some dream.
I simply moved on and walked to in to Dad’s office. He was sitting in his cabin, pointed me towards the chair in front of him and said..’Now that you are done with the job, please start taking my advice more seriously.’…
Ohh…btw the HR called me the next morning and asked me to pay up a month’s salary to them whereas the job offer clearly stated that one could either leave or be asked to leave with just one day’s notice without any reason. That was the last red flag with this company…
P.S. that company still exists but despite being ahead in the competition, it has been run over by people and companies with more ethics.
Quick hiring, long commute, immediate immersion into the job, gossip, spying on drivers, the flipbook (!). many red flags. I feel tired from just reading about your short tenure there.
Your dad's words:
Now that you are done with the job, please start taking my advice more seriously...
I occasionally check back on places I've worked. Your postscript on the current ethics is interesting too.
P.S. that company still exists but despite being ahead in the competition, it has been run over by people and companies with more ethics.
Half Japanese, at age twenty-two I had a kind of ethnic ambiguity - slender with a round-eyed feminine cuteness often associated with manga heroines. Kawaii. A perfectly dainty candidate to be the social secretary to the Japanese Ambassador to the United Nations, a role that could only be described as decorative in function. Unless you think quietly pouring tea and hand writing thank you notes and invitations on gold embossed official stationary was essential to diplomacy.
For a full time first real job, it paid well and allowed me to live on my own, without roommates. But perhaps it was better suited for an old lady in twinsets and pearls (who I am now, at sixty-five) and not a recently graduated art student living on the Lower East Side whose side hustle was selling weed to yuppies.
What a wonderful peek into your life in your youth and now. The descriptions are so memorable! The juxtaposition of who you were and how you were perceived too. Being so close to a diplomat
-slender with a round-eyed cuteness often associated with manga heroines. Kawaii
-dainty candidate
-decorative in function
-quietly pouring tea, writing thank you notes on gold embossed official stationary
The last paragraph feels like the opening to a memoir :)
"But perhaps it was better suited for an old lady in twinsets and pearls (who I am now, at sixty-five) and not a recently graduated art student living on the Lower East Side whose side hustle was selling weed to yuppies."
The place: Crows Nest, a suburb of Sydney, NSW, Australia.
The job: two and a half days a week typing invoices on a prehistoric Olivetti typewriter for a courier company in an office above a curry house.
The worst of it: the tantalising odour of the curry met the reek of the cigarettes smoked by my three employers in a sickenly awful combination. Each bloke smoked a different brand - Rothmans Untipped in a red packet, Benson and Hedges Special Mild in a gold packet, and Marlboro in a blue and white packet. Most mornings I was sent out to buy their cigarettes, plus the iced finger buns for morning tea.
The air in the office was blue with the cigarette smoke during my working hours, and the stale cigarette smell when I opened the office in the morning was strong enough to make me gag. At the end of the day, I would go home smelling like I had been chain smoking myself. My fingers would be tingling from bashing those stiff old typewriter keys. My wage at the time was AUD$2.00 an hour.
I sometimes wondered whether it was worth it. I was a poor university student and had to spend money on public transport to reach the office. A bus from my uni campus took me into the city. A brisk walk down through Martin Place brought me to the Wynyard railway station, from where I caught a train to North Sydney. Another brisk walk uphill, and I was in the next suburb, Crows Nest, ready, sort of, for another day of breathing the toxic mixture of cigarettes and curry.
But hey, I survived. I’d like to be able to say I completed my university course and did well. But the truth is, I dropped out of uni after I met the man who I thought would be the love of my life, and ran off to live with him in Darwin at the top end of Australia. You’ll be pleased to hear that, although the marriage didn’t prosper, I did well in much better paid employment, and I eventually gained a university degree as a mature age student some 35 years later.
While the job might have been the worst, I love your use of details to take us back in time. I did wonder if you ate at the curry house then or can eat it now?
I learned all I needed to know about injustice and privilege at my first job as a kitchen aid at Hamburg’s (Germany) Congress Center. In the hellishly hot bowls of that magnificent structure, we ‘unskilled laborers’ would clean and chop vegetables, assemble stacks of crustless sandwiches, and decorate silver plates with sprigs of parsley for the important people above. If we wanted a cup of coffee, we had to pay half our hourly income to get it which is why we rather stayed tired. Kitchen guards made sure we wore gloves and didn’t sneak contraband (anything edible). On my second day, some dude from above noticed me and declared that I – young, white and blond - belonged upstairs with the waitstaff, so – abracadabra - upstairs I went. On the main floor, I got tips, and the attention of some higher-up who thought I’d make a great hostess. Long story short, before the first of two weeks had passed, I ended up in the VIP lounge on the penthouse level, where my only duties were to have coffee brewed fresh at all times and smile at my benefactor’s laments about the wife who refused to divorce him. Nobody else visited, except for some dignitaries who brought their own staff when setting up meetings. Every hour or two, I’d take the carafe of unwanted coffee and slowly pour it down the drain. Then I would make a new batch, apologizing to the people downstairs.
Such a memorable day of reading about all these awful jobs. I like that you found the "lesson" in your first job at the outset - the injustice and privilege.
Finding that in another country adds even more perspective.
The crustless sandwiches. The coffee costing 1/2 hour of hourly wage. Wearing gloves. Being under such close watch. Only going upstairs because of having the right look. There's something so ironic in the coffee cost for workers juxtaposed against the need for fresh coffee for limited staff and carafes poured down the sink with an apology.
A summer job as a salesman for high quality (i.e. expensive) cookware and china was horrible.
The company hired young men to target unmarried women they had gone to high school with. We were told to mine our high school yearbooks to identify women who did not go on to college and were in their first job as an office worker or retail employee or the like.
The pitch was to get them to start building their hope chests in preparation for marriage.
Even in the mid-1970s this struck me as a bit predatory and sad. We insisted that the young woman's mother be present whenever we were able to book an in-person demonstration. We learned how to subtly “activate” the mother to pressure her daughter (who preferred to spend her limited funds in more enjoyable ways) to begin investing in the kinds of top-notch tools needed for her life as a homemaker ahead.
A basic set of pots and pans cost $400.00 (about $2,000 in today’s dollars) and were made to last forever. 3 ply construction (two layers of stainless with the middle layer of conducting high carbon steel!) with close-fitting, heavy lids (so tight you can even cook without water!). And the pots were stackable on the stovetop, serving as little dutch ovens.
The impressive china and teacups and glasses were, of course, extra but the stuff showed well and was better than one could find anywhere else.
I would set up my sample case alongside a dark, velvet table cover and ceremoniously ask for a small glass of water. Circling the rim of a wine glass with a moist finger created a pleasing melodic tone, illustrating the quality of the crystal. I could stand on an inverted teacup to demonstrate how strong and well-made they were. And we learned how to hold two of the heavy plates side by side to gently bump them up and down to illustrate how well made and chip resistant they were.
Before long, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Even as I needed a sale to cover the cost of the sample kit I had to buy, I couldn't help feeling I had just saddled the young woman with a debt she didn't need. It also felt like fostering or taking advantage of outmoded views of middle-class women's prospects, just as feminism was broadly taking hold. I lasted about three weeks before quitting and giving the pots and pans to an aunt who had coveted them from the start. They really were top-notch.
"I would set up my sample case alongside a dark, velvet table cover and ceremoniously ask for a small glass of water. Circling the rim of a wine glass with a moist finger created a pleasing melodic tone, illustrating the quality of the crystal. I could stand on an inverted teacup to demonstrate how strong and well-made they were. And we learned how to hold two of the heavy plates side by side to gently bump them up and down to illustrate how well made and chip resistant they were."
This sounds like the base of a Flannery O'Connor story. But also the start of MLMs too. Your earnest nature and the endpoint combined with the top notch products is such an interesting contrast. Seeing the pressure in businesses like the one you were roped into is fascinating. Your descriptions are so great - the velvet, rim of the wine glass, the melodic tone, the bump test of the plates.
In 1981, my Pentecostal-raised grandmother heard about my first paid gig in theater. But she nearly choked when I said, “burlesque.” I quickly explained I didn’t take my clothes off. I only worked backstage at the venue. She informed me that anybody who worked for an “outfit like that” must be the Devil’s whore. She drilled her steely gaze into me, and screamed,
“You wanna’ be the Devil’s whore?”
Working as the Devil’s whore paid rather well—and even better, in cash. But each night, I found myself drowning in a sea of eye-popping cleavage, Colgate smiles and disgustingly long legs. Beauty like that, seen through the eyes of a flat-chested, pasty-white eighteen-year-old with braces, stung like a hornet’s nest. I tried not to gawk. No one warned me that I’d have to use my finger to trace gold paint inside the edges of the dancer’s butt cheeks. That’s what it took to transform the statuesque brunette into a life-sized, dancing Oscar. She’d stand wearing only a G-string, while I covered her head-to-toe in gold body paint. At least she had the decency to bend way over, making every crevice accessible.
I tried to balance out this misery on the days I took their laundry home. With my roommates gone, I sneaked into the apartment with the dancers’ costumes. I’d grunt like a sumo wrestler, until I’d squeezed my scrawny body into a ridiculously tight Rhinestone bodysuit. Rolled-up socks had to be shoved into the chest area. But when the beaded headdress was perfectly placed, I turned to the hall mirror, and struck a pose. Back arched, stomach sucked in, I used the same open-mouthed smile I’d seen the showgirls make.
It almost worked if I could just forget about my braces.
Back inside the theater by evening, I waited as each dancer exited the stage. I ripped apart the Velcro that held together sequined G-strings, freeing their lithe torsos to wriggle into the next costume: glittering bra-like things with holes for their perfect nipples. The dancers rewarded my servitude by slipping long, graceful arms through the shoulder straps, and I clasped them in back. Then came my least favorite part. They’d always pout and ask, “Do I look okay?”
I’d nod and smile convincingly, until they’d whooshed onto the stage. Then I grumbled under my breath that they looked like a bunch of hideously fat Devil’s whores.
"Working as the Devil’s whore paid rather well—and even better, in cash."
The descriptions of the women and their clothes, interactions, the gold paint, and the squeezing into the jumpsuit - so vivid. There are so many directions you could go with this experience, even into a fictional account.
I've had about 50 jobs and been fired from more than half of them. My first was the worst-- I was a paper boy for the Vancouver B.C. Sun in the days when daily newspapers often numbers over 100 pages. It wasn't the heavy load I had to carry, it was Wolf, the hulking German shepherd dog who would lay in wait at 15 Rena Crescent as I lugged my paper bag from one side of the street to the other, getting closer with every delivery. I'd watch him patrol the driveway, walking back and forth like some steroid-popping security guard just waiting for me to invade his territory. I finally did, walking right past him, hands clenched at the sides, eyes rigidly ahead as if my soldier-boy posture would deter him. "Wolf!" cried the owner's son from the second-floor balcony. "Wolf! Leave him alone! Don't worry, boy, he's a good dog!" I kept walking up the driveway. Wolf took up a position about a foot to my rear and on my right. We walked together up the shallow hill to his front door. I could feel his eyes on me every second. I waited, helpless. The owner put his book down and reached for his drink. That's when I felt Wolf bury his fangs in my right buttock. It hurt but not as much as the humiliation of being bitten while the owner's son, just a year or two older than me, looked on. I threw the paper at the door still 20 feet away. It came apart into sheets of newsprint before it landed and soaked itself on the wet pavement. That night I got a complaint from Wolf's owner about the condition of his paper. Next day I carried a rock in my pocket, which must have weight three pounds. I was lucky; it was raining and Wolf and I were alone. I faced him at the end of his driveway while he patrolled back and forth. At the right moment I threw the rock with all my strength from about three feet away. WHOMP! It thumped into him broadside with rib-breaking force. But the best part was being able walk straight up that driveway right to the door and take my sweet time carefully arranging that paper precisely on the mat. Wolf continued his back and forth patrols but always from at least ten feet away. I took a private joy in how he flinched when I pretended to throw a rock at him.
I just really like the first line. I keep seeing the starts of 1st person POV stories in these entries. Yours instantly provides me with the broad outlines of a character, and it makes me want to learn more about him (assuming a "him"). I don't know if it's picaresque, or a memory followed by a flash-forward into a crisis even a fired-from-more-than-half-of-them resourceful, take-the-world-my-way individual couldn't handle. But something. Great fun here!
"It wasn't the heavy load I had to carry, it was Wolf, the hulking German shepherd dog who would lay in wait at 15 Rena Crescent as I lugged my paper bag from one side of the street to the other, getting closer with every delivery."
The back-breaking early jobs that stick with us - you describe the experience so well. The emotional and self-preservation backdrop. It feels like this was the start of you taking less off of people or dogs that stood in your way. Facing down your fears. I love that you remembered such specific details. The where with the address, the dog's name.
Substitute kindergarten teacher in a charter school who speaks Spanish for half the day. It was a two-day job, and it took all the power I had not to call in sick on the second day. It wasn't the snot-noses or crying or even the Spanish (I'm sort of bilingual). It was the constant motion required to keep a group of 20 five-year-olds on task. The clock was painfully slow. By the end, I resorted to performing front flips into a foam pit just to keep their attention.
I have this recurring image of you glancing at the clock during a hairs-breadth pause in the disaster and wondering if some elf has turned the hands back, yet again.
I have subbed for kindergarten. There really isn't a $ amount of pay to pull me back into it. $10 an hour was not enough.
