duck-shaped pain

Some of them have been good jobs, like the one I have now. Most have been tolerable � some bad aspects, a few good ones which made me stay for as long as I could stand to be there. Several have been horrible, horrible shit jobs, ones which made me detest and avoid entire industries from that moment on.

I only have a few standards when it comes to jobs, and I�ve added more of them the older I get. The one promise I made to myself when I started working, one which I�ve kept, is that I never wanted to work with food. No restaurants, no coffee shops, no catering businesses, nothing where I would have to wear a hairnet and an apron. So far, I�ve succeeded, even though I keep having this occasional pipe dream about starting a restaurant.

The first horrible job I had was as an attendant in an art gallery. It was the student exhibit gallery at the school I attended at the time, and there was nothing in the job description that would indicate that this was to be a horrible job.

My duties were pretty simple: watch the art, make sure no one defaces or molests any of it, and make sure all visitors sign the guest book. Reading and doing homework were permitted, and you could have friends visit. Simple � yet deceiving. Sure, it wasn�t a hard job in any sense of the word, but being there, sitting in the gallery, made it easy for any freak on campus to come over and talk to me, since they knew I wasn�t allowed to escape. I heard it all � complaints about teachers, conspiracy theories, thinly veiled requests for dates � and tried to ignore it. One guy would come in and talk for hours and hours and even feigning death would not make him go away. I still run into him, now and then, and he�s even more annoying. He tells me that he finds books that I once used to own all the time at thrift stores and used-book stores (I used to stamp my name in every book I owned � bad idea), and that he keeps the ones with my name in them on a special shelf. Gaaah.

The next horrible job, one that ranks at the top of all the bad jobs I�ve ever had, was the summer I spent taking hotel reservations over the phone. A large hotel chain (I won�t say who) opened a reservation call center in my hometown, and it quickly became the number one summer job choice for teens in my area. You didn�t have to make burgers or cotton candy, you got to be inside, and they paid the most of anyone in the area -- $4.90 an hour. Whoo hoo!

But only hours into my stint there, it became obvious how much this job was going to suck. For one thing, you had to wear uniforms � for a job where all you did was talk on the phone. Everyone got issued two polo shirts with the company name and current motto embroidered on them (the motto while I was there � I kid you not -- was �Excellence is everywhere you find it.�) These were to be worn with black or blue pants or skirts � no jeans or shorts allowed, unless with was a special Wacky Jeans And Shorts Day. If you worked on the weekends, however, you could wear what you want � they were always surprised at the number of people who demanded to work on weekends.

As a sort of back-door way of acknowledging how lame the uniform rule was, the company made us all watch a video which rationalized the rule, and gave us all handy ways to rationalize it to ourselves, too. �When actors perform on a stage, they have to wear costumes in order to get into their role. Well, just think of your cubicle and your phone as your stage and your uniform as your costume. Say to yourself, �This isn�t my Reservations Agent uniform � this is my Reservations Agent costume!�

It just went down the tubes from there. I got the worst calls � people who wanted me to do something about the fact that the sales tax in Kentucky was different than it was in Tennessee; callers who insisted that there was a five-star luxury resort in my hometown (ha!) and then told me I was lying when I said I was actually in the town they wanted to visit, and was damn sure there was no resort here; and all sorts of other types who felt free to berate me simply because they could. One call was from an old guy in Florida who kept asking me questions about my political affiliation, and started going off about how apathetic the Youth Of Today were when I wouldn't tell him. I won't even go into the porn calls (I got a lot, because I worked the late shift). For months after I left that job, I couldn�t bring myself to use the phone much. I still hate the phone.