This past summer I did this series of interviews with friends with whom I have worked. I actually DO have a job now. Whee! Thanks to all who participated and shared.
I finished grad school (masters in American Studies) recently and have been doing the job search thing. It can be kind of frustrating while simultaneously exciting because you never know where you may end up. I decided to contact some people I’ve worked with and see what their best and worst jobs were in the hopes that it would scare and encourage me at the same time. (Ironically, as I type this intro, the shuffle on my iTunes is playing the Smiths’s song “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” with its line “I was looking for a job and then I found a job / and heaven knows I’m miserable now.”)
Shauna Daly
(used to write for my now defunct zine, Actionattackhelicopter, and we worked together at Bellwether Manufacturing / Secretly Canadian / Jagjaguwar / SC Distribution)
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Why?
I wouldn’t define any of my jobs in particular as being horrible. There are bits of every job I’ve had that I’ve enjoyed and hated. I’ve never “loved” a job, and i’ve hated something about all of them.
My working life thus far has been predominately healthcare related. Care related work is taxing – emotionally and physically. But in the rush of taking people to the bathroom, bathing them, feeding them, getting them into and out of bed I shared some pretty tender moments with the residents I worked with. The work was never easy, but those moments melted all of that away. Instead of patients, I started to see grandparents, perhaps my own in a way, and I “adopted” each of them.
The bad thing about any of these types of jobs is the observable erosion of care. The assembly line training, where people become commodities and capitalism erodes human nature. I remember feeling rushed more often than not, trying to care for 10-15 people in a single shift. I wanted to spend more time with them, but I had to do laundry, clean up after meals, strip beds, give baths, answer bathroom lights – all because it saved the facility money to have me do all that work, than to hire multiple workers. Fewer employees means higher profits for those higher-ups who only set foot in the building when they came to tell you that you weren’t doing it right. Telling a little old lady that you can’t sit with her any longer and listen to her stories of being a young girl is like kicking a hungry puppy. It’s horrible. It’s probably the worst feeling I’ve ever felt.
What’s the best job you’ve ever had? Why?
My favorite job was in Chicago. I was working in a downtown coffee shop/antique bookstore in Chicago across from Grant Park. I would wake up at the crack of dawn, ride my bike to the El, and stick my nose in a book all the way downtown on the train. It was nice to ride a bike down mostly deserted streets, as was reading a few books a week while traveling to and from work. I enjoyed watching people on the train, or on the streets below. I’d try to imagine what was brewing in their little bubbles. Everyone kept to themselves on those commutes, but silence speaks volumes when reading lines on faces.
I liked the autonomy this job afforded me. I opened the store in the mornings, the owner came and went as he pleased, and I closed up at the end of the day. I spent a lot of my day chatting up customers, reading, (making coffee of course), and just getting to know people in the area: the regulars, the artists in the Fine Arts Building, the nerdy Roosevelt guys, tourists, lost business men, etc.
A lot of the regular customers gave me gifts. This Sikh man around my age gave me this little woven hippy bag, and a Ben Harper CD. Not sure why. Another guy made me this weird penguin collage, with Astroturf detail. One guy gave me a $20 tip – he used to come in and tell me about his girlfriend who lived in D.C. They would have phone “dates” where they would both go to Borders, and walk around looking for books together. The Roosevelt nerds wrote a coffee shop review for their paper, saying that I was “bookish, but friendly, and a little intimidating”. A little old Italian man who drove a horse-drawn carriage asked me to accompany him to Taste of Chicago, and offered me a horse driver job. The kid across the hall at the diner would help me stack the outdoor chairs, and asked me on a date. When I turned him down, nobody from the cafe would wave to me anymore.
I think what made this job so great was the fact that I didn’t have anyone breathing down my neck. My boss would bring up a bottle of wine on occasion, and we’d sit while I closed up shop and he’d tell me stories of being a young punk in 1980′s Chicago. The people made the job. It was a sociological awakening for me. I was constantly exposed to and studying different people. There wasn’t the pressure of having to meet deadlines, or bedtimes. I could just observe, converse, and withdraw at leisure.
It was also my first “non-adult” job as an adult. Previous to this I worked full time in jobs where I was support staff, punched in and out, received paper checks in an envelope, took 30-minute lunch breaks, etc. The coffee job was a cash job, plus tips, free coffee, no rules. As a 23 year old, I was in heaven!
Chris Estey
(I used to write for his now defunct zine, Bandoppler)
What was the worst job you’ve had? Why?
I was the front desk man at an apartment building owned by a management company that expected me OCD-style to log every movement the tenants made, put up with a big black drug dealing pimp yelling at me every five minutes on every shift, clean all the communal bathrooms in the building spotless with one rag, scrub the community hall of vomit with the same mop and bucket we didn’t have time to clean while checking the worst junkies and hookers in the city in and out (most of whom made it a point to be as abusive as possible), and clean up after a messy suicide without rubber gloves or a face mask. The middle of my third day there I punched the front desk to pieces and they let me go.
