Employment History Part 2 - Talents and Trade Secrets Revealed

In my last post I wrote about my first job out of high school working in the cash office at Gold Circle. I really liked that job and totally lucked out because it didn't require me to sell anything, deal with the public or talk to anyone at all really unless I felt like it. I could pretty much go in, get my shit done and go home. It was part time and I was done by noon most days and that totally rocked.

On the other hand though the job had 2 major drawbacks:

1. It cramped my party lifestyle. I had to be there 6 days a week at 7am and getting up, dressed and forcing myself to be alert enough to concentrate on doing my job that early in the morning at age 18 when most nights I was out partying, drinking and doing god only knows what until scant hours before my shift started was extremely difficult. There were many days when I suffered through that job (or perhaps the job suffered through me) hung over or still drunk.

2. I already mentioned other major drawback to this job in my previous post, my cash office mate Missy, who found a way to suck every atom of joy from the air of the very tiny room we were forced to live in together for 5 hours each day but Sunday. Then again upon further reflection and after re-reading the last sentence of #1 listed above a couple of times over it has occurred to me that perhaps being trapped in a small airless, windowless room with a hung over or possibly still drunk teenage baboon like me may not have been exactly pleasant for her.

3. I know I said there were only going to be 2 drawbacks but upon even further reflection I am now wondering about the validity of #1 in total. I mean if I was going work hung over or possibly still drunk from the previous nights partying or god knows what then that probably negates the job cramping my style doesn't it? Sounds more like neither one had any effect whatsoever on the other. The job didn't seem to stop me from partying and the partying never seemed to prevent me from showing up and doing my job.

4. Fuck it then. The only drawback to my job at Gold Circle was Missy and frankly she may have had a point being nasty to me and giving me a hard time because I was a hung over, smelly drunk so who could blame her really? I mean, that room was pretty small.

I suddenly realize that I have abused my numbered bullet point privileges and at this point I'm rambling so it's time for an anyhoo...

Anyhoo... what I really wanted to tell you about was the job that I had after the cash office which I referred to as "the greatest job in the world". Are you still reading this?

I quit the cash office gig because I was going to start attending college and I needed a job with more flexible hours. I applied at several different retail shops, but the job I had my heart set on and didn't think I had a chance in hell to get because it was ranked pretty high on the coolness scale and I lived in a college town so there was always lots of competition for crappy paying jobs in cool stores was at a smaller but national chain that rhymes with Beer Ton Pimports*. Do you know of it?

It's a much different kind of store now. Back then it was only just morphing into the brand image it has now and many people (like my cousin J and his stoner buddies) thought it was a fancy head shop and sometimes when I told people (like my cousin J and his stoner buddies) that I worked there (oh, yes - in case you hadn't figured it out on your own - I got the coveted job) they would make bong and rolling paper jokes.

Beer Ton Pimports didn't sell bongs or rolling papers or any other smoking accessory except for Italian marble ashtrays and sandalwood incense. No. They sold the most beautiful and wondrous things. They sold rattan furniture made in Thailand, Japanese paper lanterns and jasmine scented potpourri. They sold cut glass Romanian stemware, bamboo fans from China and carved boxes made of teak wood from Brazilian rain forests. They sold English tea pots, Scottish shortbread cookies and itchy cable knit wool "fisherman" sweaters from Ireland.

For a young woman who yearned for travel, and didn't really see much chance of it happening anytime soon, it was a wonderland.

I started off as a cashier, but within a year was promoted to Assistant Store Manager. I love, love, loved that job. I got to be around all that cool stuff and between the shipments of new merchandise that needed to be unloaded from the delivery trucks, displays that needed to be built and the various trials and tribulations associated with working with the public, every day was new and different.

It's the only job I've ever had where I actually left smelling better than when I came in.

It was at this job that I discovered my uncanny ability to solidly and successfully assemble cheap furniture armed with only Taiwanese instructions, an allen wrench and wood glue without ever once bursting into tears. I would often return from having taken a few days off to find heaps of furniture left for me to make sense of by my frustrated and distraught co-workers who had tried in vain to assemble them in my absence. I was (and still am by the way) a furniture assembly goddess.

It was also at this job where I learned that working with the public is not for me. I continued to do it for quite awhile but eventually lost the ability to control my facial expressions enough to hide the disgust I was feeling behind a big shiny grin when confronted with:

• The woman screaming at me at full volume because I would not allow her to return a dress with filthy yellowed armpit stains and no receipt. She threw a ball point pen at my head.
  
