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."

This Weeks Guest Blogger

[editors note: Nancie K is the Blog's first guest blogger. She is fairly awesome and maintains her own Blog on her adventures in her community garden. I highly recommend it if you like to garden, eat vegetables, or are the least bit interested in garden drama. -brandon]

I Got Peed On At Camp:



Some of my most vivid summer memories are from camp. It's sort of a thing in the Jewish community to send your kids off to summer camp where they can hang out with other kids, play, learn songs and learn some of the hows and whys of being Jewish. There's also the idea that it teaches independence, but probably more important than all of these is the chance for parents to get rid of their kids for 2, 4, 6 or 8 weeks and enjoy some child-free peace and quiet!

A lot of the fun of camp is the unfettered freedom. You're mostly being supervised by teenagers!

Here is a sampling of things I learned at camp:
1) How to swim and especially how to dive
2) How to play card games like "spit" as well as American, Chinese and Israeli jacks
3) How to play Newcomb and Volleyball
5) What a hickey was and how to give one
6) How to "moon"
7) What all the "bases" are and how to french kiss
8) That the girls in G-3 "did pot" although I think I learned what "pot" was much later on.
9) How to put someone in a "trance," how to hold a seance and how to use a ouija board.
10) bats like the rafters of rec rooms and sometimes like the very curly hair of counselors - ew!


In my youth, I went to a lot of different camps: day camps, sleep-away and even a teenaway camp when I was in junior high where we went someplace cool in the city every day.

Unfortunately some of my camp experiences were better than others and the very first camp I went to was a girl scout camp when I was seven. This is where I got peed on. It's really not that much of a story, but here's what happened:

A girl in my bunk wet her bed and her sleeping bag needed to be washed. While her sleeping bag was at the laundry she couldn't use it and for some reason they couldn't get her stuff washed before we all had to go to sleep that night. My counselor had the brilliant idea that we should just stick her in my sleeping bag with me and she'd get her bedding back the next day and all would be ok. Well, this kid was a bedwetter and so, she wet the bed, but this time it was MY bed. I don't really remember much of what happened next, but I have some vague recollection of them maybe sticking me in her sleeping bag the next night while mine was being laundered. It seems far fetched so maybe it didn't happen that way, but I think these girl scouts were that stupid and it really may have.

I stopped going to that camp. It was lame and there were no boys either!


Links:
Jewishsummercamp.com
Newcomb Ball

My Brush With Fame

Bored at work, I started cataloging all of my brushes with famous people. I asked around, and nobody had any interesting experiences, except for the boss. He went to a concert with Boz Scaggs' younger brother. How cool is that? Not really, I know.



My earliest memory of a brush with fame was shaking hands with Sugar Ray Leonard at a boxing match at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. I still think it's kinda neat, even though at the time, I really didn't understand who he was.



Along the boxing vein, a later brush with "fame" was when "Hurricane" Peter McNeely asked me for directions on Newbury Street once. He had recently got his ass whooped by Mike Tyson, and I was more than a little amused to have a run-in with him.



Also, at the same job, Curtis Armstrong came in to the store and bought a vest. Don't know who Curtis is? He's more commonly known for the tagline "We've got bush!" in Revenge of the Nerds. That's right. Booger. Or Charles DeMar from Better Off Dead: "This entire mountain is made of snow!"



A couple doors down from that job was another job at a cafe where I had the following brushes with fame:
Greg Hawkes was a regular, and a pretty nice guy. Don't know who he was? Me neither, at the time. He was the keyboard player for The Cars.



I served coffee to Joe Perry at one point. He seemed a little freaked out to be among the commoners. It was too quick an exchange to get any sense of Joe's coolness. Also, once at the airport I saw the bass player for Aerosmith.



Recently I came within feet of the tiniest Dixie Chick. They had pretty tight security. I found out that one of the Dixie Chicks owns a monkey that she takes on tour with her. It's true.



Also, through the same friend, I got into the green room of E-40 and his posse. Don't know who 40 is? Stay there. He's a hardly marginally talented rapper. And he's a DICK. And so are his hangers-on.



The brush that I'm kind of ashamed with took place in Denver, when I ran into Charles Lewton-Brain.



