I've had a lot of jobs: an epilogue

What have I learned from all these bullshit jobs?

If you've managed to ingest my entire long, drawn-out, and often completely absurd employment history over the years, my political trajectory and firm place on the political left throughout the years should come as no surprise. Continually dropping out of too many colleges before I could finish a degree but still needing to pay off the student loans I’d idealistically accumulated throughout ensured that I would end up in some crappy, underpaid, often undignified positions while I figured out what I wanted to do with myself. It’s easy to see why the left’s economic platform would appeal to someone with my experiences.

I started working at 14, as soon as I was legally allowed to get a real W2 job, but before that, I was always involved in some money-making scheme with my sister and our friends. We’d do the standard kid stuff like babysitting (lord, I hated that the most, which is why you never saw anything kid-related in my job history; supervising was as close as I got), mowing lawns and shoveling sidewalks, and whatever weird, creative other things we came up with, like hosting a “cat show” for the neighborhood and selling freshly-baked cookies and old McDonald’s Happy Meal toys to our very patient neighbors.

the 90s just oozing out of this photo

It was the 90s in the urban Midwest, and seemingly everyone I knew was being raised by a single mom, dads usually only around every other weekend or less than that, and my family was no different. While we never went hungry or without what we needed, there wasn't usually much left over. A job was necessary for spending money as I got older, and loans were necessary for a 4-year college, which was presented to us in the 90s and early 00s as essentially required for a decent income (of course it still pretty much is, depending on your career goals, even if it’s less guaranteed to provide that decent income now than it used to be, especially factoring in loan payments for those who needed them).

As someone who always leaned toward the creative side, particularly photography, I knew my earning potential had a high likelihood of being low if I decided to take that track, but I was a product of my generation and wanted to believe that I could do anything I set my mind to — that I could have a career I loved, not just a job I needed. I had never felt drawn toward anything else that seemed realistic, and I stubbornly insisted on pursuing the most expensive, “pure” path to get there and decided to go to a private art college after a semester at a technical college.¹ During my second semester, I got into a car accident that took most of my money and ruined my car and subsequently my credit for awhile, so I couldn’t take out any more loans that I needed to keep attending, so I went back to work full-time, tail between my legs, and tried to figure out what to do next.

I spent most of this time taking pictures of local bands at shows nearby and partying a lot. Eventually, I quit the photo lab and got out of retail and got my first “grown-up job,” as I saw it: an office job in the first bank’s call center. It was around then that I stopped making an effort to see live music and mostly disappeared from the scene, and the next two years of my life contain so many fewer photos than any other time period of my life. Kinda lost my spirit there for a bit.

There are a few moments in my life that I consider to have “radicalized” me in one way or another, and one of the first was working in that Wells Fargo small business call center when I was 22 in 2006/2007. I’ll never forget putting a customer on hold to ask my team lead if I could get approval to reverse a late fee on their credit card.

“It’s their first one, and they got it because of how we just changed the statement cycle from 30 to 21 days,” I started, referring to the recent change that the bank advertised in very tiny print on the very last page of the statements that we all knew customers never read. “They’re a really good customer,” I stressed, wanting to reverse the fee for them. My lead turned around to face me.

“If they haven’t paid any late fees or interest, they are not actually a good customer.” I stared at him. “They don’t make us any money.”

This was an obvious enough fact that we all understood to some degree, but I had never before heard it admitted so transparently by someone in charge; we were supposed to pretend to believe the bullshit we told the customers when they accused us of the same thing. The truth of the statement, uttered so matter-of-factly, was a catalyst for the growing chip on my shoulder. This was an entirely rigged system, designed to keep even these educated, upper-middle-class, often credentialed business owners down at every opportunity; what were they doing to everyone lower on the economic totem pole, who I would later have to deal with at the smaller bank? As for myself, I'd end up paying the bank thousands in overdraft fees during my employment, both because I was terrible with money and also because their business model relied on exploiting that trait in their customers as much as they could get away with.