  
• The children allowed to run loose all over the store and smash bath oil beads onto the floor I had just finished mopping while their parents argued over the fabric quality of $12 toss pillows.
  
  
• The wild-eyed man who banged on the door after closing time and tearfully demanded to be let inside. He shouted, "I can see you in there! I just need to buy a papasan!". Allrighty nut bag. Key indicator of nuttiness not so much the wild-eyes, door banging or tears but the word "need" used with "papasan" in the same sentence. Who in the hell has an urgent need for a papasan chair? He was out of his fucking mind and I called the cops.**
  

Mostly though it was a great job. I worked there for almost 3 years and made a lot of great friends. Here are some of my more fond memories:

• The morning my co-worker Jay broke all the jars in a spice rack and we used the jar labels instead of our name tags. I immediately snagged Rosemary and Jay grabbed Basil. As the day wore on some of our other co-workers including the store manager got into the act and we had Sage, Paprika, Nutmeg and Thyme all working at the cash wrap stand. I'm not sure why this was so funny. But trust me, it was. Epecially when you'd get one of those eye contact customers that make a point of reading your name tag and using your name when they pay. Thank you Nutmeg!
  
  
• After I moved out of my parents house I didn't need to buy groceries because I was able to live off of the free fortune cookies we gave away at the cash wrap.
  
  
• The time that I had excruciating pains in my abdomen and thought I was having appendicitis. My co-worker had just picked up the phone and started to dial 911 at the point in which I realized it was just some push pins that I had forgotten in my apron pocket stabbing me in the gut every time I leaned into the counter.
  
  
• Being in charge of the clearance book which gave me an inside edge into knowing all the items that were on 75% clearance. You see depending on the sales of an item we didn't always mark everything down as low as we could have. But using that book I was able to legally mark it down as low as possible for store employees. Handy.
  
  
• Our secret employee stash of full price merchandise that we all kept hidden wrapped in a tarp in the rafters over the stockroom. If we fell in love with something but couldn't afford it (and it was small, lightweight and pliable enough to be wrapped in a tarp and stored over hour heads) we would hide it in the stash and hang onto it up there until it hit 75% clearance. Brilliant.
  

*Perhaps some of you (who have made it this far and are for some reason still reading this post) may be wondering why I felt the need to hide the name of Beer Ton Pimports, but not Gold Circle and that would be because Gold Circle no longer exists as a corporation, but if balance is important to you may refer to Gold Circle as Cold Gircle as you continue to read this post.

**It's possibly the most useless piece of furniture known to humankind (it's a actually a tie between the papasan chair and the wicker bookshelf but for the sake of my post today papasan wins). It doesn't store anything, is flimsy as all hell, it slides all around when you even think about sitting on it and if you do finally find a way to get comfortable sitting in one for any longer than 90 seconds will give you curvature of the spine or at the very least a stiff neck.

Nuro-seez. I Haz Some.

Maybe I'm being a big giant baby, but I stayed home from work again today. This will be my third "sick" day from work since I started my job in the middle of February. I hadn't noticed before, but now it seems a bit excessive. Especially given that I'm still a temp and don't get sick pay. But what can I say? I feel like crap.

Don't worry it's not the same horrifying, pissing-blood thing that I had before. This time my neck and shoulders hurt. It had kind of been hurting all weekend, and I was doing a really good job of ignoring it and carrying on doing all my weekend chores, laundry, mopping, etc... Then yesterday morning as I turned my head to look behind me as I was backing out of the driveway to go to work, so as not to accidentally crash into the decorative boulders at the end of the driveway or run over the neighbor's dogs or errant toddlers - something bad happened to my neck.

It didn't make a cracking noise or anything but the pain was so excruciating that I screamed and sat there for a minute or two trying to remember how to breathe.

I blame this and all of the other joint and back pain that I typically experience on my fucked up ankle. Yes, those are both of my feet in the picture. I've got one adorable and normal looking foot and one constantly swollen and nasty frankenfoot. My right ankle has been fused and as a result I walk super funky which can cause all kinds of back, hip and knee weirdness.

I went to work anyway and continued on as if it were a just any old normal work day - for a robot. It hurt when I lifted my arms, it hurt when I turned my head in any direction, it hurt when I typed - it just hurt.