Flop sweat at the end of the day from Bandaids and new crayon requests. Love the humor infused into this - the front flips into a foam pit to keep their attention. Subbing into a kindy class with Spanish speakers feels like it would be extra hard. Props to you!
That would have to be my first paid writing job. This was back in the 80s and I wrote promotional scripts to torture folks put on-hold when they called various businesses. When I started, I had no idea that my boss was a super shady character. He was nice enough but never made eye contact and always kept his gaze glued to the floor when he walked through the office. Eventually, I learned that he was an ex- police officer who used to patrol the area around the high school I attended and had an affair with a girl in my class. He'd also been convicted for some type of investment scam. One day at the office, he asked his assistant to help him get something out of his car—a fancy white Jaguar. Later, with eyes round as saucers, she whispered to me that his trunk was loaded with guns! Not long after that incident, I picked up my local morning newspaper to see my boss's face on the front page. He'd been arrested for various crimes— gun smuggling may have been one of them; I can't remember the specifics. And that, thankfully, was the end of my first professional writing job.
"Eventually, I learned that he was an ex- police officer who used to patrol the area around the high school I attended and had an affair with a girl in my class"
some type of investment scam
a car loaded with guns
Yikes! Such an unsavory boss.
No wonder you were writing promotional scripts to torture people with. :) The mention of the fancy white Jaguar was a great description. I could instantly picture your slimy boss packing it with guns and who knows what else.
I worked for lawyers. That really should be all I need to say, but there's more. I had a niche expertise - in receivership administration. I was hired to a small, new firm of young lawyers, one of whom (Tom) was looking to get into receivership. Tom (who happened to be extremely smart) was hugely fat - like walk-down-the-hall-and-you-think-there's-an-earthquake fat. He also liked to make calculated gambles with his partners' firm's financial resources (including its personnel - me), and when a those didn't pan out satisfactorily, his partners ejected him from the firm in which his name was first on the door.
Tom began keeping tabs on his partners, because at least one of them was committing some type of securities fraud. Unbeknownst to me, there was a lawsuit pending against said partner and the firm which ultimately resulted in its closure. Tom had retained a list of email logins and passwords, and at night, he would dial in via Citrix and rifle through his former partners' computers. His login and password? Why, mine of course!
I knew something was amiss, and I knew it had something to do with Tom. I did my best to assure the rest of the partners that I had no dog in their fight, but, in a fit of true paranoia, they called me into a meeting one day and fired me. I was escorted out of the office - in front of all of my colleagues - by three (!) security guards. My reputation - that I had worked decades to build through hard work and good character - was destroyed.
OK, so I admit - I have lawyers in the family and I barely got past your first line. (Actually, I didn't, so the rest of this is typed after coming BACK from the bathroom.)
My sentiments echo Amy's -- fraud and retaliation come to mine. I suppose there was nothing that you could prove. Grr. And yes, this took me from laugh-out-loud to downright anger -- quite the transition of mood here...
I remember Citrix. From calculated gambles with the financial resources to spying on the partner/firm - it feels like you could have written a crime drama script.
It's so unfair that you got caught up in Tom's schemes because he used your login/password. Did his actions ever catch up with him?
Oh, that's a tough one. But this one is a contender:
It was 1984. I was a recent college graduate with no real direction. I did have a rather vague, unformed idea about getting into book publishing, but I lived in the DC area, not exactly a publishing mecca; my parents had moved there the year before I finished high school in Illinois. I needed a job — preferably an office job — to make some money, get an apartment, and eventually save enough to move to another city.
DC is a government town, so the most plentiful white-collar jobs are government jobs. All I had to do was go to the Office of Personnel Management, take a test, and wait to hear from a potential employer. The test turned out to be surprisingly, almost embarrassingly, easy — like the most watered-down version you can imagine of the SAT. I got a high score and was snapped up quickly by the Export-Import Bank, which needed a clerk typist in its personnel office. Yes, I am old — this was long before the days of “human resources.”
The job was an eye-opener. It revealed to me a world I’d hitherto been unaware of — a world in which people really weren’t into their jobs.
All my life, I’d been surrounded by adults who loved their work. Most were professors; some were doctors, teachers, or other professionals. The professors I knew, including my parents, were doing work they cared about deeply; while they worked hard, they had plenty of vacation time and seemed to lead fairly balanced lives. It didn’t hurt that life was pretty easy in Urbana, Illinois. There was no such thing as a long commute, unless you chose, for some reason, to live way out among the corn and soybean fields. My parents could walk to work in 20 minutes, and they usually drove in just a few.
My first full-time job, in contrast, came with a long commute for the first few months, when I was still living at my parents’ house in Potomac, Maryland. I had to drive to a commuter bus, which was always a race against time because it didn’t run very often; the Metro station had limited parking and was much farther away from us than the Montgomery Mall bus stop. When I moved into the city and walked to work (in 20 minutes!), people I mentioned that to looked at me as if I came from Mars.
But much more shocking to me than the commute was the fact that my co-workers weren’t even remotely following their calling. Most of them had drifted into their jobs by chance. As I had, but for me it was just a pit stop on the way to presumably better things. They were simply collecting a paycheck. They watched the clock. They lived for the weekend.
I could see why. The jobs weren’t inspiring or engaging, and that was especially true for the three of us who worked as employee development clerks, Clerk-Typist Series 0322.
I, too, became a clock-watcher and weekend-anticipator. My first day on the job made it clear what I was in for. Despite my clerk-typist designation, I wasn’t particularly good at typing. In rebellion against 1970s expectations for girls, I’d refused to take typing or home economics classes in high school. So imagine my delight when my first task, which took me all day, was typing the same rejection letter to six different job applicants. On a typewriter; word processors weren’t introduced to the office till the following year. I can’t recall if the rejection letters were for my job or for some other position, but I do know that a lot of Wite-Out was used that day.
It was bad enough to be working in a government agency, but a government agency and a bank!? This Flower Child (my name for my hidden generation between Boomers and X, which some call Jones) did not fit in.
I made perfunctory attempts to wear the right clothes, but my heart wasn’t in it — and it wasn’t easy for me in the conservative 1980s DC environment, where pantyhose and pumps were de rigueur. There was a certain uniform you were expected to conform to, and I couldn’t quite stomach it. So I skirted the edges of appropriate attire. More often than not I failed miserably, like the time when I wore clogs to work; I felt people staring at my shoes all day.
I had no illusions about fitting in. But if I had, they would have been shattered the day that I found myself in a large room filled with Xerox machines — just me and a conservative-looking secretary, one who wore the requisite high-heeled shoes and hose. Absorbed in struggling with paper jams as I tried to make stacks of copies of who-knows-what, I wasn’t prepared for her question. She looked me up and down and asked, slowly and quizzically, “Are you a … hippie?”
I was too taken aback by the question to come up with a good answer. Was there such a thing as a hippie in 1984? I now realize that there were indeed hippies then, and there may always be. But at the time, my narrow view of what constituted a hippie made me consider the question woefully out of date. I figured that the secretary, like most EXIM Bank employees, didn’t know what to make of me and was simply grasping for any possible way to fit me into some box — any box.
The truth was that despite my halfhearted sartorial attempts, I didn’t want to fit into their boxes or be like them. The office environment and the people I shared it with for eight hours a day had me constantly cringing. Neither The Office nor Office Space had yet been made, but our office would have provided ample fodder for that TV show and movie.
There was the time when I was walking down the streets of DC with the head of personnel, Tami — a very white, rather conservative woman who in the evenings retreated to the suburbs, where she belonged. On spotting some homeless people, she blurted out, “I don’t see why they don’t just get up and DO something!” There was the volleyball game I hadn’t wanted to join, during which my boss, Bert, yelled at me for not managing to hit the ball — like I really wanted to be reminded of junior high PE class? There was the time when Bert whistled at another clerk typist and then said, “Don’t worry, my bark is worse than my bite.” It was less creepy than it sounds, but still. There was the time when we had a male stripper in the office for Tami’s 40th birthday and the suburban women went nuts.
Then there were the posters. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a personnel office in the ‘80s had to be full of inspirational posters. Our office didn’t disappoint in that regard. Till revisiting the first photo above, I hadn’t recalled that decidedly uninspiring poster, but my brain could never erase the memory of one that depicted a kitten hanging from a tree, with the inscription, “Hang in there, baby, Friday’s coming!”
Needless to say, the “inspirational” posters had the opposite effect on me. Let’s face it — there was nothing inspiring about the job.
Now and then, the tedium was alleviated momentarily. Because we were just a couple blocks away and had low-level security clearances (a story for another time), we’d sometimes get invited to the White House lawn to help fill audiences for visiting dignitaries. It was actually interesting to see, from a distance, Ronald Reagan spewing out platitudes alongside whoever his guest was.
Before long I was out of there — on to bigger and better things in my chosen city, San Francisco.
My year and four months at EXIM Bank (not that I was counting!) felt much longer, but at least my time there taught me an important lesson: Enjoyable, satisfying work isn’t a given; you have to seek it intentionally. Lots of people out there are trapped in dull, soul-killing jobs and live for the weekend. Who knew? I just knew I didn’t want to be one of them.
It's interesting to see how the Export-Import Bank employees really operated - people who really weren't into their jobs. Very disillusioning to find out that people didn't care about where they worked or how they did their jobs.
Long commutes and soul-killing jobs really suck!
Wite out and word processors and inspirational cat posters - what a blast from the past. Being called a "hippie" for being an empathetic person feels like it could happen now or in the past. 1 year and 4 months to find out intentionality in work is crucial for balance and happiness. A great lesson to learn and not from a cat poster. :)
I work as a PR person and genuinely had a director suggest to me that I try writing press releases using AI.
It made working behind bars, as a gardener or as anything else in my younger days seem like an absolute dream. To have your craft and profession that you'd worked on for 10 years undermined by someone in a position of power and who should have some knowledge of your industry was mind-blowing.
AI has its place I think but press releases and magazine copy isn't it. I've seen so many lifestyle magazines that I write for decimated because the AI version of human writing had no soul - and people just didn't read it enough.
Sorry that you had such a disappointing situation. I'm guessing the "suggestion" was really more of a "do it this way or else." :(
It wasn't so much as "do it this way or else". It was actually much more nefarious in my view, if a piece of work failed to perform, usually because too many cooks came in and completely altered the work until it said nothing at all, he would throw in comments to undermine you and try and make you feel awful.
This was just his way of operating, it was to consistently ensure you felt at fault or he could just punch a few words into an AI system and do a better job than you could.
Straight graveyard shift at a soda bottling factory and warehouse. I worked alone in the warehouse that was as big as a football field. Sodas of kinds palletized to the ceiling two stories up.
Five nights a week relieving the swing shift guy who looked like a 1950's beatnik caricature. He had to wear dark sunglasses even at night because of his snow blindness. His favorite pasttime at work was to feed his pet black widow who lived in a dark corner. I respected his pet and his willingness to fetch her tasty flies and such.
I loaded semi's with twenty pallets of soda destined for sites unknown to me. Nights in the warehouse/light manufacturing district in a large city made me hyper-alert. The night I saw the three-man gang break into a parked and loaded trailer for three cases of soda made me realize that some folks will work very hard to steal virtually nothing and that under those circumstances my life probably meant very little to someone lurking out there in the dark. After all, I had to be rich because I had a job.
Wow. Maybe you could do something on swing / midnight shift characters. I love these stories -- eyewitness to bizarre human behavior, up close and (too) personal...
What a great, unexpected setting! Now I'm humming the Laverne and Shirley theme song too. :) Love the descriptions of the other characters - the beatnik caricature with snow blindness and a black widow spider. The fact that this is set at a soda bottling factory is so intriguing.
Add in a gang and the appraisal of circumstances and this short lived job stands out as a very unique experience. - made me realize that some folks will work very hard to steal virtually nothing and that under those circumstances my life probably meant very little to someone lurking out there in the dark. I lasted two more nights.
I had risen quickly to the upper ranks of corporate mediocrity and eagerly applied for and was rewarded to the next level, my predecessor having failed miserably at the job. There I met the mistress of the game, Madam X. She knew how to keep her minions in line: punish, cajole, bully, and demean, pitting one poor soul against another, stand back to watch the delicious results. But I prided myself in my art of communication. I taught the course for heaven’s sake. What could go wrong?. But nothing I tried seemed to have any effect at all.
I worked at an out-of-State offshoot, and one disastrous day she proclaimed she would be arriving for a visit. I suggested an evening meal together, hoping that this might cement our relationship.
The meal started well. The air was redolent with the smell of fine dining, the room plush with waiters eager to offer their services. She explained the art of cooking celeriac and I responded with glowing enthusiasm. But by dessert the conversation turned. She declared that she never knew where I stood. Perhaps I had been over-doing the paraphrasing a bit? She hammered on. What was I thinking about her and our relationship. On and on she went until, heedlessly, into the valley of death I plunged.
“Sometimes I think we don’t communicate very well”.
There was a deathly silence. She turned as white as the surrounding walls, with a little bright spot of pink right at the tip of her nose.
“Excuse me for a moment” she said eventually, and disappeared. I stared out at the desolate palm trees on the bay. I rearranged my napkin. I hailed the waiter and paid the bill. I wished a thousand times that I could stuff those words back into my mouth. Had she left? What should I do?
Eventually she returned.
“Well” she said “I suppose you would like me to get a taxi.”