What was the best job you’ve had? Why?
My favorite job will probably always be to help begin and protect the Wintonia, a 92-unit apartment building near Capitol Hill in Seattle that was specifically for giving homeless people a permanent home. Once a posh hotel as it was established in the early part of the 20th century, it passed through time being a Buddhist monastery and a cult-like Christian social center to finally ending up in the hands of the Archdiocese. This was when that organization was more concerned with helping the poor than hiding abuses and forcing their religion on people downtown and getting involved in right wing politics. (R.I.P.) My boss was a pipe-smoking activist and science fiction fan who like me had been a member of a justice for Central America organization. Every time he saw me on shift, day, swing, or night time, working the front desk, he’d ask “How’s the book coming?” (It never did, but he knew what was important to me.) I was fresh out of rehabilitation and had never had a job I cared about (I’d mostly been a temp file clerk and muscle for a loan shark getting money back from the religiously duped in the 80s), and from moving the heavy, newly donated furniture in (up six flights of stairs), to wrestling some guy for his knife the first night I worked there, I really admired our mission. It was harm reduction, though that word didn’t exist then, which was letting drunks and addicts live there as long as they let others go unmolested. When that would occasionally happen, I’d take action like a pit bull. I beat up a couple of tenants for grabbing tits and causing shit in the lobby, and ended up becoming security supervisor before running into a wall to save a crackhead and tearing my rotator cuff. I had been in the Christian music scene before (after a couple of years of AA and NA) and was coming to realize how selfish and narcissistic that whole scam was. American religion’s obsession with a “personal relationship” with a divine creator was all about feeling OK with our lack of responsibility in taking care of the dispossessed, and that it was “OK to be cool for Christ!” Sadly, I would let a job at Tooth & Nail Records tempt me back from being there for people who needed help and security as they tried to get better. Now, I admit that I loved being editor of my college newspaper and being drunk while I pumped out an issue laced with leftist propaganda every week; I loved working at Light In The Attic Records when the distributor wasn’t mad I was busting out mad press before he could get his product in stores and would get mad at me about it (ah, capitalism, more complicated than it seems); and as a freelancer I’ve loved terrorizing bands for articles in The Stranger and getting checks for it. (If you listen to my interview tapes you realize I am baiting and mocking my interview subjects relentlessly for shocked quotes.) BANDOPPLER is probably a close second to the Wintonia, for the same reason: The joyful building of creative if damaged community, the frenzied fun of collaboration in making something out of nothing (the They Might Be Giants issue was madly pulled out of our asses in a fit of uncertainty), having some ownership in a life changing project. But with the Wintonia I helped construct, develop, write all the rules for, and bring to life a tenement where a lot of people came to live new lives and die reasonably blissful deaths. It gave many people hope and kicked me out of a vile writer’s block. I learned a whole lot of necessary things by helping found and protecting the Wintonia: The 91 come before the one who is dead set on being a jack ass; punching him doesn’t really help anything; and we take almost everything in our lives for granted. When the Wintonia was established as low income housing in a down-trodden neighborhood the nearby owners of slums complained about the tenants moving in — and the building’s care and the way we used it helped the neighborhood to flourish and become beautiful and useful.
Sally Harless
(Did the artwork for the print version of Welcome to Flavor Country quite often)
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Why?
The worst job I’ve ever had was when I was 17 and I worked as a hostess at an Italian restaurant. Everyone that worked there was so stressed out all the time! They would be in a bad mood everyday and take it out on their co-workers. At one point they wanted me to be a food runner, which I did not want to do. They didn’t train me to do it, they just threw me into it. I had to go to the counter to get the food, and take it to the table. The problem is that they didn’t really have a way to let you know what the dishes were and where they went. It seemed like everyone else just knew. I would just stand there and stare at the food trying to figure out what it was and where it was supposed to go. And then the other employees would get mad at me! I started crying and then left during the middle of my shift, and I never went back!
What’s the best job you’ve ever had? Why?
The best job I’ve had is probably the one I have now. I am a self-employed artist and make my living through my Etsy shop, traveling to different craft fairs, and doing freelance work and commissions. There are a lot of crappy things about my job, like I don’t have health insurance, I don’t make a lot of money, I sometimes work 12-14 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, and my hand and wrist hurt a lot. But there are a lot of really great things about my job. I can go swimming in the middle of the day if I need a break, watch (er, listen to) TV while I work, and work in my pajamas. I receive a lot of great feedback and compliments. I can’t get fired from my job, and there’s nowhere to go but up!
Me
(I work with myself all the time)
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Why?
