Crappy Job III: With Soundtrack!

My first real job when I moved to Boston was at a one-hour photomat called Moto Photo. The thing that makes the job crappy was that I was paid probably about $6.25 per hour, but other than that, it was kind of an awesome gig. Plus, take it away, Def Leppard!



One of my main jobs was quality control/packaging. The process was fairly automated. Rolls of film were fed into a machine that spit out developed negatives. These were then put into a machine that exposed the negatives onto a giant roll of photographic paper. It was carried, through rolls and conveyors through development chemicals, and spat out at the other side of the machine into neatly cut 4x6 photographs. My job was to collect the piles of photos, look through the entire stack to make sure the colors and alignment were correct, then package the prints in envelopes with the negatives and file them into bins alphabetically for the clients.

On one hand, this experience warped my perceptions for all eternity: I cannot look through a stack of photographs the way a normal person can. I look at them in a rapid-fire manner, scrutinizing for color balance, exposure, etc. I take in what I'm seeing, although it doesn't look like it to the proud owner of the prints. More than once I've heard, "You're not even looking at them!"

But I am. I am.

Working in a place like this, you experience the joy and wonder and good times vicariously. I've been three steps removed from weddings, births, vacations, parties, reunions, sporting events, concerts, celebrity sightings, you name it. This was also the days before digital cameras. We had a number of repeat clients, people I saw several times a week. Insurance companies, galleries, Realtors all needed photographic documentation often. So I got to know some of our regulars. Every once in a while, one of them would have a couple frames left on a roll, and would snap off shots just to fill it out before dropping off. I've seen a number of wife-boobs due to these thrifty urges.

On the subject of naked people: I've seen A LOT of them. I did not ask for or seek out the exposure of nakedness. I simply punched a clock, and voila! Naked people. It's not so bad. I went to art school, after all. I've seen naked people. I've even drawn them.

On one day in particular, I was leafing through photos at my usual breakneck speed. I picked up a stack that looked a lot like a number I had seen before: The College Keg Party, known primarily for the proliferation of red keg cups, baseball caps, and chummy, arms-around-shoulders, cups-hoisted head shots. One girl in particular was featured in a majority of the shots. It became clear, in retrospect, that this girl owned the film at hand, and posed in most of the frames. These were run-of-the-mill pics, boring, really. Until the last few shots. These featured our young lady, pants down, leaning back on a bed with what can only be described as a Huge Apparatus inserted into her lady-bits, with a look on her face like the one that most people reserve for riding on an awesome roller coaster. If this photo could speak, it would say, "WOOOO HOOOO HOOOO!"

Somewhat amused, I nudged my friend Dan, "Hey, heh. Check it out."

Time passes. I'm packaging, Dan is working the counter. I hear a girl's voice, here to pick up #3497. Dan digs in the bin near me, retrieves an envelope, places it on the counter and takes the money. She asks, "Do you guys look at these pictures?" I say, without looking up, "Yeah, sometimes we pass 'em around," to look up and see that girl, aghast. She turns crimson, does an about-face, and bolts from the store.

Whoops! Sorry... She should have gone with a Polaroid.

Stay tuned for Part IIIa: "Way More Excessive Porno Than Even I Can Tolerate In The Work Place."

Crappiest Job: The Prequel: Silly String and Gummy Worms

I nearly forgot about this job, even though it wasn't really a job because I was underage, worked for less than a day, and I didn't get paid. But it really shaped the rest of my working life, I think, when I look back on it.

A friend of John's family was opening a convenience store at the beach, building it from the ground up. John somehow got the go-ahead to come and work some mindless menial task, and was able to finagle a job for me as well. Just getting there was a task in itself. When I approached my folks about the possibility of working after school, they naturally shot that idea out of the sky. I was 13. What the hell did I need with a job? It was out of the question. But I wanted to work, and wanted a little extra cash to burn, so I crafted some elaborate, cockamamie scheme whereby I would ride my bike to school, which would explain why it took me so long to get home in the evening. I left early and biked a mile or so down the road to my friend Josh's house, stashed the bike in the woods and caught the normal bus into school. After class I caught the bus to the beach, where John and I were to begin our working lives. It was a flawless plan.