“No, no” I begged, ever the sycophant “I’ll drive you to your hotel of course.”
On the drive back I asked her how she was feeling?
“As if I’m going to throw up” she replied.
Some 4 weeks later I was fired - with a 6-month bonus and all stock options intact, a welcome release - and the realization that my predecessor, in fact, had not been terrible at her job at all.
What an unexpected twist: Some 4 weeks later I was fired - with a 6-month bonus and all stock options intact, a welcome release - and the realization that my predecessor, in fact, had not been terrible at her job at all.
The descriptions here again make the memory come to life! he boss' name, the desolate palm trees, the cooking descriptions.
I once did budgets for what used to be called guerilla porn. these were low budget junk videos shot on the fly in any number of semi public places. I needed the money because after 9/11, my work as a field producer dried up for a while and a friend of a friend was producing this stuff because he was bored. Walking in and out of an editing bay and catching snippets of body parts contorted into various superhuman angles wasn't so bad. It's just sex, even if it was sloppy and dumb. Making a few shekels in the bad porn world wasn't the shame hill I was going to die on, but when one of the hungry production assistants plopped a box of used sex toys on my desk and asked if I would help clean them, I knew that my future in guerilla porn was over. I didn't even bother formally quitting. I just didn't show up for work the following day.
Great job at describing and condensing down this work so that we as readers - get it. That can be hard to do if it's a job that we may not know from the title itself.
"It's just sex, even if it was sloppy and dumb. Making a few shekels in the bad porn world wasn't the shame hill I was going to die on, but when one of the hungry production assistants plopped a box of used sex toys on my desk and asked if I would help clean them, I knew that my future in guerilla porn was over."
There's a statement here (and in several of the other posts) in how we (you) draw lines at jobs, even desperate or early ones. Cleaning used sex toys was a step too far. Your experience and response feels like it could have happened yesterday even though the memories are over two decades past.
The day I turned sixteen I became an official film technician at the Photo Depot. I felt like my dream had come true landing the position. When my boss handed me a white lab coat I beamed as if I had just won an Emmy. The hourly rate was $3.25 per hour. It was better than babysitting which only paid $1.00.
My new job was loaded with important responsibilities. I greeted customers. I’d drop film into envelopes and set it on the processing counter. Then I’d sit at the gargantuan machine to print negatives for six hours.
“Customer service is our number one priority,” my boss said, patting me on the back, a little lower than necessary if I can be honest. His glass eye bobbed around and that piece of greasy gray hair flopped on the top of his head but none of it bothered me. After all, I was a film technician and was on top of the world.
About six months into the job a young guy dropped off a roll of Kodak color film. I settled myself at the printer and immediately noticed something strange on the negatives. “Oh my God,” I said to my co-worker. Every image on the roll was a penis. As a newly sixteen year old I had never seen a real penis, only the ones in my father’s dirty magazines or maybe at school if someone snuck in The Joy of Sex. But here, in front of me was a man’s organ, larger than life, on my screen, about to be turned into twelve 4x6 glossy prints. I was horrified and intrigued at the same time. One of the images showed the guy’s penis sticking out of his zippered jeans with a sign hanging off it reading “OUT OF ORDER.”
Of course I had to bring the obscene pictures to school so I printed dozens and dozens of extras to hand out to my friends, hoping it would make me cool. And I was cool. Until I wasn’t. The next day my boss realized what I had done and fired me on the spot saying I had violated the company’s privacy policy. I was crushed and so embarrassed. Turning in my beloved lab coat I said goodbye to my co-workers and that was the end of that. But man, for one whole day I was sure popular in high school.
"The day I turned sixteen I became an official film technician at the Photo Depot. I felt like my dream had come true landing the position. When my boss handed me a white lab coat I beamed as if I had just won an Emmy. The hourly rate was $3.25 per hour. It was better than babysitting which only paid $1.00."
I miss the days of Fotomats and Photo Depots. Film pictures overall.
It's so interesting here that the exciting and official job had more layers than just an early job. The lecherous boss. The thrill of a title. The naked images. Taking them to school. The lab coat. The instant popularity at school. The details are so vivid that I felt transported back with you.
It's funny the bizzare details that come rushing back when you let yourself go there. Ironically I became a professional photographer and now that I'm retired, I spend time photographing birds and wildlife while also writing a memoir about my adventures. And no more silly lab coat! Life is good. :-)
The worst job wasn’t the same as some of the worst jobs that most people post, but it was the fifth job I took, simultaneously, while I was a freshman in college in 1966. It was necessary to have this last job because I could not afford to live otherwise!
The day the catering job became the worst was when I had only 10 minutes between the end of one job and that job a mile and a half across campus. Someone had just put brownies in my locker and they were spiked which I did not know.
What happened at the job was I had a plate full of hot stew to deliver to a table and it jumped right off of my tray! I had no idea what happened until perhaps a year later. It was definitely an OMG moment and the worst moment of a job I’ve ever had.
I did a series of jobs to afford college too but NEVER 5 at once. It sounds like your fifth job was complicated by several external events out of your control - time, spiked brownies. The fact that you didn't know what happened with the stew. Hoping by then, you had a few less jobs, and stress.
Thanks for reading! That plate with stew--it is as if it was yesterday, the spiked brownie, which I'd gulped down, didn't taste good because it was full of dried "herbs". At that date, those "herbs" were marijuana and I'd not ever eaten anything like that before--so I was higher than high! And so innocent. The stew was a mess and I'd never done or seen anything like it.
But not stressful with so many jobs--just far too many to juggle well.
The summer before college, I worked as a marketing intern at an “As Seen on TV” infomercial products company. 😂
I was 17 years old, ambitious ahead of my freshman year at Princeton, but with no work experience. To remedy my lack of business skills, for twelve weeks, I drove my way through suburban North Jersey to learn the ropes at a place best known for things that get sold for “$19.99 plus shipping and handling” with the perennial, “But wait! There’s more!” as part of the sale.
At the time, the company was wildly well-known for a foot file called the Ped Egg.
I can assure you—that workplace was as campy, quirky, and cheesy as the commercials and products they sold.
The moment I’ll always laugh about was a group brainstorming session to name an upcoming product: a meat tenderizer. My name ideas, “The meat genie,” “meat buddy” and “meat master” did not win out in the brainstorming session, but neither did the names that would make high school boys completely lose it with laughter.
I still have the list of name suggestions in my files. I break it out on hard work days to make me laugh about the silliness of the world of business. Needless to say I did not stay in marketing…
“But wait, there’s more!”
On a more profound note, the founder was an Indian guy who had started the company from scratch after moving to the United States. He was a living case in point of achievement of the stereotypical “American Dream.” Through this business, he worked his way to wealth, rags to riches, providing bountifully for his family of 5. He his name on buildings at my high school. The family in a mansion. The whole nine yards. It was very New Jersey, a little cheesy, but the founder was a really inspiring figure to be around.
During that summer, I felt a great respect for the ingenuity of the “American Dream” that the founder and the company represented. I shadowed commercial shoots. I read and managed letters and emails from inventors: literally anyone could write in with an invention and prototype and pitch the company. Great ideas could truly come to life and get sold.
Thinking back to that summer of 2008, in some ways, it’s the most patriotic I’ve ever felt. Especially in today’s day and age, that moment of Americana-style, bootstrapper ingenuity is something on which I look back on fondly.
"I was 17 years old, ambitious ahead of my freshman year at Princeton, but with no work experience. To remedy my lack of business skills, for twelve weeks, I drove my way through suburban North Jersey to learn the ropes at a place best known for things that get sold for “$19.99 plus shipping and handling” with the perennial, “But wait! There’s more!” as part of the sale."
The background world of As Seen on TV products! The meat product brainstorming meeting. The contrast between Princeton on the horizon and the immigrant back story. It sounds like you got some solid experience that summer - in work and life. Do you think you appreciate and understand the experiences more now with perspective?
My professional life since that internship has ranged widely, but there are common threads across my roles of interesting subcultures, eccentric characters, and people who are determined to roll up their sleeves and do what it takes to build something that lasts—and for every inspiring figure I’ve met, there are tragic ones, too. Since that internship in 2008—in no particular order—I’ve been a podcaster, a baker, a competitive martial artist, a business school case study writer, freelance writer, and tech worker across 4-5 industries. It has been a wild, wide-ranging professional ride over 17 years, with the story still being written. 😆
Re: this particular anecdote, as an Ivy League-bound overachiever circa 2008, my naive sense at 17 was that my education would be the main thing to open doors in my life and “the future” as I vaguely conceived it. This was also a principle I drew from my dad, a self-employed lawyer whose own dad immigrated to the US via Ellis Island in the early 20th century and had a particular industriousness of mentality ingrained in him.
Whether due to the generational legacy or the kinds of jobs and environments in which I found myself, the older I got and more experiences I had in and around the business world, the more I internalized that my education remains a life-changing and wonderful privilege, but when it came to building a career—and, more importantly, a life I was proud of—grit, hard work, and a willingness to be in the trenches often served me more than my degree in isolation.
1959: I did get fired, but not before I'd had some fun. I'm legally (not totally) blind, and had a scholarship from the New York State Commission for the Blind for tuition, books and six (sic) dollars a week in living expenses at a prestigious university. I needed a job. If I read too much I got headaches, so I tried to find work that didn't involve reading--like handing out free samples of Vick's cough drops on street corners in the winter--but I ended up writing obituaries for the university's alumni magazine. The obituaries came from family members; some were typed, but most were hand scribbled. I struggled to read them. I got frustrated. What to do? I decided to use those I could read and invent the rest. "Sam Winterspoon, class of '02, developed the first over-the-counter drug for foot fungus......" My obituaries were much more colorful than those of relatives, but I soon got fired. Naomi Woronov
These responses have made me smile this morning. It sounds like you had writer (and survival) instincts very early on. "developed the first over-the-counter drug for foot fungus." The thought of handing out cough drops. To remember these 1959 details so vividly is wonderful - it's a great memory to jumpstart writing but it's also interesting for potential readers. It feels like something a Mad Men character might have done as a side job.
TLDR: I got demoted to being a WORM COUNTER and then still got fired.
For being a closeted queer at a bible college reasons, I spent a summer in the 80s in Springfield, MO. The only place hiring for summer jobs in Springfield, Missouri, was the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Company Catalog Fulfillment Center. At the interview, a bored-looking woman checked my paperwork to ensure I was of legal age for factory work and immediately hired me.
I hesitated "you don't need any special skills?"
"It's not brain science," she said.
I think she was combining "It's not brain surgery" with "It's not rocket science."
I started that night at the 11 pm to 7 am shift, with a three-minute orientation from a lightly cranky woman chewing on a cigar.
"There's a rule against smoking, isn't a rule against tobacco," she said, in response to my very much unanswered question.
"Okay, you see that box, Jesus College?" I'd told her that I attended Mid America, and she instantly parlayed it into a nickname.
"So, you see, the box comes down the conveyor belt, and then you grab the catalog order form. Look for the item they ordered over here." She gestured to an entire warehouse full of tiny fishing-related objects in hundreds of bins.
"How do I know where to find them?"
"Ya look," she said. "They're also labeled."
She continued. "So you grab it, make sure you have the right amount."
My question about knowing how to find the items made her reconsider whether this was enough explanation.
"I mean, if they order two, put in two. If they order three, put in three. Like that. Put 'em in the box, and then let the box go down the belt.
Easy, right?"
"Sure," I said. "Easy."
She left. I grabbed the order form from the first box, headed enthusiastically into the towering bins of fishing tackle, and examined each one.
I read from the form.
"Let's see. Strike King Rage bug. I need one of those. Mepps Musky Flashabou Spinner. Two of those. And I need one Musky Mayhem Tackle Double Showgirl Spinner."
I would not have known a Strike King Rage Bug if it came up and bit me on my repressed gay ass.
I started methodically reading the tiny print on the bins.
"Okay, War Eagle Tandem Willow Spinnerbaits. Nope. Booyah Tux and Tails Spinnerbaits Double Colorado. Nope. Panther Martin Salmon and Steelhead Spinner."
Almost every label I read would have made an excellent drag name. Unfortunately, I wouldn't know about the existence of drag names for nearly another decade.
I had to read 27 bin labels before finding even the first item. As I returned to the conveyor belt with the Strike King Rage Bug, I had to run 30 yards to catch its box, which I then grabbed off the conveyor belt and took with me to the next round of bin reading.
It took me 17 bins and 13 bins respectively to find the next two items; when I triumphantly returned to the conveyor belt, my cigar-chewing supervisor was there.
She looked at me and then at the boxes piling up in my area and falling off the conveyor belt. She sighed deeply, maybe from her pancreas.
There was a large red button labeled "conveyor emergency stop" on the far wall. She walked over, turned around to look at me, sighed again, and pushed the button.
I had created the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center equivalent of Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.
Maybe, technically speaking, you didn't need special skills to do this job. But you did need enough casual experience with fishing lures to recognize them on sight; otherwise, you'd never be able to keep up with the conveyor belt.
"Where are you from?" My cigar-chewing friend asked, with a tone that implied she thought "the moon" was the 100 percent likely response.
"I've got someone headed your way, Betty," she said into her walkie-talkie. I was demoted to the night shift worm counter at the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center.
Worm Counter is the kind of employment where the job description is wholely encompassed in the job title. They sat me at a table in a room kept chilly for the comfort of the worms. On my left was a huge bin of rich black earth trembling with hundreds of nightcrawlers, and on my right were white plastic containers. My job was to pull the worms out of the soil and carefully place one dozen in each white container that had been prepped with its own little clump of traveling soil.