I did the most important things I needed to do and then took off early for home where I could arrange my bed pillows just so and swallow a muscle relaxer (or seven) and not move for awhile.

Now... here is the thing and I've written about this before; I feel like a big giant baby girl liar-head baby. Could I have gone to work today? Technically? Yes. Without a doubt. I feel a lot better than I did yesterday, but I do still hurt. I intended to go to work and even showered and put on make-up and everything. But when I started to fasten the hooks on my bra - I knew I was in trouble.

I think the reason that staying home feels wrong is because for the last 5 years or so I didn't really have a job that I could call in sick for. I was on the road. You can't call in sick from the road, so I used to suck it up and work when I was sick or in pain and I did this no matter what. The clients I was working with had been waiting (most typically) several months for me to be there. Most of them had closed their business for the day (or week) in order for me to do my thing. I would have felt terrible to have not shown up and then been sick all day in a hotel room in a strange town.

So I worked no matter what.

When I wasn't traveling I worked from home - and how do you call in sick when you are already home? On one occasion I did actually call my boss and ask her to cancel all of my appointments for the day, but mostly I just worked anyway and then whined about it later.

I think a lot of my failure to enjoy the indulgence of a sick day is due to previous corporate culture that frowned upon sick days to the point where people were boasting about coming to work while ill. In a not dissimilar fashion to what I have just done in the above paragraphs.

Now that I have a more normal type job, where I go to an office every day and I'm not star attraction (it's marvelous - my phone hardly rings at all) I think I just feel a little more free to indulge myself in a sick day or three. Plus the corporate culture is one where it is not only NOT frowned upon to take a sick day - people seem happy that you have stayed away and are not spreading your ick all over the place.

Are you still reading this piece of shit blog post whereby I try to convince myself that I'm justified in staying home from work today? Well I hope I'm happy because my neck has begun to hurt again while I've been typing this.

In conclusion, hey Me, leave me alone and stop judging me! Oh, wait!! Could you hand me the remote before you storm out? Oh, and fluff my pillow - pretty pleeese?

If I Get Shot I'll Stop the Bleeding With Toilet Paper

I moved out of my parents home in the late 80's, the summer I turned 21.
Living at my parents house had become unbearable as my late night, "wild" lifestyle was too noisy for them.

I went to school full time during the day and worked a full time job in retail at night. My shift ended at 9:30pm after the store closed and the cash drawer could be counted and the floors swept. I usually arrived home at around 10pm. In our open floor plan, ranch style house, their master bedroom was just off the kitchen/family room combo and they went to bed every night at around 9pm.

The biggest factor to our domestic problems was this: they refused to close their bedroom door, saying that it made the room too hot. So if I tried to fix myself something to eat after arriving home from work, no matter how quietly I crept about, the noise woke them up and one or both of them would get up and yell at me to be quiet. Ditto for watching television in the family room, or talking on the phone. (Hey kids! Once upon a time in the olden days there was no such thing as cell phones! Whacky!)

Everything I did it seemed, woke them up and they always woke up angry. I was paying them $150 a month for rent, which included groceries I never got to eat, cable TV I never got to watch, and a phone I never got to use.

During this period of my life is when my greatest dream was to get the hell out of that house as soon as possible.

Eventually I just stopped coming home from work altogether and found myself hanging out in the library of my university until it closed and then after that I would go and hang out in bars. This wasn't a great plan either because the later I stayed out, the more likely they were to be woken up when I unlocked the door to come in the house, which resulted in more yelling. On more than one occasion I actually slept in my car in my parents driveway rather than run the risk of waking them up. It was a really shitty and exhausting way to live. Essentially, I was homeless.

At this point my lifestyle became every bit as wild as my parents had originally believed it to be. College life started to interfere with the bar hopping and socializing (and there was that math phobia I mentioned in a recent post), so I dropped out.

After I dropped out of college things got really bad at home because in addition to being upset at my noisy ways and wild lifestyle, now they were seriously disappointed in me. To "teach me a lesson" they doubled the rent and said I'd have to start buying my own groceries.

I remember feeling very trapped. Nothing I did was right, and I was giving them a large amount of my very hard earned money each month to live this way. In the end I didn't so much "move out" as just not come back. I took nothing with me but some clothes, my alarm clock and a sleeping bag.

