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18 Responses to “The Stupid 365 Project, Day 5: Odd Jobs” -
fairyhedgehog Says:
October 5th, 2010 at 8:36 am
And I had learned that there was no such thing as a free lunch, and even if there had been, you wouldn’t have wanted to eat it off one of those dishes.
You always find the humour in the most awful situations!
I haven’t done many jobs I didn’t like, luckily, but four weeks working in a small chemist shop was one of those few. Not only was it not very busy so I had to dust shelves a lot but also people came in for condoms and lube and I was very young and shy. The chemist would take over for me, but I could feel my face heating up.
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Suzanna Says:
October 5th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Ewwww…I can’t even begin to imagine the purpose of the human elephant probe, and I don’t want to know!
I for one applaud you for your imaginative act of revenge on the singing cook and substandard hygiene at DuPars.
Restaurant work was never my favorite. I once worked at a chain that served a huge variety of cheesecake. After a few weeks of serving obnoxious customers sickeningly sweet slabs of caloric suicide my final act of revenge was aimed at the drunken customer who wondered why his cheesecake didn’t have a chocolate leaf on it. I promptly found a chocolate leaf and jammed it into the top of his cake like a shovel. Management did not approve and I was out of a job.
I pity the poor souls who for whatever reason are trapped in menial jobs. I suppose unless you’re born a prince or princess at some point you will work a few. But can you imagine how dysfunctional life would be without the folks who work these jobs?
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Beth Says:
October 5th, 2010 at 10:19 am
One look at the apron should have sent customers running, bus boy or not. It said something about the management I didn’t want to hear.
The term used now is “bus person”. I have three children; my son is 6′, my older daughter is 5’10″, my younger daughter is 5’1″. Guess which one was the bus person. The trays weighed more than she does. I couldn’t watch. I had nightmares about her dropping a full tray on a table that had babies in infant seats. She was insulted by my fears, telling me she is stronger that she looks. Her fingers are bird bones and she got hired to carry heavy trays.
It worked in her favor in that she was quickly promoted to waitperson and a bus person carried the tray from the kitchen. She had to tip her bus person very well each shift.
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Robb Says:
October 5th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Well you’re making me feel better about my decision to stay out of longform prose. It would have taken me a month just to write the Hat thing and to save time I would have left out the funny. So… I think what we have here is: wait til all 365 are written, press them between two pieces of cardboard, call yourself Notcavintrillin… I smell nonfiction!
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Phil Hanson Says:
October 5th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
By happenstance or some other quirk of fate, I managed somehow to avoid looking for menial employment in the food industry. But please, someone tell me in what way service station attendant is superior to bus boy. Grunt work is grunt work; to my way of thinking, during times of inclement weather, it’s best done with a roof over one’s head. So far the score is 15-love, bus boy’s advantage.
In trying to recollect my worst job ever, I find that I can’t. Probably because it was so demeaning that I’ve repressed the memory. I’d tell you about my favorite job, but I can’t do that without incriminating myself. Much can be said in praise of meaningful work, but for the most part jobs really suck.
Courage, Tim. Onward.
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 5th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Hello, all –
I’m actually embarrassed by the gentle implication in Suzanna’s note that for many people, these rotten jobs aren’t rites of passage but life sentences. And she’s right, we couldn’t get along without them. On the other hand, one way to look at human society is that it evolved as it did in order to guarantee employment for all, even the least, uh, promising. Cars were invented to allow guys to change oil for others. Fast-food restaurants are a social organism that functions as a symbiotic entity among 15-20 people, none of whom could run the whole thing but each of whom can do something. I know life isn’t fair and that some ethnic and social groups have a more difficult time than others rising above this kind of employment, but that’s really a different issue. SOMEBODY has to flip our burgers, or vegan nut patties or whatever. It’s just too bad it can’t work backwards– put kids in positions where energy and imagination are needed and put us older, less interesting folks on the floor buffers and leaf blowers.
Phil — if you’re me, any indoor work is preferable to any outdoor work. I’d rather be a bus person (doesn’t that term actually denote a person who rides buses) than a snow shoveler or a traveling minstrel any day. There are bugs outdoors. It stops being light at a certain time each day. There’s no air conditioning. The hell with it, I say.
Robb, I keep thinking that maybe some grand theme will emerge and I’ll have something when I’m finished, but so far it’s a box of pieces from different jigsaw puzzles that accidentally got thrown together. At this point, the only thing I can say with any certainty is that it’ll be long, and even that won’t be true if I don’t finish.