When I stopped by the convenience store to get a soda on my way home after my shift, a woman ladeling chili onto her self-serve nachos said, "Maaaaan something smells like worms around here."
Not something
Someone.
Me.
Perhaps you'd think this turn of events might cause me to quit my job at the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center. Nope. Bass Pro was the only place hiring, and I needed a job to stay in town. Never underestimate the power of a repressed homosexual's crush on their volleyball team captain.
I did not quit. When I came in the next night, Betty came at 3 am to inform me that the spot checks of my worm counts had been wrong four times in four hours. But she wasn't going to demote me from Worm Counter because there was apparently no job requiring fewer skills. Instead, Betty informed me that my services would no longer be needed at the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center.
This line stands out so much: I had created the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center equivalent of Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. Being demoted to worm counter from worm sorter feels like a whole backroom world of Bass Pro. Again, we get memorable sensory details - the smell of the worms, the chili and nachos. Through the memories, it's interesting that your own self-discovery comes through in your reactions and commentary too. It's a story about worms but feels like so much more in your timeline.
When I was twelve, since I was a student at the local ballet school, I was hired by our town’s J.C. Penney department store to be Prince Charming. Okay, the job only lasted an afternoon, but still. Rewarded with a $20 gift certificate, I bought my first suit, in brown polyester. I had to show up in white tights, a pink tunic, and ballet slippers, and spend four hours kneeling in front of a white and pink plywood throne, as a never-ending line of girls took their turn sitting on the tasseled cushion and earnestly tried to maneuver their right foot into the long, narrow glass slipper I held out for them. If the slipper fit, they would be entered into the grand prize raffle, giving them a chance to win a dress or a supply of Cinderella perfume. The contest was a scam. No human girl’s foot would fit into a 10-inch by 2-inch glass shoe shaped like a canoe. But that didn’t excuse all the moms I saw cheating – dropping their daughter’s names into the grand prize box instead of the consolation prize box. That was disappointing. It was bad enough that I had to relax the definition of “the shoe fits” so that there were at least some names in the winning box. I felt that making the tough call of what fit and what didn't should have delegated to someone higher in the hierarchy. (Or lower, since I was the Prince, after all!)
Oh my! I remember those days of teen/tween fashion shows at department stores. I always wanted to be on a teen council or walk the runway in JC Penney clothes. Your Prince Charming job experience is so unique though. The humorous details and retail backstory are so charming too. The cheating moms. Contest scam. Cinderella perfume. "Shoe fits." The costume and payment. I want to know if there were more contests or if this was dreamed up by some eager Penney's employee. And if there's a picture of you holding out the shoe. :)
I joined the Air Force as a technician at 18. After recruit training, I had to wait two weeks before tech course started. Me and other course members were assigned to 'base duties'. One morning we were picked up by truck, and taken to a field at the end of the airstrip where sheep were grazing. Our job was to periodically jump off, and shovel sheep manure into the back of the truck. Needless to say, by the end of the day we were totally covered in it. When we returned to the base proper, we were tasked with spreading the manure over the Commanding Officer's wife's rose garden. I still remember that smell.
More great sensory details! Sheep manure may be the ultimate smell to think back on. It's interesting how you order the details here (maybe by life importance) - joining the Air Force at 18 feels like the most important with the smelly task secondary. These are only short entries but I was intrigued wondering if you stayed in the Air Force, what other similar tasks you had to do.
I think we all had at least one of those "no future" jobs that we did for minimal money. :) The idea of circulars and delivering paper feels so far away now with today's digital version. When I think back on my early, boring jobs, it can open up other experiences or memories too.
As a 19-year-old aspiring actress living in Venice I'd obviously applied for jobs waiting tables in various West LA. venues. I had a part time cashier job at Zuckys, but it was barely covering my weekly gas money out to the Valley for acting classes. So I took a sales job, selling printer toner (for you youngsters, that's printer ink). The job started at 5:30 am every weekday, so we'd be ready to start dialing the East Coast at 6. The warren of rooms was viciously lit by long banks of fluorescent bulbs. The weak, slightly burned coffee was abundant. We were cold calling from lists of businesses who had printers. We'd been trained to ask questions about their supply of toner so they'd think we were calling from whoever their supplier was. Then offer a very low cost first order price to get them to switch to our company. The people we talked to got mad another, and often hung up after some choice words. I thought I could lie for a living by playing a part, after all, I'd already been acting professionally for years by then. I couldn’t. I lasted a week.
Loving the sensory and place details in the posts. It's fascinating to me how those details from past jobs are what come through to ground them now. They're the details that take potential readers to the jobs and places because we can feel what you felt. Adding in the acting aspirations here make this more than "just" a cold-calling job - it makes it YOUR life story with great essay potential!
PS: Want more ideas to inspire your own writing? Join us in February for "28 Days, 28 Essay Prompts: A Month of Generating Inspiration and Ideas for Memoir"
“AMBER ALERT!” Chad yelled. At me. Through the company branded megaphone on Amber’s desk.
“AMBER IS OUT TO LUNCH!!!” I yelled back.
He was already back to giggling with ‘large guys’ on speaker phones, who were giggling to other ‘large guys’ about how much their large speaker phones cost.
Chad was the only one who thought the Amber Alerts, or the occasional air horn thrills were still funny. No matter how many times I knew to expect him and tried to prepare, most weeks didn’t pass without one air horn blow startling a little pee out of me. Usually, moments I was nose to computer screen doing something crazy again, like generating revenue for Chad.
Chad’s office was the same size as the adjacent office that held all 10 of the rest of us barn animals and all 10 of our custom, double-wide, wrap around stables. The wrap arounds were presented as luxury cubicles.
They were there to provide aesthetic barriers between Chad’s Billion Dollar Uber Friends and the scowling faces of Chad’s 3 Accounting Hens that loyally squawked at him for 30 years and were stuck here now RE zero transferable skills in the real world.
The Hens somehow navigated Chad through a $2.7B public merger- acquisition but they couldn’t navigate Excel. Even though I was just salary…same amount…every time…week after week…year after year, the odds of getting a frantic call Friday ordering me to not cash the wrong paycheck currently in my purse, until Monday, were 50/50.
"It takes all 3 to make 1," Chad reminded them daily. While they flipped him off in unison.
Chad couldn’t get rid of them either.
They knew all the secrets. And their faces threatened to expose them if you dared look directly at them. Hence, the barriers.
“Questionable Aesthetics…Call the Paramedics!” Chad sang while straightening up all 3 of their barriers himself, while The Hens executed a synchronized flip off, again.
“AMBER ALERT!” Chad yelled again. Laughing.
“Amber is out to lunch.” I said. Again. Not laughing.
Amber had been out to lunch for a year now.
It took me 12 weeks and 50 interviews to offer Amber the role. She was the 3rd we met and an instantly perfect star. Chad insisted I confirm that, by meeting the other 47 Executive Assistants available on the DC market too, just to be sure.
It took a 10-man team, a crane, and roof access to install Chad’s billionaire dry erase board. He himself, polished it like the Mona Lisa at night. The designers arrived at dawn to hand paint the life-sized logos of the day’s scheduled ‘large guy’ lineup.
I forgot to warn Amber no one goes out to lunch on a weekday. Ever. And everyone else assumed Amber assumed we didn’t ever leave. Since we didn’t ever leave
.
Amber escaped HQ at noon on Wednesday. Day 3. She did leave a humongous note none of us could miss, to be fair.
She wrote: AMBER IS OUT TO LUNCH!!!!! In big black block letters. On Chads billion-dollar board.
In permanent marker.
‘Success is an ability to move on from failure to failure without losing one’s enthusiasm’ I read on a wall hanging in a two-star hotel somewhere or other when I was about halfway through this list of shit jobs you can read below.
First job - waitress for a wedding party - aged 16 - creme caramel in little glass dishes - sliding around the tray - oops - one landed on a man’s shoulder and the cream pudding splattered like a custard tart. That was my first and last shift.
Second job - ear piercing on Brighton pier - failed to disclose fear of needles, so avoided having to do any terrifying body piercings by lying to customers; ‘not today’ I said. And I said that every day until the days got shorter, and I was back in college.
Third job - after graduating with a degree in history, I worked as a literacy teacher in Chelmsford prison. My approach was collective learning, not teaching as such. Inspired Dave Foreman’s book Ecodefence, I produced a handout on possessive apostrophes entitled ‘How to disable a motor vehicle’. I got fired.
Fourth job - lining up cars for auction. Yes, I was hired to park cars in impeccably neat rows like a 5-year-old with box of matchbox toys. It was very cold work in winter. I heard that the company next door had a subsidised canteen and an inside toilet. I quit.
Fifth job - a warehouse operative on minimum wage at Penguin Random House (next door to the car auction). My job was ‘picking and packing’ books. It was fine until one day it was announced that the company had made 56 million pounds profit. Exploited and angry, I became a Marxist and started writing. I went to trade union meetings. Then the bosses discovered my blog. I got blacklisted.
Back to education - I worked in a school as a teaching assistant for £13,00/pa and read the brilliant David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’. Questioning, I googled the salary of the CEO of the academy chain where I worked. Mr Drinkall’s annual salary, I discovered, was £270,000, double that of the Prime Minister at the time! Furthermore, I discovered he’d received a bonus of £200,000 - he found my blogpost with his name on it - and I got disciplined for bringing the academy chain into disrepute!!
I got another job.
And another.
Now, I don’t even know who my employer is, I’m still working in education, as a tutor for kids who have been excluded from mainstream schools. I was recruited by an agency on a zero-hour contract, but I’ve never had a contract. They say, they are not my employer, I know my rights and demanded a statement of employment. Turns out my employer is Thorpe Spring Ltd. nature of business ‘general trade’: and, according to Companies House, the business hasn’t filed any accounts, ever. I have some questions.
Do I have the energy? Am I losing my enthusiasm?
I'm picturing your opening quote with an upside-down cat on the poster. :) What a list of beginning jobs! Love that you have included great sensory and place details to immerse us in the memories. Being 16 and having the creme caramel fall or being 36 and having the same thing happen might both result in termination, but the age is important.
‘Success is an ability to move on from failure to failure without losing one’s enthusiasm’ I read on a wall hanging in a two-star hotel somewhere or other when I was about halfway through this list of shit jobs you can read below."
First job: "creme caramel in little glass dishes - sliding around the tray - oops - one landed on a man’s shoulder and the cream pudding splattered like a custard tart
Second job: ear piercing on Brighton pier
so intriguing - the book!
Third job: Inspired Dave Foreman’s book Ecodefence, I produced a handout on possessive apostrophes entitled ‘How to disable a motor vehicle’.
Fourth job - Yes, I was hired to park cars in impeccably neat rows like a 5-year-old with box of matchbox toys.
Interesting to see how these last two jobs were when you became more of an activist, finding out money details. There's a different confidence level and investment in the jobs/leaving the jobs.
Fifth job - a warehouse operative on minimum wage at Penguin Random House. Exploited and angry, I became a Marxist and started writing.
Back to education - read the brilliant David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’. Furthermore, I discovered he’d received a bonus of £200,000 - he found my blog post with his name on it - and I got disciplined for bringing the academy chain into disrepute!!
I got another job.
And another.
Now, I don’t even know who my employer is, I’m still working in education, as a tutor for kids who have been excluded from mainstream schools. Turns out my employer is Thorpe Spring Ltd. nature of business ‘general trade’: and, according to Companies House, the business hasn’t filed any accounts, ever.
and full circle back to the opening quote:
I have some questions.
Do I have the energy? Am I losing my enthusiasm?
It was truly unfair and a really shitty thing he did. I think karma did ultimately catch up with him, which was sad as he did not live to be an old man.
Oh, it's been fifty years. And it was the worst job inside of a worst job. Kind of like the Russian doll of worst jobs.
I really don't like groundskeeping work and knew that even as a teen. I'd been encouraged to spend my summer productively (adult version), doing an immense amount of garden work at a local famous tourist location (I won't name it -- even now, somebody might be nursing a lawsuit). Grounds work. Only good thing was that, for an introvert, you had a swatch of land you could call your own and work by yourself. A plot. Like a cemetery. At least you could lose yourself in thought, pulling endless rows of weeds and minimizing awkward interactions with other, inevitably larger, guys in boots.
That is, until you were pulled onto a special assignment. This one was a doozy, even by their standards. We were to clean out the second-floor loft in the famous founder's birthplace barn. A loft chock-full of pigeons, who had been living and pooping and cooing and pooping and dying and pooping and molting and pooping and eating and pooping and pooping and pooping in there for what must have been thousands of years. I had not, until then, and will never see again (nor will you ever, dear reader) that much pigeon crap in one place in my life. Piles of it. We're talking six inches deep when it wasn't in piles. And littered throughout with carcasses, as generations transferred their pigeon-y wisdom to younguns before expiring.
All we were given were brooms and bags.
Here's the thing about pigeon crap. (Yes, you really want to become instant experts, like we did.) It ossifies. The ejecta turn into these little white crusted sculptures of infinite variety. I don't know, maybe some evil wind cuts holes in them, something like snowflakes. And the minute -- the minute -- you touch this stuff with a single spare bristle from your broom, it crumbles. Nay, it ignites, or seems to, creating tiny puffs of what you instinctively understand to be noxious, toxic dust. We're not geniuses, we teenage boys. Even we understood this.