The gig was easy enough: we were stocking a store, which consisted mainly of opening boxes, removing the contents, setting said contents onto shelves or into coolers, breaking down the boxes, and throwing them into the dumpster. Easy. Piece of cake. I could taste that $4/hour already. I loaded a few shelves, ran a bunch of boxes to the dumpster, and all was going well. Until I went back and found John behind the dumpster.

"Check this out, man!" he said with pride, as he reached under the dumpster and fished out a giant tub of Gummy Worms for my approval. Looking behind him, I could see that Silly String was sprayed EVERYWHERE.



Now, Some interesting things to consider:

1) Things which are important to 13 year-old boys: Silly String and a giant tub of Gummy-Worms.

2) Gummy-Worms are important enough to a 13 year-old to:
a)steal, and
b)hide under trash, supposedly with the intention of retrieving and eating later.

Please understand, gentle reader, I had no intention of storing food under trash and then eating it. I only wanted to throw broken boxes into that trash and collect some cash. But John hijacked that meager dream.

And of course, as luck would have it, as I turned to walk away, leaving John with his Trash-Gummies and his no-longer-silly string, the boss came out through the back door.

"What the fuck is this?"

"Uhh, uhh... " John stutters and attempts to hide the tub, forgetting that part of his guilt is sprayed all over the alley behind him. The boss isn't impressed. He reaches under the dumpster and pulls out the Tub-O-Gummy, and grabs John by the collar of his t-shirt. Meanwhile, I'm going back into the store to keep working.

"Don't go anywhere, kid," I'm told. He's dragging John back inside, and now I'm guilty by association. We're taken back into the store, into the office. John is pushed rather brusquely into a chair. I stand in the corner.

The boss calls John's dad, tells him we're ready to be picked up right now.

The boss doesn't say much for the next half hour or so, and I keep trying to melt into the wall. It doesn't work well.

When John's dad shows up, Bossman follows us out to the car. He waits until John and I are inside, me in the back and John riding shotgun. He tells John's dad through the window, after the car has been started, what happened, how he found us both in the back, conspiring to rob him of his earthly possessions, how John had been caught in the act, red-handed.

John Sr bids his friend farewell, rolls up the window, watches him return to his store. He turns to John and pauses, observing his child for a moment. Then he punches John squarely in the jaw. His right hand rains down again and again against the boy, finding easy weaknesses in the meager defense his boy puts up. He is bigger, stronger. He beats the living shit out of John while I sit in the backseat watching, cursing and spitting. I'm terrified. For all I know, I might be next.

Afterward he drives me to Josh's house, John quietly crying and wiping blood from his nose, me holding the door handle the whole time, ready to bail and take my chances against fast-moving asphalt rather than those meaty fists.

Much like the timeI got caught shoplifting, I don't go back to that store for years. I never really liked Gummy Worms to begin with.

The Crappiest Job

I thought I would do a bit about all the awful jobs I've ever worked. I have at least one anecdote from each that illustrates how ridiculous, terrible, or ridiculously terrible each one was, and perhaps how it crafted me in some small way into the industrious young man I am today. Or maybe it will just be good for a laugh. At me, not with me.

Without further achoo, Part I:

The Line House.

I grew up in Southern Maine, where the youngest that one could legally work was 14. So, as soon as I was eligible, my friend Mike hooked me up with a job washing dishes with him.

A lot of young men in this country get their start in the working world this way. It doesn't take a whole lot of brain-power to do. It is, however, one of the crappiest jobs on the planet. The smell is the worst part. A pungent blend of bleach, industrial soap, grease, and old food, it really sticks with you. On rare occasions I will walk into a restaurant and catch a tiny whiff of that scent and be transported back to the late 1980's, scrubbing away in that tiny little back room.