My time at that call center altered my perception of work in general and my later attitudes at many jobs. It wouldn't have been completely inaccurate to call me “entitled” at times, but I don't necessarily think I shouldn't have been, sometimes.

I always wanted to be sure that I was proficient at my actual job duties, but beyond that, I was not one to take direction well if the direction did not make immediate sense to me, or if it felt unjust. I would argue with any boss about anything, thankfully nearly always shielded from any negative effects from that due to being technically good at my job or just having an otherwise good, positive banter with management, although I suspect my unwillingness to shut the hell up sometimes cost me a few otherwise-deserved promotions.

When I mentioned in my bit about the fraud investigation job that someone told the local NPR station about the bank’s bullshit, I was referring to myself. I sent the emails to the station and told them what was happening, anonymously at the time. They reported on it. I did not, as you may remember, get fired, although my roommates and I (who all worked there together) did wonder, not completely unseriously, if I might get snatched up by some anonymous black SUV on my way out sometime that week. If the bosses knew it was me, they never bothered to do anything about it. I was always itching to get back at these places in some way or another for being exploitative to their customers or employees.

Anyway, I've noticed a few things about myself in the writing and subsequent binge-reading of my own series:

I had very little discipline or useful ambition. Aside from the standard party girl shit during my 20s holding me back with too many hangovers and poor decisions, I also just didn't look too far above my “station,” assuming I needed to finish college first before really trying for much more than a one-step promotion in whatever job. If a job description said they required a degree, I believed them and didn’t try. I could've branched out, but I'm not very good at that in a workplace. I need to feel competent in order to feel like I've come by it honestly or I'm likely to be too stressed out, feeling like an incompetent fraud, and quit. Aside from that, the mental drain of working those kinds of jobs (or any kind of job, really) makes the act of looking for another one that much harder when all you want to do is collapse onto your couch and engage in something mind-numbing for a while to forget about your day. I could be counted on to go to work every day (as long as it wasn’t a call center, where I would call in “sick” as often as I could get away with) and do my job to the standards required, but rarely little else. I worked 6 days a week in that post office and didn't call out a single time in a year and a half, because I felt a sense of obligation to my customers (and coworkers in other scenarios like restaurants) and felt it was simply my nonnegotiable duty, no matter how much I hated it. This wasn't the case when I knew my place answering phone calls in a queue would not be missed because there were thousands more of us.

I actually stole a lot more shit than I thought I did, damn. The magazines from Barnes and Noble and the cigarettes from Fred’s store when I was 15, all the prints and photo CDs I made for myself at the photo lab, other piddly things that I never really thought mattered at the time, which I still don’t think matter that much now, even though I’m not likely to steal anything these days. The way I saw it back then was that as long as it didn’t have a barcode on it and could be counted as “waste” when we did inventory, it was kind of just an extra employee benefit. I rarely made these determinations entirely on my own, however; they were always careful calculations made after observing my own coworkers and what they did and were able to get away with. I’d never steal a pair of shoes or a roll of film, but I was perfectly fine with printing photos for myself for free or eating a hot dog off the rollers or a breakfast sandwich at a gas station. Printer paper was “wasted” all the time, and everyone knows old gas station and restaurant food just gets thrown away when no one buys it. Either way, I have my own ethical framework when it comes to stealing stuff: don't steal from people, don't steal from small businesses, and what you do at Walmart is your own business.²

I have very little patience for rudeness and inconsiderate behavior. I believe this comes primarily from being treated badly by customers over the course of so many years of public-facing work, and it's extended to the rest of public life. My experiences gave me empathy, but they also gave me expectations.

The above note came in response to this thread, in which I argued that a customer service job is not only emotional labor but in fact the original definition of the term and how you describe the labor you perform at those jobs, and that if you hate emotional labor but work in a field that requires it, anyway, it is still your responsibility to be nice to your customers until you are able to find a job that is better suited to your temperament.