He's a jeweler and sculptor who writes little books on techniques, tricks, and shortcuts. A big writer/teacher, he writes great articles about steamlining one's workspace, and lo-fi techniques. I've been an avid reader of his books and articles, and really respected his knowledge. I ran into him at a conference and was rendered nearly speechless. It was pathetic.

My coolest brushes took place over a weekend recently. I found myself having breakfast in the same room as Mean Gene Okerlund. Fucking badass.



I'm way over it now, but I was a fan of WWF as a wee kid, and Mean Gene was the voice of it. Also, on that same day, I got within two feet of Hulk Hogan. The Hulkster. If seeing Gene was a big deal, Hogan was like walking by Elvis. I also saw a bunch of superstars of the modern fake-pro-wrestling, but don't give a crap about it, so I didn't recognize any of them, aside to say that it was filled with Huge Dudes, and Smokin hot chicks.



Also, living in Boston affords some odd perks: I sat on the orange line opposite former presidential candidate Mike Dukakkis once.


(*no caption necessary)

Walking with Pollard in Kenmore Square, he claimed that we had just walked past Frank Black, but I wasn't paying attention, so I can't confirm that one.

Anyone else?

(originally published 11/10/2006)

Crimes Against Nature

Assault and Butterfly

Grand Theft Otter

Man Sl-Otter

Crimes Against a Manatee

Hake Crime

Domestic Bass-ault

Henocide

Hamdalism

Joeyriding

Pros Tit Tution

Codomy (depending on state)

(originally published 9/30/2007)

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.

Seeking Guest Bloggers

Seems as if I've become a medium sized fish in a gigantic pond in recent weeks and I can't quite explain it.

In short: A lot of people are into this blog and want to talk to me about it, usually in person. Sometimes a tale I tell reminds someone of a similar event that happened to them. Just tonight Nancie was telling me how she read about me getting puked on and it reminded her of getting peed on not once but twice at sleep-away camp.

This, friends, is a story that needs to be told.

So I implore you, gentle reader: tell me your story. I shall publish it here with full credit given, links to any site you want, and props for any product you are selling. You will have as much or as little editorial oversight as you wish. I think it would be hilarious. It doesn't have to be so elaborate. Just tell an amusing anecdote. Humiliation always plays well around here, especially when it is directed at oneself (me, usually).

Or maybe it's stupid. You could say that too. But I have faith in the project.

That Time I Got Puked On

I was attending a sleepover with some of my neighbors, kids my age. We couldn't have been more than eight years old.



Thad was hosting. He was a skinny redhead who usually wore wide-striped long-sleeve shirts. He was funny and a good soccer player. Nathan and I were the guests. Nathan was a little on the dorky side. A little socially awkward. Chubby. I remember once he and my younger brother got into an argument in our garage. Shawn, who was at least a foot shorter, literally jumped upwards and punched Nathan square in the nose. Blood poured out in a torrent, Nathan cried and ran home. Served him right, I thought. We were trying to build a robot.

As I recall, Thad's parents weren't around, and we ate M+M cookies and watched a copy of Friday the 13th on video disc. When his folks eventually came home, it was time for lights out. We were to sleep in the backyard in a tent that Thad had received from his Grandma for his birthday. We crawled into our sleeping bags, me in the middle, Thad and Nathan on the either side, and after some cursory chit chat, fell asleep.

Later that night I awoke wet and confused. What the hell happened? I tried to make sense of what was going on. Had I pissed myself in the night? How embarrassing! What was I going to do? I'll never live this down!

And then I noticed the smell. We all know the acrid stench of vomit. It's horrifying. I sat up. There was puke all over my sleeping bag, my head. I looked to my right, and saw Nathan asleep, a smattering of vomit around his mouth.

That little bastard! He had woken up, puked on my head and gone back to sleep!

I turned to my left and started shaking Thad:

"Thad! Wake up! Nathan puked on me!"

Thad came around and nearly lost it from the concentrated stench. We didn't know what the hell to do. We were just kids, after all. In the hubbub, Nathan awoke and immediately started crying:

"I'm sorry! I didn't mean to!"

"You jerkwad! You puked on me!"

Somehow Thad's parents were roused, Nathan's parents were called and they took him home, crying and hysterical. I spent the wee hours of the morning in the bathtub trying to wash puke off myself. I swear, for weeks I was picking bits of vomit out of my hair.

I'm glad my brother punched that son of a bitch.