The whole day. The whole long, dusty, hot, choking summer day we did this. Of course, not until later were my suspicions confirmed, that pigeon guano can carry lovely diseases. The most common is psittacosis (or, as we might have called it, "pissed-off-cosis"), parrot fever, most commonly transmitted through inhalation of "dust containing dried bird secretions." No shit. We didn't just breathe it, we became it, for a whole day. I think the reason we didn't get sick is because the germs died of overpopulation.
There you have it. Thanks for letting me dredge up this gem of a childhood memory.
Picture a bird of prey circling over a dying animal. This analogy isn't too far off, since my boss had quite a beak and frizzy red hair like a cockscomb hanging over her forehead. I was in desperate need of a job since getting married and moving to a new town, so I took a job far below my previous one where I had supervised 12 employees, wrote bids, and handled sales. Now my job was routing servicemen to their jobs. Every day, this raptor stood behind me and corrected me on directions, told me who to send out, and looked at her watch to see if I violated the half hour lunch. She called me incompetent in front of staff and told me, "I can get you fired anytime, I'm related to the owners. Before I was turned into carrion, I found another job where I was appreciated.
nasty boss, I can feel her breathing down my neck
I love the imagery in this one!
What vivid imagery of your boss. I think we might often conjure up images to cope with difficult jobs. This one sounds like it was hard as a job and also in how it demeaned you and your skills.
Great wrap-up from the opening image!
"Before I was turned into carrion, I found another job where I was appreciated."
At fourteen, I washed dishes at a retirement home for priests for $4.15 an hour. The nurses wheeled them in every night and kept me tucked away into an abandoned section of the building with an industrial sized sink. I avoided getting there too early because the cook would sometimes ask me to run supplies down from the attic above the kitchen, where a giant statue of the Virgin Mary stood deep in the dark distance, covered by a sheet, and my little gay ass was worried she’d come alive and eviscerate me.
Not to plant too evil a thought in your mind, Brenden, but did you ever think this would be a great first paragraph for a novel? LOL
Oooh! Not a bad idea! Thank you!
There's something so ominous in your short recounting of this job - being tucked away to clean dishes, the attic, and the creepy Virgin Mary statue. You do a great job at setting the stage for a job that was hard work for minimum wage, but also how 14-year-old you saw and felt the setting too. The self-awareness. I would love to know how you ended up at this job and what was next. :)
Notes on my worst job!!
I was working in this startup which was planning to shut down owing to lack of product market fit. The founders had introduced us to other startups in their network who could on-board us if needed.
Since the founders had a good reputation, their referrals were being taken very seriously by others in their network. I got a call from this food delivery startup which used to work with food outlets and help them deliver their online orders.
I didn’t even have to visit their office. The interview was all done over the phone and it lasted hardly 5 mins and I was asked to join the very next day and report to office at 7 am. My father was against me joining there since the work involved working with delivery boys and his experience working with blue collared workers was not very pleasant. He had imagined a better life in corporate offices for me. However, I didn’t listen to him and accepted the offer.
Now the thing was that the office was literally 2 hours one way from my home and they had a rule that no matter where your work for the day is, you have to first be physically present in this office for a daily standup where the agenda for the day would be decided. I reached the first day and the meeting started.
A brief about the role before I proceed with the story - We were ‘Territory Managers’ which meant that we had food outlets and ‘x’ number of delivery boys in a certain pre defined territory under our control. We were responsible for the blue collared drivers who were supposed to deliver from the outlets within our radius. One of the tasks included making sure that the drivers were in the perfect outfit and the cleanliness and grooming aspect was taken care by them. They were not supposed to turn up shabbily to work and had to wear the right gloves and head gear while on the job since they were handling food deliveries.
Coming back to the story, the meeting starts at 7.30 where we were supposed to discuss the agenda for the day. We were barely 15 mins into the meeting that the agenda shifts from deliveries to the personal lives of drivers. It starts with why one driver under one of the territory managers had not reported for work the past 4 days and it turned out that his extra marital affair was caught and he was being held hostage by his wife at home. Rather than move on from this, the meeting became a deep dive on the affairs of other such drivers. This went on for a good 2 hours before we resumed work. I thought of this to be a one off anomaly.
Moving forward, As part of my induction, I went with the territory managers to the nearby driver hotspots. McDonalds was the major client there and the outlet manager called us in right away showing some sort of frustration and anger. He pulled out a thick booklet which was basically printouts of tons of pages and bound together. He started flipping through the pages while showing the same to us…
The pages were basically screenshots of one of drivers who was caught having some sort of tobacco while on the job. The outside camara had caught it. The funny part was that rather than having 1-2 images of him consuming the tobacco, he had created an entire flipbook wherein you could literally see him tearing the pouch and then moving his arm up towards his mouth to the tobacco coming out and falling into his mouth. It was hilarious to think of what he had done to prove his point and became the second red flag in this job within hours.
We stepped out of the outlet and started confronting the drivers about their hygiene habits and the breaking of the no-tobacco on the job rule. The drivers lied to us knowing fully that we knew that they were lying. It was literally a zero sum game. You had to just put up with the lies. That’s it. Red Flag Number 3.
Somehow the day got over and I got back home after a grueling 2.5 hours journey. I got early and reached office again at 7 am only to go through the same malicious gossip in the morning meeting. I realized that yesterday was not an anomaly, it was just the norm. To make matter worse, after the meeting got over I was supposed to now go back to a territory which was located right next to my home. So in a nutshell, I travelled 2 hours early morning to listen to workers gossip about drivers and then come back 2.5 hours to begin real work for the day which in itself would involve handling lies.
I quietly sat in the car with two other territory managers who were go the same way. They would drop me off at my location. The moment, we reached near my Dad’s office, I asked them to stop the car on the side. I got off and told them - “thankyou, I am done. You can let the people know that I will not be joining this office. 2 days was enough for me.” They had that bewildered look on their faces, like they were in some dream.
I simply moved on and walked to in to Dad’s office. He was sitting in his cabin, pointed me towards the chair in front of him and said..’Now that you are done with the job, please start taking my advice more seriously.’…
Ohh…btw the HR called me the next morning and asked me to pay up a month’s salary to them whereas the job offer clearly stated that one could either leave or be asked to leave with just one day’s notice without any reason. That was the last red flag with this company…
P.S. that company still exists but despite being ahead in the competition, it has been run over by people and companies with more ethics.
---
Quick hiring, long commute, immediate immersion into the job, gossip, spying on drivers, the flipbook (!). many red flags. I feel tired from just reading about your short tenure there.
Your dad's words:
Now that you are done with the job, please start taking my advice more seriously...
I occasionally check back on places I've worked. Your postscript on the current ethics is interesting too.
P.S. that company still exists but despite being ahead in the competition, it has been run over by people and companies with more ethics.
Thanks for your feedback Amy. Also, apologies, I just realized that I had posted this as a comment on your note.
It’s all good! ;)
Half Japanese, at age twenty-two I had a kind of ethnic ambiguity - slender with a round-eyed feminine cuteness often associated with manga heroines. Kawaii. A perfectly dainty candidate to be the social secretary to the Japanese Ambassador to the United Nations, a role that could only be described as decorative in function. Unless you think quietly pouring tea and hand writing thank you notes and invitations on gold embossed official stationary was essential to diplomacy.
For a full time first real job, it paid well and allowed me to live on my own, without roommates. But perhaps it was better suited for an old lady in twinsets and pearls (who I am now, at sixty-five) and not a recently graduated art student living on the Lower East Side whose side hustle was selling weed to yuppies.
What a wonderful peek into your life in your youth and now. The descriptions are so memorable! The juxtaposition of who you were and how you were perceived too. Being so close to a diplomat
-slender with a round-eyed cuteness often associated with manga heroines. Kawaii
-dainty candidate
-decorative in function
-quietly pouring tea, writing thank you notes on gold embossed official stationary
The last paragraph feels like the opening to a memoir :)
"But perhaps it was better suited for an old lady in twinsets and pearls (who I am now, at sixty-five) and not a recently graduated art student living on the Lower East Side whose side hustle was selling weed to yuppies."
Thank you for your comments! (The weed selling part is another job story 😆)
The smell of curry brings it all back to me.
The year: 1975
The place: Crows Nest, a suburb of Sydney, NSW, Australia.
The job: two and a half days a week typing invoices on a prehistoric Olivetti typewriter for a courier company in an office above a curry house.
The worst of it: the tantalising odour of the curry met the reek of the cigarettes smoked by my three employers in a sickenly awful combination. Each bloke smoked a different brand - Rothmans Untipped in a red packet, Benson and Hedges Special Mild in a gold packet, and Marlboro in a blue and white packet. Most mornings I was sent out to buy their cigarettes, plus the iced finger buns for morning tea.
The air in the office was blue with the cigarette smoke during my working hours, and the stale cigarette smell when I opened the office in the morning was strong enough to make me gag. At the end of the day, I would go home smelling like I had been chain smoking myself. My fingers would be tingling from bashing those stiff old typewriter keys. My wage at the time was AUD$2.00 an hour.
I sometimes wondered whether it was worth it. I was a poor university student and had to spend money on public transport to reach the office. A bus from my uni campus took me into the city. A brisk walk down through Martin Place brought me to the Wynyard railway station, from where I caught a train to North Sydney. Another brisk walk uphill, and I was in the next suburb, Crows Nest, ready, sort of, for another day of breathing the toxic mixture of cigarettes and curry.
But hey, I survived. I’d like to be able to say I completed my university course and did well. But the truth is, I dropped out of uni after I met the man who I thought would be the love of my life, and ran off to live with him in Darwin at the top end of Australia. You’ll be pleased to hear that, although the marriage didn’t prosper, I did well in much better paid employment, and I eventually gained a university degree as a mature age student some 35 years later.
While the job might have been the worst, I love your use of details to take us back in time. I did wonder if you ate at the curry house then or can eat it now?
-smell of curry
-reek of cigarettes (by name and appearance)
-iced finger buns for morning tea
-blue air
-tingling fingers from old Oilivetti typewriter
-the bus trip
-the ill-fated romance
-the low pay
I learned all I needed to know about injustice and privilege at my first job as a kitchen aid at Hamburg’s (Germany) Congress Center. In the hellishly hot bowls of that magnificent structure, we ‘unskilled laborers’ would clean and chop vegetables, assemble stacks of crustless sandwiches, and decorate silver plates with sprigs of parsley for the important people above. If we wanted a cup of coffee, we had to pay half our hourly income to get it which is why we rather stayed tired. Kitchen guards made sure we wore gloves and didn’t sneak contraband (anything edible). On my second day, some dude from above noticed me and declared that I – young, white and blond - belonged upstairs with the waitstaff, so – abracadabra - upstairs I went. On the main floor, I got tips, and the attention of some higher-up who thought I’d make a great hostess. Long story short, before the first of two weeks had passed, I ended up in the VIP lounge on the penthouse level, where my only duties were to have coffee brewed fresh at all times and smile at my benefactor’s laments about the wife who refused to divorce him. Nobody else visited, except for some dignitaries who brought their own staff when setting up meetings. Every hour or two, I’d take the carafe of unwanted coffee and slowly pour it down the drain. Then I would make a new batch, apologizing to the people downstairs.
This has such a nice gentle punch at the end... I really like "hellishly hot bowls of that magnificent structure" -- !
Thank you so much, David.
Love this. Great story and great writing. :-)
Thank you so much!
Such a memorable day of reading about all these awful jobs. I like that you found the "lesson" in your first job at the outset - the injustice and privilege.
Finding that in another country adds even more perspective.
The crustless sandwiches. The coffee costing 1/2 hour of hourly wage. Wearing gloves. Being under such close watch. Only going upstairs because of having the right look. There's something so ironic in the coffee cost for workers juxtaposed against the need for fresh coffee for limited staff and carafes poured down the sink with an apology.
Thanks for reading, Amy.
A summer job as a salesman for high quality (i.e. expensive) cookware and china was horrible.
The company hired young men to target unmarried women they had gone to high school with. We were told to mine our high school yearbooks to identify women who did not go on to college and were in their first job as an office worker or retail employee or the like.
The pitch was to get them to start building their hope chests in preparation for marriage.
Even in the mid-1970s this struck me as a bit predatory and sad. We insisted that the young woman's mother be present whenever we were able to book an in-person demonstration. We learned how to subtly “activate” the mother to pressure her daughter (who preferred to spend her limited funds in more enjoyable ways) to begin investing in the kinds of top-notch tools needed for her life as a homemaker ahead.
A basic set of pots and pans cost $400.00 (about $2,000 in today’s dollars) and were made to last forever. 3 ply construction (two layers of stainless with the middle layer of conducting high carbon steel!) with close-fitting, heavy lids (so tight you can even cook without water!). And the pots were stackable on the stovetop, serving as little dutch ovens.
The impressive china and teacups and glasses were, of course, extra but the stuff showed well and was better than one could find anywhere else.
I would set up my sample case alongside a dark, velvet table cover and ceremoniously ask for a small glass of water. Circling the rim of a wine glass with a moist finger created a pleasing melodic tone, illustrating the quality of the crystal. I could stand on an inverted teacup to demonstrate how strong and well-made they were. And we learned how to hold two of the heavy plates side by side to gently bump them up and down to illustrate how well made and chip resistant they were.