Frankly, I couldn’t imagine being so entitled as to believe I have the right to be rude or openly disdainful to people for simply walking into the place that has employed me. Aside from just being mean-spirited and directed at precisely the wrong target, it also makes your entire job even more miserable than it needs to be, and for what? So you can prove to these innocent customers how much your employer sucks? So you can start an argument you've been itching to have, just waiting for a victim on whom to pounce? What purpose does that actually serve other than making their day just a little bit worse? If you are so embittered that you cannot find it within yourself to be a decent human being to the other decent human beings in your daily orbit, I recommend doing literally anything else for the sake of us all. Yours is not the only mental health that matters.

I had that annoying combination of being both too arrogant and too insecure for anyone to take me seriously about anything other than the exact duties of my job itself, which I always made sure I was good at, perhaps as a way to protect my own ego, perhaps as leverage when I was being reprimanded for other shitty behavior, perhaps a little of both. This led to self-sabotage and staying stuck in dead-end positions for too long with no motivation or drive to propel myself forward or upwards. One example of this that I am embarrassed to recall is when I moved from the photo lab that fired me in high school to the one in the other mall across the river. I missed my old lab, I missed the weight of the paper, I missed the coworkers I had, I missed the familiar mall and the shorter drive. I didn’t like the new company’s logo, I didn’t like damn near anything about it at first, and I did not hide that fact. Mostly I was an immature 17-year-old, but also that’s just how I fucking was, and still am if I don’t stay on top of it. I can be a massively self-centered and ungrateful person if I don’t keep myself in check. This comes out most often at work, because I'm primed for it because I probably hate my job and am already feeling resentful about being there. At least I’m honest, I guess.

I drank way the fuck too much to sustain any kind of goals I ever had. I leapt into the party scene quick, as is wont to happen in the hospitality industry in particular, but also in plenty of other low-paid, low-status jobs that leave workers feeling tired and annoyed by the end of the week and wanting to let loose. The older you get, the more that catches up with you if you keep at it, and I did keep at it, and it did catch up. Working half-drunk after getting 2 hours of sleep after a random Tuesday night hotel party thrown by coworkers is fine when you’re 19; having a few too many glasses of wine while sitting on your couch watching TV on a random Tuesday and still being functional at work on Wednesday can be downright impossible when you’re in your late 30s. In the past two years, I have massively reduced my alcohol intake to about 1-2 drinks every 6 months or so on special occasions (usually trips back to Minnesota where alcohol can hardly be avoided) and have never felt better.

21st birthday drinking some green thing in someone else’s hat

I was perpetually stuck in a victimhood mentality. After Wells Fargo, I knew shit was rigged and I had too much dignity to kiss the asses of the kinds of bosses who played along with the game without, at minimum, a conspiratorial “wink” to demonstrate that they were at least self-aware in their participation of the madness in which we were entrenched. This led to plenty of petty sabotage and whistleblowing which felt righteous, but it also led to a very defeatist attitude that brought me down everywhere else in life in addition to work. Occupy only solidified my hatred for work as a concept and my distrust for the capitalist economic system as a whole. I do not look back on Occupy or my involvement in it as misguided for this; I credit it with giving me more self-respect, even though I went (in my opinion) a little too far and needed that pendulum swing to slow down a little.

What got me out of this self-destructive mindset was a boyfriend with a very different background and perspective on money and class in general. While I can’t say the relationship was the most stable, he was responsible for catalyzing a lot of my own personal growth in this area. This was a guy who’d traveled all over the world, usually to some of the most impoverished places on the planet that changed his perspective in what “poor” really meant, and he would do anything he could to finance those trips that he loved so much. His family wasn’t wealthy, but they were solidly middle-class and he was always able to find ways to make it work. He had a lot more options than I did at his fingertips and that caused me to resent a lot his advice that seemed out of touch with my reality, but eventually it sunk in: if I care enough about something, I can make it happen. Not only that, but I am the only person in control of my own life and how I react to what happens in it. No one else has that responsibility, and I cannot force it on anyone else. That realization was life-changing. It would take a while to fully internalize this message, but once I did, I felt incredibly free, finally. I was not truly trapped by anything that was not of my own making, or by something that could not be unmade — also, and only, by me. A better attitude can often lead to better opportunities and more open doors. It was something I'd heard in one way or another my whole life and blew off as a cliché, but, as we do, I eventually learned firsthand why it exists.