Beth, in my day no “girl” would have been allowed to bus dishes. It was guy work. So you can chalk one up for gender equality that your daughter got to stagger around under those big trays — and I remember how heavy they were.
Whenever I think of restaurant work, I remember the obsequious maitre’d in one of the Monty Python movies who imperiously orders the waiter to position the bucket better every time the enormously fat customer vomits on the floor. Just sums up the whole gestalt for me.
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EverettK Says:
October 5th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
I was 5 or 6 when I started my first paid job: picking strawberries (soon to be followed by picking green beans). I did those two jobs every summer, pretty much all summer long, from that age until I was 17 or 18. Up at 5:30am to catch the berry (or bean) bus at 6:00, in the field by 6:30-7:00am and picking until 2:30-3:00 in the afternoon. Back then, the strawberries were mostly grown up in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The ride up there in the old, broken-down school bus probably contributed to the ringing in my ears that I suffer from today (well, there were all those high-school dances in the late 60s…)
Some days the boredom drove me to sit there on my row rubbing strawberries into the thighs of my jeans, followed by dirt, followed by more berry, followed by more dirt. By the end of the day, with a little help from the hot sun, portions of my jeans were magically transformed into something very akin to black leather. My mom didn’t appreciate it.
The strawberries were Marshalls, THE standard for strawberries from the late 1800s until the mid-1960s when Hoods and many other varieties started being introduced. Hoods had a white center and were hollow when you pulled out the stem. The old Marshall variety was all berry, solid goodness all the way through, and WONDERFUL flavor. No one grows them anymore, and good luck finding plants.
A year ago this past spring, after reminiscing about the old Marshalls, I decided to try to find some plants. An internet search and some e-mail exchanges eventually got me in touch with the nice folks at the USDA National Plant Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon, less than 20 miles from where I live. They still had some, assured me that I could acquire a couple of samples after filling out the proper forms. In September of last year, I received two runners via Priority Mail. I carefully planted and cared for them, and this spring I had two strong plants and one weak one. I got a few wonderfully delicious berries off of them this spring, but even more importantly, this fall I’ve gotten enough runners to start SIXTY new plants. I’m anticipating a marvelous trip down ‘memberry’ lane next June.
After all those miserable summers picking strawberries, I still love those wonderful fruits! (But please don’t try to make me eat green beans…)
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Gary Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 2:44 am
What is it with this correlation between youth and mundane jobs? It seems to be universal. My first job was working in a mobile kitchen, serving roadside snacks and coffee to drunks late at night as they came out of the bars to go home. And yes, I was the one who got to wash the dishes.
It is sobering to reflect on how many are condemned to this stuff for the terms of their natural lives, instead of just experiencing it and moving on. I guess it’s only some of us who are privileged to work at something more interesting. (My SECOND youthful mundane job was in tropical rain forest, measuring fallen giants after the evil loggers had struck them down… But that’s another story.)
Well, Tim, I know it’s only Day 5, but the quality of your writing shows absolutely no sign of flagging. If anyone can make it to Day 365, my money’s on you.
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Rachel Brady Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 6:11 am
I like this 365-day blog project. 
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fairyhedgehog Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 9:55 am
I’m thinking, if you saved your replies to comments and used them for your blog the next day, you’d be well ahead! I know OldKitty (http://ten-lives-second-chances.blogspot.com/) does that and it works for her.
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 10:11 am
Everett, picking strawberries seems almost idyllic, compared to DuPar’s until I think about the working hours and how low to the ground srawberries grow. I’m amazed, frankly, that you can still stand the smell of them. (I’ll write at some point in the future about my revulsion toward the fragrance of gardenias, and I didn’t spend half as much time with my nose stuck in a gardenia as you did yanking strawberries.) Interesting about the varieties grown then and now — it seems like everywhere you look, better-tasting fruits and vegetables are being replaced with bigger, waxier, more tasteless varieties that would be better in still life paintings than on the dinner table.
Gary, your second job sounds like my idea of a nightmare. Snakes, spiders, headhunters, the possibility of running into a Michael Douglas film shoot (he used to specialize in getting muddy in forests), and evil loggers, lurking behind big trees toting chainsaws. You’ve got the makings of an eco-thriller there. And thanks for the nice words about the quality of the writing –we’ll see where I am in, say, three weeks.
Thanks, Rachel — I’d probably like it even more if you were the one who was doing it.