Before long, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Even as I needed a sale to cover the cost of the sample kit I had to buy, I couldn't help feeling I had just saddled the young woman with a debt she didn't need. It also felt like fostering or taking advantage of outmoded views of middle-class women's prospects, just as feminism was broadly taking hold. I lasted about three weeks before quitting and giving the pots and pans to an aunt who had coveted them from the start. They really were top-notch.
"I would set up my sample case alongside a dark, velvet table cover and ceremoniously ask for a small glass of water. Circling the rim of a wine glass with a moist finger created a pleasing melodic tone, illustrating the quality of the crystal. I could stand on an inverted teacup to demonstrate how strong and well-made they were. And we learned how to hold two of the heavy plates side by side to gently bump them up and down to illustrate how well made and chip resistant they were."
This sounds like the base of a Flannery O'Connor story. But also the start of MLMs too. Your earnest nature and the endpoint combined with the top notch products is such an interesting contrast. Seeing the pressure in businesses like the one you were roped into is fascinating. Your descriptions are so great - the velvet, rim of the wine glass, the melodic tone, the bump test of the plates.
Thanks...appreciate it!
I didn't think about it enough at first but I really love the Flannery O'Connor angle; lots of possibilities there.
In 1981, my Pentecostal-raised grandmother heard about my first paid gig in theater. But she nearly choked when I said, “burlesque.” I quickly explained I didn’t take my clothes off. I only worked backstage at the venue. She informed me that anybody who worked for an “outfit like that” must be the Devil’s whore. She drilled her steely gaze into me, and screamed,
“You wanna’ be the Devil’s whore?”
Working as the Devil’s whore paid rather well—and even better, in cash. But each night, I found myself drowning in a sea of eye-popping cleavage, Colgate smiles and disgustingly long legs. Beauty like that, seen through the eyes of a flat-chested, pasty-white eighteen-year-old with braces, stung like a hornet’s nest. I tried not to gawk. No one warned me that I’d have to use my finger to trace gold paint inside the edges of the dancer’s butt cheeks. That’s what it took to transform the statuesque brunette into a life-sized, dancing Oscar. She’d stand wearing only a G-string, while I covered her head-to-toe in gold body paint. At least she had the decency to bend way over, making every crevice accessible.
I tried to balance out this misery on the days I took their laundry home. With my roommates gone, I sneaked into the apartment with the dancers’ costumes. I’d grunt like a sumo wrestler, until I’d squeezed my scrawny body into a ridiculously tight Rhinestone bodysuit. Rolled-up socks had to be shoved into the chest area. But when the beaded headdress was perfectly placed, I turned to the hall mirror, and struck a pose. Back arched, stomach sucked in, I used the same open-mouthed smile I’d seen the showgirls make.
It almost worked if I could just forget about my braces.
Back inside the theater by evening, I waited as each dancer exited the stage. I ripped apart the Velcro that held together sequined G-strings, freeing their lithe torsos to wriggle into the next costume: glittering bra-like things with holes for their perfect nipples. The dancers rewarded my servitude by slipping long, graceful arms through the shoulder straps, and I clasped them in back. Then came my least favorite part. They’d always pout and ask, “Do I look okay?”
I’d nod and smile convincingly, until they’d whooshed onto the stage. Then I grumbled under my breath that they looked like a bunch of hideously fat Devil’s whores.
Mashaw you are the best. I love this! What an experience! What a grandma. I'm your Oxnard friend on other platforms.
Just saw this today! (I'm still trying to learn my way around Substack.) Thanks for your support!
Great story, well told!
Thanks, LaVonne!
this is a fascinating account of an unusual job
Thank you. For a naive 18-year-old woman, it was disturbing at times to see the reality of professional burlesque close up.
What a scene and early job!
"Working as the Devil’s whore paid rather well—and even better, in cash."
The descriptions of the women and their clothes, interactions, the gold paint, and the squeezing into the jumpsuit - so vivid. There are so many directions you could go with this experience, even into a fictional account.
Thank you for reading. It was quite an initiation into the world of professional theater for someone so naive.
I've had about 50 jobs and been fired from more than half of them. My first was the worst-- I was a paper boy for the Vancouver B.C. Sun in the days when daily newspapers often numbers over 100 pages. It wasn't the heavy load I had to carry, it was Wolf, the hulking German shepherd dog who would lay in wait at 15 Rena Crescent as I lugged my paper bag from one side of the street to the other, getting closer with every delivery. I'd watch him patrol the driveway, walking back and forth like some steroid-popping security guard just waiting for me to invade his territory. I finally did, walking right past him, hands clenched at the sides, eyes rigidly ahead as if my soldier-boy posture would deter him. "Wolf!" cried the owner's son from the second-floor balcony. "Wolf! Leave him alone! Don't worry, boy, he's a good dog!" I kept walking up the driveway. Wolf took up a position about a foot to my rear and on my right. We walked together up the shallow hill to his front door. I could feel his eyes on me every second. I waited, helpless. The owner put his book down and reached for his drink. That's when I felt Wolf bury his fangs in my right buttock. It hurt but not as much as the humiliation of being bitten while the owner's son, just a year or two older than me, looked on. I threw the paper at the door still 20 feet away. It came apart into sheets of newsprint before it landed and soaked itself on the wet pavement. That night I got a complaint from Wolf's owner about the condition of his paper. Next day I carried a rock in my pocket, which must have weight three pounds. I was lucky; it was raining and Wolf and I were alone. I faced him at the end of his driveway while he patrolled back and forth. At the right moment I threw the rock with all my strength from about three feet away. WHOMP! It thumped into him broadside with rib-breaking force. But the best part was being able walk straight up that driveway right to the door and take my sweet time carefully arranging that paper precisely on the mat. Wolf continued his back and forth patrols but always from at least ten feet away. I took a private joy in how he flinched when I pretended to throw a rock at him.
I just really like the first line. I keep seeing the starts of 1st person POV stories in these entries. Yours instantly provides me with the broad outlines of a character, and it makes me want to learn more about him (assuming a "him"). I don't know if it's picaresque, or a memory followed by a flash-forward into a crisis even a fired-from-more-than-half-of-them resourceful, take-the-world-my-way individual couldn't handle. But something. Great fun here!
"It wasn't the heavy load I had to carry, it was Wolf, the hulking German shepherd dog who would lay in wait at 15 Rena Crescent as I lugged my paper bag from one side of the street to the other, getting closer with every delivery."
The back-breaking early jobs that stick with us - you describe the experience so well. The emotional and self-preservation backdrop. It feels like this was the start of you taking less off of people or dogs that stood in your way. Facing down your fears. I love that you remembered such specific details. The where with the address, the dog's name.
Substitute kindergarten teacher in a charter school who speaks Spanish for half the day. It was a two-day job, and it took all the power I had not to call in sick on the second day. It wasn't the snot-noses or crying or even the Spanish (I'm sort of bilingual). It was the constant motion required to keep a group of 20 five-year-olds on task. The clock was painfully slow. By the end, I resorted to performing front flips into a foam pit just to keep their attention.
I have this recurring image of you glancing at the clock during a hairs-breadth pause in the disaster and wondering if some elf has turned the hands back, yet again.
I won’t say it didn’t happen
I have subbed for kindergarten. There really isn't a $ amount of pay to pull me back into it. $10 an hour was not enough.
Flop sweat at the end of the day from Bandaids and new crayon requests. Love the humor infused into this - the front flips into a foam pit to keep their attention. Subbing into a kindy class with Spanish speakers feels like it would be extra hard. Props to you!
Kindergarten teachers are a special breed. 💗
Yes - gold stars all around!
That would have to be my first paid writing job. This was back in the 80s and I wrote promotional scripts to torture folks put on-hold when they called various businesses. When I started, I had no idea that my boss was a super shady character. He was nice enough but never made eye contact and always kept his gaze glued to the floor when he walked through the office. Eventually, I learned that he was an ex- police officer who used to patrol the area around the high school I attended and had an affair with a girl in my class. He'd also been convicted for some type of investment scam. One day at the office, he asked his assistant to help him get something out of his car—a fancy white Jaguar. Later, with eyes round as saucers, she whispered to me that his trunk was loaded with guns! Not long after that incident, I picked up my local morning newspaper to see my boss's face on the front page. He'd been arrested for various crimes— gun smuggling may have been one of them; I can't remember the specifics. And that, thankfully, was the end of my first professional writing job.
"Eventually, I learned that he was an ex- police officer who used to patrol the area around the high school I attended and had an affair with a girl in my class"
some type of investment scam
a car loaded with guns
Yikes! Such an unsavory boss.
No wonder you were writing promotional scripts to torture people with. :) The mention of the fancy white Jaguar was a great description. I could instantly picture your slimy boss packing it with guns and who knows what else.
I worked for lawyers. That really should be all I need to say, but there's more. I had a niche expertise - in receivership administration. I was hired to a small, new firm of young lawyers, one of whom (Tom) was looking to get into receivership. Tom (who happened to be extremely smart) was hugely fat - like walk-down-the-hall-and-you-think-there's-an-earthquake fat. He also liked to make calculated gambles with his partners' firm's financial resources (including its personnel - me), and when a those didn't pan out satisfactorily, his partners ejected him from the firm in which his name was first on the door.
Tom began keeping tabs on his partners, because at least one of them was committing some type of securities fraud. Unbeknownst to me, there was a lawsuit pending against said partner and the firm which ultimately resulted in its closure. Tom had retained a list of email logins and passwords, and at night, he would dial in via Citrix and rifle through his former partners' computers. His login and password? Why, mine of course!
I knew something was amiss, and I knew it had something to do with Tom. I did my best to assure the rest of the partners that I had no dog in their fight, but, in a fit of true paranoia, they called me into a meeting one day and fired me. I was escorted out of the office - in front of all of my colleagues - by three (!) security guards. My reputation - that I had worked decades to build through hard work and good character - was destroyed.
OK, so I admit - I have lawyers in the family and I barely got past your first line. (Actually, I didn't, so the rest of this is typed after coming BACK from the bathroom.)
My sentiments echo Amy's -- fraud and retaliation come to mine. I suppose there was nothing that you could prove. Grr. And yes, this took me from laugh-out-loud to downright anger -- quite the transition of mood here...
I remember Citrix. From calculated gambles with the financial resources to spying on the partner/firm - it feels like you could have written a crime drama script.
It's so unfair that you got caught up in Tom's schemes because he used your login/password. Did his actions ever catch up with him?
Oh, that's a tough one. But this one is a contender:
It was 1984. I was a recent college graduate with no real direction. I did have a rather vague, unformed idea about getting into book publishing, but I lived in the DC area, not exactly a publishing mecca; my parents had moved there the year before I finished high school in Illinois. I needed a job — preferably an office job — to make some money, get an apartment, and eventually save enough to move to another city.
DC is a government town, so the most plentiful white-collar jobs are government jobs. All I had to do was go to the Office of Personnel Management, take a test, and wait to hear from a potential employer. The test turned out to be surprisingly, almost embarrassingly, easy — like the most watered-down version you can imagine of the SAT. I got a high score and was snapped up quickly by the Export-Import Bank, which needed a clerk typist in its personnel office. Yes, I am old — this was long before the days of “human resources.”
The job was an eye-opener. It revealed to me a world I’d hitherto been unaware of — a world in which people really weren’t into their jobs.
All my life, I’d been surrounded by adults who loved their work. Most were professors; some were doctors, teachers, or other professionals. The professors I knew, including my parents, were doing work they cared about deeply; while they worked hard, they had plenty of vacation time and seemed to lead fairly balanced lives. It didn’t hurt that life was pretty easy in Urbana, Illinois. There was no such thing as a long commute, unless you chose, for some reason, to live way out among the corn and soybean fields. My parents could walk to work in 20 minutes, and they usually drove in just a few.
My first full-time job, in contrast, came with a long commute for the first few months, when I was still living at my parents’ house in Potomac, Maryland. I had to drive to a commuter bus, which was always a race against time because it didn’t run very often; the Metro station had limited parking and was much farther away from us than the Montgomery Mall bus stop. When I moved into the city and walked to work (in 20 minutes!), people I mentioned that to looked at me as if I came from Mars.
But much more shocking to me than the commute was the fact that my co-workers weren’t even remotely following their calling. Most of them had drifted into their jobs by chance. As I had, but for me it was just a pit stop on the way to presumably better things. They were simply collecting a paycheck. They watched the clock. They lived for the weekend.
I could see why. The jobs weren’t inspiring or engaging, and that was especially true for the three of us who worked as employee development clerks, Clerk-Typist Series 0322.
I, too, became a clock-watcher and weekend-anticipator. My first day on the job made it clear what I was in for. Despite my clerk-typist designation, I wasn’t particularly good at typing. In rebellion against 1970s expectations for girls, I’d refused to take typing or home economics classes in high school. So imagine my delight when my first task, which took me all day, was typing the same rejection letter to six different job applicants. On a typewriter; word processors weren’t introduced to the office till the following year. I can’t recall if the rejection letters were for my job or for some other position, but I do know that a lot of Wite-Out was used that day.
It was bad enough to be working in a government agency, but a government agency and a bank!? This Flower Child (my name for my hidden generation between Boomers and X, which some call Jones) did not fit in.