Working as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton to the EPA in Seattle doing records management was by far the worst job I’ve ever had. I’ve written a lot about it in past issues of the zine but I’ll give a brief summary of why I disliked that job so much. While I thought the mission we were doing was admirable (keeping records to help the Superfund program – the part of the EPA that cleans up toxic waste sites – and working with them on court cases against polluters), the government bureaucracy was totally evident. We were a sub-contractor to a general contractor that worked for the EPA. This meant at any one time I had three bosses: my boss at Booz Allen (the sub-contractor), the boss of the records center (the lead on the contract) and the contact at the EPA. This made things fairly confusing. This was compounded by the fact that my first boss was incompetent (he was in his late 60s and we seriously thought he might be suffering from dementia as he forgot things all the time) and also sexually harassed my work spouse. After he was finally fired (my work spouse had to sue people to get it accomplished) he was replaced by another boss that was also incompetent. On top of this we had fairly frequent turnover (I think half of our staff of 10 people left in the two years I was there – which is pretty high for professional work) and I had two different Booz Allen bosses during the time, neither of which was ever on-site or even in Seattle. We were also working at the EPA at a time when Bush was President, which meant the EPA was very underfunded. On top of this, I had a formal reprimand written against me for not following through on a request to do work that no one had ever told me about and had one contact at the EPA die of cancer and a co-worker I really liked who was consistently in and out of the hospital for hepatitis. I yelled at bosses on multiple occasions (which I’ve never done at other jobs) and even tried to get fired. I consistently could finish a day’s worth of work in half a day and then had nothing to do so would often just wander around downtown Seattle for an hour or two here and there. I started going to counseling mainly to talk about how much I hated my job and how depressed it made me to be behind a desk doing data entry (when they hired me under the premise I’d be doing work related to my library science degree). The only thing that really got me through the work was that some of my co-workers had great senses of humor and understood mine so we were able to laugh our way through many of the absurdities of the work.
What’s the best job you’ve ever had? Why?
The best job I ever had was from when I was 16 through the age of 18 and worked for the Christian music store in town, Music Express. My boss at the time I started was 23 and a local radio DJ. We weren’t a bookstore; we only carried Christian music and the boss was young enough that he was cool with me listening to Christian punk and alternative music, which may sound lame to most reading this but I was really into it at the time. The set-up was in what used to be a small dry cleaners drive-through booth, probably no more than 200 square feet. But basically I got paid to sit around, listen to music I wanted to listen to anyway, do my homework and talk to customers. Being that this was the mid to late 90s I also got to listen to CDs before they came out and was up on all kinds of music gossip (hey, it exists even in the Christian world). I also met a lot of cool people including some friends I still have today. After a time, Christian punk became somewhat trendy amongst a lot of the Christian kids in our Indiana city (of which most everyone was a Christian or did a pretty good job of acting like it) and I got sick of so many bands that sounded the same that I started listening to a lot of Adult Contemporary music while at work. Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Newsboys and Rebecca St. James were amongst the ones that got regular rotation. It confused all the punk kids who walked in and saw me, a punk kid, listening to singers their parents tuned into on their local Christian music station (WFRN – your friend of the family). I wouldn’t necessarily want to work in a setting like that now but for the time period it was a good job and a lot of fun.
Jeremiah Wade
(Used to write for my now defunct zine, Actionattackhelicopter, and we worked together at Menards in high school)
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Why?
The worst job I’ve ever had would actually have to be a tie between two jobs: being a cashier at Menards and detasseling corn. Detasseling sucked for a number of reasons, the main one being the dumb, racist, violent, toothless hillbillies who set a field on fire with cigarettes, had sex in portable toilets, started a fight on the bus using road flares, and threatened to beat me up regularly for being a “fucking faggot.” The corn rash, sunburn, and sub-minimum wage just added to the misery.
Working at Menards sucked for different reasons. While the pay was okay for a high school senior, the soul-killing big box store anti-culture was almost unbearable. All those in management were brought in by the corporation to open the store and get it up and running. They had no interest in the community and only hung out with other boring, pathetic members of management. Whether they were at work or at Applebee’s after work, the dynamic was the same: you always felt like you were intruding on their lame private party to which you were only begrudgingly invited and only attended because someone was paying you to show up and smile. Menards was the only job I’ve ever quit without having another job to go to.
What’s the best job you’ve ever had? Why?
The best job i’ve ever had? That’s hard to answer. It depends not only how one defines “best,” but also “job.” I’ve had plenty of great jobs, but not too many that paid well. Being a musician has been pretty great, of course, but I’m not sure if I could count that as a job, as it has been pretty sporadic at times.
The most enjoyable “real job” would have to be working in the a/v department at the local public library. I love organizing and working with music and movies. It’s the only job that has allowed me to feel like my encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture actually has some practical value. Plus, I enjoy working with the public, especially the crazy neighborhood people, who add a bit of excitement at times. Unfortunately, the pay is so low that I can’t justify keeping it while I have to pay for childcare.
