I was walking down the street this morning and had to side-step a guy rockin’ out with a Cash for Gold sign. You know the guy – he’s the one on the street corner trying to get your attention by waving around a sign that, ironically, you can’t read because he’s moving around too much. He had his earphones on and was clearly enjoying his music, but as I passed him I saw him stop everything, just for a moment, and exhale a big, discouraged, shameful sigh. At least this is how I interpreted it. He may have just been passing gas or waiting for the next tune to begin playing in his ears.
And that got me thinking about all the jobs I’ve taken just to pay the rent or put food on the coffee table (I actually rarely eat at my kitchen table). When you’re a 99 percenter, it’s uncommon for your savings account to have more than a two-digit number, so when one job ends, especially unexpectedly, you scramble to earn in any way you can. And scrambling, my friends, is a verb that is best left to eggs.
The last time I scrambled for a job, it looked a little something like this:
Me: “Oh my god all my glamorous temp work dried up, what do I do?!”
Friend: “Hey, I just took a job petitioning for the upcoming municipal election. Come work with me.”
Me: “What does that entail?”
Friend: “Standing outside of supermarkets in the rain or blazing sun all day begging passers-by for their signature while trying not to get booted off the property by management. Sometimes for fun complete strangers will swear at you.”
Me: “Fuck that shit. I’d rather get a job at Starbucks.”
A week later…
Me: “Starbucks says I’m not qualified to steam milk and write on cups. Is that petitioning job still open?”
And speaking of glamorous temp jobs, I’ve got enough stories about these to write a War and Peace*-length anthology. Some highlights include:
· - a boss who insisted that every morning I purchase and then cut his croissant into four pieces, discard all the crumbs, and serve him at his desk
· - a reception job where I was forbidden to turn on the computer, read a magazine or have my cell phone on the desk so as not to distract from the work – work being answering the phone that rang about five times over the course of eight hours (I got in a looooot of meditating that week)
· - a CEO who told me part of my job was to turn on the lights in his office and water his plants every morning; one day I forgot and this grown man left his office, walked down the hall, and confronted me about my terrible work ethic rather than fling his arm out two feet to the left and flip the switch on himself
· - the company that had me come in one day early to train with the employee I’d be filling in for; she spent the entire day instructing me how to use the phone (“This is the phone. When it makes that noise, you pick up the receiver and speak into it. Upon completion of the conversation, you hang up the phone.”)
· - working at an onsite property management company where a homeowner yelled at me, the doe-eyed temp on her first day, “If you were president of the United States this country would go down the shitter!” My response: “You really think I could be president?”
Other jobs I’ve taken out of desperation are: traveling salesperson (if you knew my shy, sensitive, writer’s personality, you’d understand why this job made this list), dog walker (I have a fear of dogs), film and TV extra (my favorite role was Scantily-clad Slave on Flash Gordon which was filmed in Canada during the winter; if you know anything about extra work, you can imagine the heatless tents they had us huddling in during downtime), writing marketing articles about adult diapers (I don’t mean to judge, but I was seriously sad/depressed for three days afterward), and I was actually offered money to have sex with someone (I turned it down, but only because it didn’t pay enough. Kidding.).
So, these days I try to limit my scrambling to eggs or transmission frequencies. But if I find myself in a spot o’ desperation, at least I have accumulated enough experience to be jack of all trades, because these days it doesn’t seem to pay to be master of one.
* a 1475-paged novel, for those of you who failed/skipped/didn’t care about English Lit (which, by the way, shame on you!)
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