I made perfunctory attempts to wear the right clothes, but my heart wasn’t in it — and it wasn’t easy for me in the conservative 1980s DC environment, where pantyhose and pumps were de rigueur. There was a certain uniform you were expected to conform to, and I couldn’t quite stomach it. So I skirted the edges of appropriate attire. More often than not I failed miserably, like the time when I wore clogs to work; I felt people staring at my shoes all day.
I had no illusions about fitting in. But if I had, they would have been shattered the day that I found myself in a large room filled with Xerox machines — just me and a conservative-looking secretary, one who wore the requisite high-heeled shoes and hose. Absorbed in struggling with paper jams as I tried to make stacks of copies of who-knows-what, I wasn’t prepared for her question. She looked me up and down and asked, slowly and quizzically, “Are you a … hippie?”
I was too taken aback by the question to come up with a good answer. Was there such a thing as a hippie in 1984? I now realize that there were indeed hippies then, and there may always be. But at the time, my narrow view of what constituted a hippie made me consider the question woefully out of date. I figured that the secretary, like most EXIM Bank employees, didn’t know what to make of me and was simply grasping for any possible way to fit me into some box — any box.
The truth was that despite my halfhearted sartorial attempts, I didn’t want to fit into their boxes or be like them. The office environment and the people I shared it with for eight hours a day had me constantly cringing. Neither The Office nor Office Space had yet been made, but our office would have provided ample fodder for that TV show and movie.
There was the time when I was walking down the streets of DC with the head of personnel, Tami — a very white, rather conservative woman who in the evenings retreated to the suburbs, where she belonged. On spotting some homeless people, she blurted out, “I don’t see why they don’t just get up and DO something!” There was the volleyball game I hadn’t wanted to join, during which my boss, Bert, yelled at me for not managing to hit the ball — like I really wanted to be reminded of junior high PE class? There was the time when Bert whistled at another clerk typist and then said, “Don’t worry, my bark is worse than my bite.” It was less creepy than it sounds, but still. There was the time when we had a male stripper in the office for Tami’s 40th birthday and the suburban women went nuts.
Then there were the posters. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a personnel office in the ‘80s had to be full of inspirational posters. Our office didn’t disappoint in that regard. Till revisiting the first photo above, I hadn’t recalled that decidedly uninspiring poster, but my brain could never erase the memory of one that depicted a kitten hanging from a tree, with the inscription, “Hang in there, baby, Friday’s coming!”
Needless to say, the “inspirational” posters had the opposite effect on me. Let’s face it — there was nothing inspiring about the job.
Now and then, the tedium was alleviated momentarily. Because we were just a couple blocks away and had low-level security clearances (a story for another time), we’d sometimes get invited to the White House lawn to help fill audiences for visiting dignitaries. It was actually interesting to see, from a distance, Ronald Reagan spewing out platitudes alongside whoever his guest was.
Before long I was out of there — on to bigger and better things in my chosen city, San Francisco.
My year and four months at EXIM Bank (not that I was counting!) felt much longer, but at least my time there taught me an important lesson: Enjoyable, satisfying work isn’t a given; you have to seek it intentionally. Lots of people out there are trapped in dull, soul-killing jobs and live for the weekend. Who knew? I just knew I didn’t want to be one of them.
It's interesting to see how the Export-Import Bank employees really operated - people who really weren't into their jobs. Very disillusioning to find out that people didn't care about where they worked or how they did their jobs.
Long commutes and soul-killing jobs really suck!
Wite out and word processors and inspirational cat posters - what a blast from the past. Being called a "hippie" for being an empathetic person feels like it could happen now or in the past. 1 year and 4 months to find out intentionality in work is crucial for balance and happiness. A great lesson to learn and not from a cat poster. :)
Since then, I've learned to accept — even embrace — my "hippieness."
I work as a PR person and genuinely had a director suggest to me that I try writing press releases using AI.
It made working behind bars, as a gardener or as anything else in my younger days seem like an absolute dream. To have your craft and profession that you'd worked on for 10 years undermined by someone in a position of power and who should have some knowledge of your industry was mind-blowing.
Safe to say I don't work there anymore.
AI has its place I think but press releases and magazine copy isn't it. I've seen so many lifestyle magazines that I write for decimated because the AI version of human writing had no soul - and people just didn't read it enough.
Sorry that you had such a disappointing situation. I'm guessing the "suggestion" was really more of a "do it this way or else." :(
It wasn't so much as "do it this way or else". It was actually much more nefarious in my view, if a piece of work failed to perform, usually because too many cooks came in and completely altered the work until it said nothing at all, he would throw in comments to undermine you and try and make you feel awful.
This was just his way of operating, it was to consistently ensure you felt at fault or he could just punch a few words into an AI system and do a better job than you could.
Straight graveyard shift at a soda bottling factory and warehouse. I worked alone in the warehouse that was as big as a football field. Sodas of kinds palletized to the ceiling two stories up.
Five nights a week relieving the swing shift guy who looked like a 1950's beatnik caricature. He had to wear dark sunglasses even at night because of his snow blindness. His favorite pasttime at work was to feed his pet black widow who lived in a dark corner. I respected his pet and his willingness to fetch her tasty flies and such.
I loaded semi's with twenty pallets of soda destined for sites unknown to me. Nights in the warehouse/light manufacturing district in a large city made me hyper-alert. The night I saw the three-man gang break into a parked and loaded trailer for three cases of soda made me realize that some folks will work very hard to steal virtually nothing and that under those circumstances my life probably meant very little to someone lurking out there in the dark. After all, I had to be rich because I had a job.
I lasted two more nights....
love the spider detail in this piece and 'I had to be rich because I had a job' shows an industrial working class perspective
Thank you!
Wow. Maybe you could do something on swing / midnight shift characters. I love these stories -- eyewitness to bizarre human behavior, up close and (too) personal...
What a great, unexpected setting! Now I'm humming the Laverne and Shirley theme song too. :) Love the descriptions of the other characters - the beatnik caricature with snow blindness and a black widow spider. The fact that this is set at a soda bottling factory is so intriguing.
Add in a gang and the appraisal of circumstances and this short lived job stands out as a very unique experience. - made me realize that some folks will work very hard to steal virtually nothing and that under those circumstances my life probably meant very little to someone lurking out there in the dark. I lasted two more nights.
The opening of Laverne and Shirley comes to mind until the dark turn at the end. I don't blame you for walking.
I had risen quickly to the upper ranks of corporate mediocrity and eagerly applied for and was rewarded to the next level, my predecessor having failed miserably at the job. There I met the mistress of the game, Madam X. She knew how to keep her minions in line: punish, cajole, bully, and demean, pitting one poor soul against another, stand back to watch the delicious results. But I prided myself in my art of communication. I taught the course for heaven’s sake. What could go wrong?. But nothing I tried seemed to have any effect at all.
I worked at an out-of-State offshoot, and one disastrous day she proclaimed she would be arriving for a visit. I suggested an evening meal together, hoping that this might cement our relationship.
The meal started well. The air was redolent with the smell of fine dining, the room plush with waiters eager to offer their services. She explained the art of cooking celeriac and I responded with glowing enthusiasm. But by dessert the conversation turned. She declared that she never knew where I stood. Perhaps I had been over-doing the paraphrasing a bit? She hammered on. What was I thinking about her and our relationship. On and on she went until, heedlessly, into the valley of death I plunged.
“Sometimes I think we don’t communicate very well”.
There was a deathly silence. She turned as white as the surrounding walls, with a little bright spot of pink right at the tip of her nose.
“Excuse me for a moment” she said eventually, and disappeared. I stared out at the desolate palm trees on the bay. I rearranged my napkin. I hailed the waiter and paid the bill. I wished a thousand times that I could stuff those words back into my mouth. Had she left? What should I do?
Eventually she returned.
“Well” she said “I suppose you would like me to get a taxi.”
“No, no” I begged, ever the sycophant “I’ll drive you to your hotel of course.”
On the drive back I asked her how she was feeling?
“As if I’m going to throw up” she replied.
Some 4 weeks later I was fired - with a 6-month bonus and all stock options intact, a welcome release - and the realization that my predecessor, in fact, had not been terrible at her job at all.
Meliora Dockery: Melioradockery@gmail.com
What an unexpected twist: Some 4 weeks later I was fired - with a 6-month bonus and all stock options intact, a welcome release - and the realization that my predecessor, in fact, had not been terrible at her job at all.
The descriptions here again make the memory come to life! he boss' name, the desolate palm trees, the cooking descriptions.
I once did budgets for what used to be called guerilla porn. these were low budget junk videos shot on the fly in any number of semi public places. I needed the money because after 9/11, my work as a field producer dried up for a while and a friend of a friend was producing this stuff because he was bored. Walking in and out of an editing bay and catching snippets of body parts contorted into various superhuman angles wasn't so bad. It's just sex, even if it was sloppy and dumb. Making a few shekels in the bad porn world wasn't the shame hill I was going to die on, but when one of the hungry production assistants plopped a box of used sex toys on my desk and asked if I would help clean them, I knew that my future in guerilla porn was over. I didn't even bother formally quitting. I just didn't show up for work the following day.
Great job at describing and condensing down this work so that we as readers - get it. That can be hard to do if it's a job that we may not know from the title itself.
"It's just sex, even if it was sloppy and dumb. Making a few shekels in the bad porn world wasn't the shame hill I was going to die on, but when one of the hungry production assistants plopped a box of used sex toys on my desk and asked if I would help clean them, I knew that my future in guerilla porn was over."
There's a statement here (and in several of the other posts) in how we (you) draw lines at jobs, even desperate or early ones. Cleaning used sex toys was a step too far. Your experience and response feels like it could have happened yesterday even though the memories are over two decades past.
shazam. thank you. this means a lot to me. i enjoy your work as well.
The day I turned sixteen I became an official film technician at the Photo Depot. I felt like my dream had come true landing the position. When my boss handed me a white lab coat I beamed as if I had just won an Emmy. The hourly rate was $3.25 per hour. It was better than babysitting which only paid $1.00.
My new job was loaded with important responsibilities. I greeted customers. I’d drop film into envelopes and set it on the processing counter. Then I’d sit at the gargantuan machine to print negatives for six hours.
“Customer service is our number one priority,” my boss said, patting me on the back, a little lower than necessary if I can be honest. His glass eye bobbed around and that piece of greasy gray hair flopped on the top of his head but none of it bothered me. After all, I was a film technician and was on top of the world.
About six months into the job a young guy dropped off a roll of Kodak color film. I settled myself at the printer and immediately noticed something strange on the negatives. “Oh my God,” I said to my co-worker. Every image on the roll was a penis. As a newly sixteen year old I had never seen a real penis, only the ones in my father’s dirty magazines or maybe at school if someone snuck in The Joy of Sex. But here, in front of me was a man’s organ, larger than life, on my screen, about to be turned into twelve 4x6 glossy prints. I was horrified and intrigued at the same time. One of the images showed the guy’s penis sticking out of his zippered jeans with a sign hanging off it reading “OUT OF ORDER.”
Of course I had to bring the obscene pictures to school so I printed dozens and dozens of extras to hand out to my friends, hoping it would make me cool. And I was cool. Until I wasn’t. The next day my boss realized what I had done and fired me on the spot saying I had violated the company’s privacy policy. I was crushed and so embarrassed. Turning in my beloved lab coat I said goodbye to my co-workers and that was the end of that. But man, for one whole day I was sure popular in high school.
"But man, for one whole day I was sure popular in high school."
Writers have the best punch lines.
Haha, thanks! 😊
"The day I turned sixteen I became an official film technician at the Photo Depot. I felt like my dream had come true landing the position. When my boss handed me a white lab coat I beamed as if I had just won an Emmy. The hourly rate was $3.25 per hour. It was better than babysitting which only paid $1.00."
I miss the days of Fotomats and Photo Depots. Film pictures overall.
It's so interesting here that the exciting and official job had more layers than just an early job. The lecherous boss. The thrill of a title. The naked images. Taking them to school. The lab coat. The instant popularity at school. The details are so vivid that I felt transported back with you.
It's funny the bizzare details that come rushing back when you let yourself go there. Ironically I became a professional photographer and now that I'm retired, I spend time photographing birds and wildlife while also writing a memoir about my adventures. And no more silly lab coat! Life is good. :-)
The worst job wasn’t the same as some of the worst jobs that most people post, but it was the fifth job I took, simultaneously, while I was a freshman in college in 1966. It was necessary to have this last job because I could not afford to live otherwise!
The day the catering job became the worst was when I had only 10 minutes between the end of one job and that job a mile and a half across campus. Someone had just put brownies in my locker and they were spiked which I did not know.
What happened at the job was I had a plate full of hot stew to deliver to a table and it jumped right off of my tray! I had no idea what happened until perhaps a year later. It was definitely an OMG moment and the worst moment of a job I’ve ever had.
I did a series of jobs to afford college too but NEVER 5 at once. It sounds like your fifth job was complicated by several external events out of your control - time, spiked brownies. The fact that you didn't know what happened with the stew. Hoping by then, you had a few less jobs, and stress.
Thanks for reading! That plate with stew--it is as if it was yesterday, the spiked brownie, which I'd gulped down, didn't taste good because it was full of dried "herbs". At that date, those "herbs" were marijuana and I'd not ever eaten anything like that before--so I was higher than high! And so innocent. The stew was a mess and I'd never done or seen anything like it.
But not stressful with so many jobs--just far too many to juggle well.