My friend Psych Major, was a beret wearing, Shriekback fan who went to school during the day and worked as a waitress at Friendly's in the evenings and on weekends. She was getting over a pretty serious break up with a long term, live-in, cheating boyfriend, whom I had made out with several times behind her back, while she was at work. My confession of this to her was likely the key factor in her resultant break up and need for immediate housing. To my amazement, she didn't hate me and even suggested that we move in together.

The apartment was pretty nice for a first timer, like me. It was a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom duplex built at around the turn of the century (the other century, as in 1900), that Psych Major (never washed the pots and pans she cooked in and didn't flush the toilet when she peed) and I shared with Dancer and Debbie, who were friends of Psych Major's.

I had my very own bedroom in which I slept on the floor in my sleeping bag with my alarm clock next to my head. It was absolute bliss. I could eat, watch TV and talk on the phone whenever I felt like it. I could stay out as late as I wanted and with whomever I wanted. Na Na! Whee!

Dancer (fought loudly with her boyfriend late at night and constantly slammed doors) was an OSU student majoring in modern dance and minoring in fine arts. She was the kind of goth-ish girl that came from a very wealthy and educated family but wore unravelling sweaters held together by safety pins with wrap around skirts and colorfully striped knee socks. We didn't have much in common, but a love of Bauhaus and combat boots worn with fishnet tights.

Debbie (lost 3 sets of house keys in the span of 6 months, drank my liquor supply and lied about it and beat my cat with a rolled up magazine and then complained when he shit on her pillow) had a steady boyfriend majoring in cinematography, whom we all liked very much. He was thoughtful and a lot of fun and the kind of guy that stumbles into cool things without even trying, like the time he went to JC Penny to buy a new pair of Chucks and the escalator ate the toe of his shoe so the store manager gave him a new pair of Chucks. Things like that were always happening to him.

Debbie on the other hand was a bit of a scuzzball. I remember coming downstairs for breakfast one morning and seeing Debbie eating a big bowl of instant oats. I sat down across from her and said, "You've got a little oatmeal on your cheek there."

"Where?", she asked, and we proceeded to do that little wincing face dance you do when you're trying to help someone get a smudge or piece of food. She wasn't getting it so finally, I reached across the table and touched it with the very tip of my index finger. "Oh, that's just some dried sperms", she said, and carried on eating her oats.

Debbie also allowed her brother (hogged our parking spot, left whiskers in the sink and left the toilet seat up and little urine droplets all over) to come and live on our couch indefinitely without kicking in for the rent or bills. My other roommates and I pointed out that we had been sharing, bathroom time, hot water, groceries, cable and phone bills and square footage, not to mention an entire couch with him for nearly 3 months - so it was time for him to get the fuck out or chip in. For some reason she thought this was an unreasonable request and moved out to go live with her boyfriend. Her brother stayed for another 2 weeks until he found a place of his own.

I had many other roommates over the years, including my friends Dan (monopolized the TV and kept letting my cat outside) and Nature Boy (never washed a dish or made ice cubes and had noisy sex), and it's all pretty much the same.

Other people are irritating, weird and filthy in ways that I cannot appreciate and other people don't seem to appreciate the ways that I myself am irritating, weird and filthy (I will not answer the phone or take your messages and I leave my clothes, shoes and coats all over the place). This leads to arguments and unhappiness with people who you may or may not like.

There was only one solution for it so I traded the hip urban scene within walking distance to the bars and clubs I frequented for a neighborhood on the other side of town in an apartment complex known popularly as "Uzi Alley".

It seemed OK at the time because my friend Bob lived there too, for exactly the same reason - she desperately wanted to live alone. The rent was $250 per month for 600 square feet with utilities and heat included. Awesome.

I lived there for 5 years.

Yes. It was a terrible neighborhood.

Yes. My apartment complex was on the news nearly every night because of some gang related shooting or drug bust.

I didn't care.

It was a sweet little oasis in the middle of hell and living there meant living alone, so I was willing to put up with nightly gunfire, police sirens and low flying helicopters at all hours of the day and night. You get used to it in the same way you get used to train or airplane noise when you live next to the tracks or under a landing pattern. After awhile you might even miss it when it's not there.

When I could afford it, at the urging of my constantly worried friends and family, I moved somewhere less crappy. I never regretted living there though because having bullets whizzing over my head was better than fuming over dirty dishes or sitting down to pee and realizing that there isn't any toilet paper in the house because it was your asshole roommates turn to buy it and they forgot.

I lived alone for almost 11 years and never once ran out of toilet paper. After living with MDH for nearly eight years, the record remains unbroken.