The Line House was situated on the town line (get it?) between Kittery and York, Maine. It served your standard diner fare, blended with a few nods to the surrounding fishing industry. Think fish and chips and clam chowder, but nothing more elaborate than that. Burgers and fries, brunch on the weekends, that sort of thing. The burgers were pretty good, however, and it was here that I tasted Cape Cod potato Chips for the first time. One "perk" of the job was unlimited fountain sodas, which, as a teenager, is really all you need in life.

As I said, I worked in a small room with a low-ceiling in the back designated for dishwashing. It couldn't have been more than 12 x 12 feet, with most of the space taken up by a chest-type freezer, two industrial stainless steel sinks, a drying rack, and shelf space on either side: one side for clean dishes, the other side for dirty.

Dave was the line cook, a diminutive guy with tight, curly red hair, who thought nothing of tending the grill with a Marlboro hanging out of the corner of his mouth as he worked the spatula and barked at the waitresses as items were 86'd. He would torment the dishwashers in a good-natured way, and smoke a joint on the back steps with the waitresses after the place had closed for the night. He took to calling me Metal Head, as I had a habit of wearing Megadeth T-shirts and wearing my hair in the mullet style. I'd walk into my shift and be greeted with "METALHEAD!!!" Putting on a white apron, I'd smile, flash The Goat, and walk into the steam-filled abyss of the crappiest job ever.

Washing dishes sucks. It sucks. As a dishwasher, you are wet from your chest to your thighs all the time. Your hands will turn into pink prunes and smell of garlic and bleach for days. They will also blister, from the combination of the industrial chemicals and the searing heat of the washing process. That apron I mentioned does nothing to protect you, either from the water or the food and grease that ends up sticking to you like a ghost. But, as a fourteen year-old kid, I didn't have a lot of career options.

One Saturday in particular, the restaurant was slammed. Packed to the gills. Crammed into a small, greasy, hot and dangerous place, people tend to get a little cranky. Dave was screaming at the waitresses, and I was scrubbing like mad to keep up. Woe be unto the lowly dishwasher if the cook runs out of frying pans. Steve was the owner/boss, and he came into the back, needing more wine glasses. I looked around, and could only see three in the dish room. I washed those quickly and gave them to him. Shortly after, he came back again, and asked a little more pointedly, for more wine glasses. "I don't have any. Every glass in here is out front," I told him, getting a little testy as well.

A few minutes later, he came to me and said, "this is what I need you to do."

The Line House sat on a plot of land owned by Steve's sister, who had a house down a dirt road about 200 yards behind the restaurant. I was to jog down the road, open the garage door, go through the laundry room, and into the kitchen, where a case of new wine glasses was stowed in a cabinet next to the sink. Being the loyal foot soldier that I am, I clicked my heels, saluted, and jogged down that road.

As I opened the garage door, I could hear the telephone ringing. On the other end of that line was Steve, trying to call to warn me about the large German Shepherd that his sister owns.



I walked into the laundry room and opened the door to the kitchen, where I was greeted by the biggest fucking dog I had ever seen. His head was lowered, and as soon as he smelled the grease on me, assumed I was either an intruder or lunch. Or both. He lunged forward and bit me right in the middle of my chest. I'm sure I screamed like a girl, but I know I ran faster than I ever have out of there, the dog biting me twice on my ass as I fled. The t-shirt I was wearing, I later discovered, had a perfectly symmetrical bite mark taken out of the bottom of it.




Everyone from the back of the restaurant had come out onto the back steps to see what was going to happen. Dave later approached me, "Dude! Metalhead! That was fucking inTENse!" My hands couldn't stop shaking for hours after that. When I told my folks about it, my dad was pissed. But I defended the place, saying that Steve was a good guy, it was an accident, they were good enough to give me a job, etc. I know now that I should have sued the hell out of that guy. But sometimes I'm too nice for my own good.