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Fairyhedgehog, I don’t know — it kind of feels like cheating. If I’m going to do this at all, I might as well go full suicidal with it and commit myself to starting from scratch every single day (360 left!). I am thinking, though, about soliciting topics — and I mean ANY topic, even challenge topics, and also asking whether it would be kosher for me to use this space once in a while to preview first chapters of new books.
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fairyhedgehog Says:
October 6th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I think what you include is really up to you – you made the rules in the first place!
It’s an amazing experiment.
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Sarah Says:
October 7th, 2010 at 10:30 am
Oh my gosh …this is NOT relevant to this blog but I have got to come here more. I came here looking for some reference to the garden in Breathing Water which I still will always reference in my brain whenever I am seeing things about gardens that I like. So I said on FB that I want to see the garden in Breathing Water and I link to here and I get that photo of the boy and the elephant. Nobody makes me laugh more Tim than your comments. Wryness hits a new level with you and Thailand. A new meaning with an Asian eye opening awareness. Thank you. Will be back.
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EverettK Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 5:16 am
Tim says, “I am thinking, though, about soliciting topics — and I mean ANY topic, even challenge topics, and also asking whether it would be kosher for me to use this space once in a while to preview first chapters of new books.”
It seems to me that soliciting topics would be fine, as you still have to write about them (and that’s the point of the blog-challenge, isn’t it, to get you started writing earlier in the day?)
The posting of first chapters, while wonderful for US, would sort of go against the “getting started writing earlier” goal, wouldn’t it? But then, if you only did it once in a great while (no more often than once a month, say), then that would have minimal effect on achieving your primary goal.
But then, it IS your blog and your challenge, so as fairyhedgehog said, “…what you include is really up to you…”
As for picking strawberries, yes, somewhat idyllic, beautiful setting, mountains, trees, views. But yes, back-breaking work for any but the young and stout. There were several picking stances: standing, straddling the row; on one knee and one foot, still straddling the row; on two knees, sitting on your feet beside the row, struggling along under the seemingly endless sun. But hey, most folks had one of those hot new techie toys, you know, the thing EVERYONE who was ANYONE just *HAD* to have: the transistor radio, sitting right there in your carrier, listening to the latest music all day long. The poorer of us had to settle for a 2-transistor radio, but the better-heeled had 6-transistor and a few even the boom-box of its day: the TWELVE-transistor radio (with telescoping and rotating antenna, too, of course, for pulling in those exotic AM stations from 60 or 70 miles away!)
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 7:53 am
Hey, Sarah, and how are you? Absolutely ANYTHING is relevant to this blog, and if it isn’t now, it soon will be as I ransack my consciousness for new topics. You’ve given me a good idea — writing about little things dropped into my books (Pan’s garden is a great example.) Come back whenever you like.
Everett, I agree about the chapters — but it would probably only be twice in the (already seemingly endless) year. In fact, I just wrote about this in the next blog. And in a pinch, if I suddenly went all Puritan, I could add on to the end of the year the days I filled with chapters. But I’d like to introduce new books to people without demanding money first, and this would be one way to do it.
Ahh, the transistor radio/boom box and high-tech of yore. It’s amazing how fast, in this period of accelerated change, things can go from futuristic to Flintstones in the time it takes to blink. My friend Shadoe Stevens did a long string of insane commercials for an electronics chain in the 80s and 90s and recently screened a compilation of them in a theater in Hollywood. People laughed at the commercials, but some of the biggest laughs were reserved for the tech. VCRs half the size of refrigerators, TVs as thick as a double-wide.
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Jaden Says:
October 10th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
I was once the world’s worst Taco Bell employee. I was pretty good at actually making the tacos burritos, etc., but I was very meticulous, which means I was also very slow. The thing I was worst at was filling the squeeze bottles with sour cream. The sour cream came in large plastic bags, and we had to snip a bit off one corner and then squeeze it into the plastic bottle like cake icing. The first (and only) time I did it, I brought the full bottles of sour cream out to my manager, who took one look at me and said, “I was going to put you on the cash register, but I can’t let people see you like this.” I had sour cream from top to bottom–even in my hair and eyebrows.
My career in fast food was a short one.
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 10th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Slow is death, Jaden. Offered a choice between one perfect Matisse of a taco and five lumpy, misshapen, dripping mystery objects, they’ll vote for the five every time. Would have loved to have seen you encased in sour cream.
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