I grew up with the example that you do what you have to do to survive. Even if your job sucks, you go to it every day because you have to. What I did not grow up with was an example of how to rise above your station in life, or how to chase my dreams. That was for me to figure out on my own. I was being raised by someone who didn’t have those luxuries herself because her husband left her with two young children to raise on her own, and she needed to figure out a good-paying job, fast, to take care of us. She abandoned her original goals and enrolled in a community college into the program with the highest reported salary she could find and got a diploma in powdered metallurgy, something she knew and cared nothing about but pursued solely out of necessity. There was no time for her to chase her dreams, only to do what had to be done, so there was no advice to give me on how to do anything differently. I don’t resent this; since recognizing it, I understood exactly why it was that way and, uncharacteristically, immediately thought more about how that had affected my mother than how it affected me (I told you I have a tendency to be self-centered). And I also understand that I’m the only one who can do anything about how it's affected me and that it’s useless to dwell resentfully in any direction.

A guy I dated once told me that upper-class parents act like managers to their kids, while working-class parents act like friends. He was part of the former group and was vaguely resentful of this fact that he’d observed in his own life and relationship with his parents, and I would see him talk to them on the phone and note how the conversation was always about updates about his life: how was work going? Were there any promotion opportunities coming up? Have you given any more thought to graduate school? Do you think you’ve saved enough for an investment property yet? He’d always end those conversations exhausted. He was jealous of my relationship with my mom, where we’d talk about our lives and the people we knew and how work was going for each of us, but without any pressure or subtext, just a conversation. Just hanging out. I realized then with some amusement that I was jealous of his relationship with his parents, thinking that having more of that may have pushed me to try harder, earlier.

I go back and forth between looking back on these experiences as a frustrating waste of time that took me too long to get past, and an amused pride in my ability to collect such strange and entertaining memories through even some of the stupider decisions I’ve made. Ultimately I am glad for all the varied experiences I’ve had, and especially the different people I’ve met along the way. Most of my friendships and relationships began from jobs (I met my ex-husband at that Wells Fargo call center; he sat across from me and would eventually lose his complete mind dealing with the place and started to tell customers things like “we spent your overdraft money on pizzas and ponies” when they’d get mad about their balances, and he eventually quit by simply never coming back after a smoke break). There’s a lot of value in learning how to read and talk to a variety of different people in a way that ensures a harmonious sort of interaction, and I’ve carried that with me, which is good. It’s important to have a good knowledge of what life is like in those customer-facing roles, too, for the more obvious reason of empathy.

I do wish job stacking had been a thing back then, though. I’d do it now had I not committed myself to this yoga and fitness track. But even though

Walt Bismarck

has his own framing for the practice, it’s also pretty dope left-wing praxis. Stick it to the evil corporate overlords! Get that bag while you can. Use it to buy land for a commune or some shit. If the wellness industry doesn’t work out and job stacking hasn’t been destroyed by said evil corporations yet, you can count on that being my next employment-related adventure.

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1. My boyfriend from the art school would later tell me that he envied the graduates of a different community college I would later attend. I was incredulous, thinking he was being patronizing. I asked him how he could possibly be jealous. He answered, “because they have jobs.”

2. It's a lot more complicated than that, and I'm not encouraging anyone to steal from big box stores, because when that happens in mass numbers, we get shit like this. That said, I'm gonna be a lot less angry to hear that you stole a dress from Walmart than I would be to hear that you jacked a kid's Switch from the backseat of his mom’s car.