The summer before college, I worked as a marketing intern at an “As Seen on TV” infomercial products company. 😂
I was 17 years old, ambitious ahead of my freshman year at Princeton, but with no work experience. To remedy my lack of business skills, for twelve weeks, I drove my way through suburban North Jersey to learn the ropes at a place best known for things that get sold for “$19.99 plus shipping and handling” with the perennial, “But wait! There’s more!” as part of the sale.
At the time, the company was wildly well-known for a foot file called the Ped Egg.
I can assure you—that workplace was as campy, quirky, and cheesy as the commercials and products they sold.
The moment I’ll always laugh about was a group brainstorming session to name an upcoming product: a meat tenderizer. My name ideas, “The meat genie,” “meat buddy” and “meat master” did not win out in the brainstorming session, but neither did the names that would make high school boys completely lose it with laughter.
I still have the list of name suggestions in my files. I break it out on hard work days to make me laugh about the silliness of the world of business. Needless to say I did not stay in marketing…
“But wait, there’s more!”
On a more profound note, the founder was an Indian guy who had started the company from scratch after moving to the United States. He was a living case in point of achievement of the stereotypical “American Dream.” Through this business, he worked his way to wealth, rags to riches, providing bountifully for his family of 5. He his name on buildings at my high school. The family in a mansion. The whole nine yards. It was very New Jersey, a little cheesy, but the founder was a really inspiring figure to be around.
During that summer, I felt a great respect for the ingenuity of the “American Dream” that the founder and the company represented. I shadowed commercial shoots. I read and managed letters and emails from inventors: literally anyone could write in with an invention and prototype and pitch the company. Great ideas could truly come to life and get sold.
Thinking back to that summer of 2008, in some ways, it’s the most patriotic I’ve ever felt. Especially in today’s day and age, that moment of Americana-style, bootstrapper ingenuity is something on which I look back on fondly.
Great story. My weekend bike rides take me right past this business a few miles from home. Thanks for giving me a glimpse inside!
There is something so nostalgic and optimistic about infomercials. Just reading "but wait, there's more" takes me back
"I was 17 years old, ambitious ahead of my freshman year at Princeton, but with no work experience. To remedy my lack of business skills, for twelve weeks, I drove my way through suburban North Jersey to learn the ropes at a place best known for things that get sold for “$19.99 plus shipping and handling” with the perennial, “But wait! There’s more!” as part of the sale."
The background world of As Seen on TV products! The meat product brainstorming meeting. The contrast between Princeton on the horizon and the immigrant back story. It sounds like you got some solid experience that summer - in work and life. Do you think you appreciate and understand the experiences more now with perspective?
110%!
My professional life since that internship has ranged widely, but there are common threads across my roles of interesting subcultures, eccentric characters, and people who are determined to roll up their sleeves and do what it takes to build something that lasts—and for every inspiring figure I’ve met, there are tragic ones, too. Since that internship in 2008—in no particular order—I’ve been a podcaster, a baker, a competitive martial artist, a business school case study writer, freelance writer, and tech worker across 4-5 industries. It has been a wild, wide-ranging professional ride over 17 years, with the story still being written. 😆
Re: this particular anecdote, as an Ivy League-bound overachiever circa 2008, my naive sense at 17 was that my education would be the main thing to open doors in my life and “the future” as I vaguely conceived it. This was also a principle I drew from my dad, a self-employed lawyer whose own dad immigrated to the US via Ellis Island in the early 20th century and had a particular industriousness of mentality ingrained in him.
Whether due to the generational legacy or the kinds of jobs and environments in which I found myself, the older I got and more experiences I had in and around the business world, the more I internalized that my education remains a life-changing and wonderful privilege, but when it came to building a career—and, more importantly, a life I was proud of—grit, hard work, and a willingness to be in the trenches often served me more than my degree in isolation.
1959: I did get fired, but not before I'd had some fun. I'm legally (not totally) blind, and had a scholarship from the New York State Commission for the Blind for tuition, books and six (sic) dollars a week in living expenses at a prestigious university. I needed a job. If I read too much I got headaches, so I tried to find work that didn't involve reading--like handing out free samples of Vick's cough drops on street corners in the winter--but I ended up writing obituaries for the university's alumni magazine. The obituaries came from family members; some were typed, but most were hand scribbled. I struggled to read them. I got frustrated. What to do? I decided to use those I could read and invent the rest. "Sam Winterspoon, class of '02, developed the first over-the-counter drug for foot fungus......" My obituaries were much more colorful than those of relatives, but I soon got fired. Naomi Woronov
These responses have made me smile this morning. It sounds like you had writer (and survival) instincts very early on. "developed the first over-the-counter drug for foot fungus." The thought of handing out cough drops. To remember these 1959 details so vividly is wonderful - it's a great memory to jumpstart writing but it's also interesting for potential readers. It feels like something a Mad Men character might have done as a side job.
TLDR: I got demoted to being a WORM COUNTER and then still got fired.
For being a closeted queer at a bible college reasons, I spent a summer in the 80s in Springfield, MO. The only place hiring for summer jobs in Springfield, Missouri, was the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Company Catalog Fulfillment Center. At the interview, a bored-looking woman checked my paperwork to ensure I was of legal age for factory work and immediately hired me.
I hesitated "you don't need any special skills?"
"It's not brain science," she said.
I think she was combining "It's not brain surgery" with "It's not rocket science."
I started that night at the 11 pm to 7 am shift, with a three-minute orientation from a lightly cranky woman chewing on a cigar.
"There's a rule against smoking, isn't a rule against tobacco," she said, in response to my very much unanswered question.
"Okay, you see that box, Jesus College?" I'd told her that I attended Mid America, and she instantly parlayed it into a nickname.
"So, you see, the box comes down the conveyor belt, and then you grab the catalog order form. Look for the item they ordered over here." She gestured to an entire warehouse full of tiny fishing-related objects in hundreds of bins.
"How do I know where to find them?"
"Ya look," she said. "They're also labeled."
She continued. "So you grab it, make sure you have the right amount."
My question about knowing how to find the items made her reconsider whether this was enough explanation.
"I mean, if they order two, put in two. If they order three, put in three. Like that. Put 'em in the box, and then let the box go down the belt.
Easy, right?"
"Sure," I said. "Easy."
She left. I grabbed the order form from the first box, headed enthusiastically into the towering bins of fishing tackle, and examined each one.
I read from the form.
"Let's see. Strike King Rage bug. I need one of those. Mepps Musky Flashabou Spinner. Two of those. And I need one Musky Mayhem Tackle Double Showgirl Spinner."
I would not have known a Strike King Rage Bug if it came up and bit me on my repressed gay ass.
I started methodically reading the tiny print on the bins.
"Okay, War Eagle Tandem Willow Spinnerbaits. Nope. Booyah Tux and Tails Spinnerbaits Double Colorado. Nope. Panther Martin Salmon and Steelhead Spinner."
Almost every label I read would have made an excellent drag name. Unfortunately, I wouldn't know about the existence of drag names for nearly another decade.
I had to read 27 bin labels before finding even the first item. As I returned to the conveyor belt with the Strike King Rage Bug, I had to run 30 yards to catch its box, which I then grabbed off the conveyor belt and took with me to the next round of bin reading.
It took me 17 bins and 13 bins respectively to find the next two items; when I triumphantly returned to the conveyor belt, my cigar-chewing supervisor was there.
She looked at me and then at the boxes piling up in my area and falling off the conveyor belt. She sighed deeply, maybe from her pancreas.
There was a large red button labeled "conveyor emergency stop" on the far wall. She walked over, turned around to look at me, sighed again, and pushed the button.
I had created the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center equivalent of Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.
Maybe, technically speaking, you didn't need special skills to do this job. But you did need enough casual experience with fishing lures to recognize them on sight; otherwise, you'd never be able to keep up with the conveyor belt.
"Where are you from?" My cigar-chewing friend asked, with a tone that implied she thought "the moon" was the 100 percent likely response.
"I've got someone headed your way, Betty," she said into her walkie-talkie. I was demoted to the night shift worm counter at the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center.
Worm Counter is the kind of employment where the job description is wholely encompassed in the job title. They sat me at a table in a room kept chilly for the comfort of the worms. On my left was a huge bin of rich black earth trembling with hundreds of nightcrawlers, and on my right were white plastic containers. My job was to pull the worms out of the soil and carefully place one dozen in each white container that had been prepped with its own little clump of traveling soil.
When I stopped by the convenience store to get a soda on my way home after my shift, a woman ladeling chili onto her self-serve nachos said, "Maaaaan something smells like worms around here."
Not something
Someone.
Me.
Perhaps you'd think this turn of events might cause me to quit my job at the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center. Nope. Bass Pro was the only place hiring, and I needed a job to stay in town. Never underestimate the power of a repressed homosexual's crush on their volleyball team captain.
I did not quit. When I came in the next night, Betty came at 3 am to inform me that the spot checks of my worm counts had been wrong four times in four hours. But she wasn't going to demote me from Worm Counter because there was apparently no job requiring fewer skills. Instead, Betty informed me that my services would no longer be needed at the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center.
Brilliant!
This line stands out so much: I had created the Bass Pro Fishing Lure Catalog Fulfillment Center equivalent of Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. Being demoted to worm counter from worm sorter feels like a whole backroom world of Bass Pro. Again, we get memorable sensory details - the smell of the worms, the chili and nachos. Through the memories, it's interesting that your own self-discovery comes through in your reactions and commentary too. It's a story about worms but feels like so much more in your timeline.
When I was twelve, since I was a student at the local ballet school, I was hired by our town’s J.C. Penney department store to be Prince Charming. Okay, the job only lasted an afternoon, but still. Rewarded with a $20 gift certificate, I bought my first suit, in brown polyester. I had to show up in white tights, a pink tunic, and ballet slippers, and spend four hours kneeling in front of a white and pink plywood throne, as a never-ending line of girls took their turn sitting on the tasseled cushion and earnestly tried to maneuver their right foot into the long, narrow glass slipper I held out for them. If the slipper fit, they would be entered into the grand prize raffle, giving them a chance to win a dress or a supply of Cinderella perfume. The contest was a scam. No human girl’s foot would fit into a 10-inch by 2-inch glass shoe shaped like a canoe. But that didn’t excuse all the moms I saw cheating – dropping their daughter’s names into the grand prize box instead of the consolation prize box. That was disappointing. It was bad enough that I had to relax the definition of “the shoe fits” so that there were at least some names in the winning box. I felt that making the tough call of what fit and what didn't should have delegated to someone higher in the hierarchy. (Or lower, since I was the Prince, after all!)
Oh my! I remember those days of teen/tween fashion shows at department stores. I always wanted to be on a teen council or walk the runway in JC Penney clothes. Your Prince Charming job experience is so unique though. The humorous details and retail backstory are so charming too. The cheating moms. Contest scam. Cinderella perfume. "Shoe fits." The costume and payment. I want to know if there were more contests or if this was dreamed up by some eager Penney's employee. And if there's a picture of you holding out the shoe. :)
I joined the Air Force as a technician at 18. After recruit training, I had to wait two weeks before tech course started. Me and other course members were assigned to 'base duties'. One morning we were picked up by truck, and taken to a field at the end of the airstrip where sheep were grazing. Our job was to periodically jump off, and shovel sheep manure into the back of the truck. Needless to say, by the end of the day we were totally covered in it. When we returned to the base proper, we were tasked with spreading the manure over the Commanding Officer's wife's rose garden. I still remember that smell.
More great sensory details! Sheep manure may be the ultimate smell to think back on. It's interesting how you order the details here (maybe by life importance) - joining the Air Force at 18 feels like the most important with the smelly task secondary. These are only short entries but I was intrigued wondering if you stayed in the Air Force, what other similar tasks you had to do.
Perhaps delivering circulars summer in high school as very boring plus no future, ha!
I think we all had at least one of those "no future" jobs that we did for minimal money. :) The idea of circulars and delivering paper feels so far away now with today's digital version. When I think back on my early, boring jobs, it can open up other experiences or memories too.
Hi Amy! Be well! Terry
As a 19-year-old aspiring actress living in Venice I'd obviously applied for jobs waiting tables in various West LA. venues. I had a part time cashier job at Zuckys, but it was barely covering my weekly gas money out to the Valley for acting classes. So I took a sales job, selling printer toner (for you youngsters, that's printer ink). The job started at 5:30 am every weekday, so we'd be ready to start dialing the East Coast at 6. The warren of rooms was viciously lit by long banks of fluorescent bulbs. The weak, slightly burned coffee was abundant. We were cold calling from lists of businesses who had printers. We'd been trained to ask questions about their supply of toner so they'd think we were calling from whoever their supplier was. Then offer a very low cost first order price to get them to switch to our company. The people we talked to got mad another, and often hung up after some choice words. I thought I could lie for a living by playing a part, after all, I'd already been acting professionally for years by then. I couldn’t. I lasted a week.
Loving the sensory and place details in the posts. It's fascinating to me how those details from past jobs are what come through to ground them now. They're the details that take potential readers to the jobs and places because we can feel what you felt. Adding in the acting aspirations here make this more than "just" a cold-calling job - it makes it YOUR life story with great essay potential!
-Zuckys
-viciously lit by long banks of fluorescent bulbs
-slightly burned coffee
-choice words
So much to say just about Zuckys!
PS: Want more ideas to inspire your own writing? Join us in February for "28 Days, 28 Essay Prompts: A Month of Generating Inspiration and Ideas for Memoir"
https://www.narratively.com/p/30-days-30-essay-prompts