I've had a lot of jobs (Part 5)
This was literally supposed to be two parts.
Lots of images, so you know what that means: too long for email! Do the click-through thing to see it all. I’m not breaking this into one more damn part, for your sake and mine.
We made it! We're in the final stretch of all the jobs I've had so far (except the ones I forgot about). Catch up on the previous parts of my entire chronological online resume at Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.
TSA, 36
That was an experience.
Training took place in the most depressing room you could imagine: grey concrete walls, crooked motivational posters of the extremely old school variety, a dead plant in the corner. You buzzed at the door to get into the training room and waited as the grumpiest person alive (all of them were) let you in, usually rolling their eyes at you for the imposition.
Training consisted of 10 or so of us. Most of them were much younger than I was and, I would quickly learn, hardly remembered the event that caused their job to exist in the first place. Half these children didn’t even know that more than the Twin Towers had been hit, and we were four miles from the Pentagon and its 9/11 memorial.
They weren’t all bad, though; their youthful ignorance was kind of adorable. They were not all good, either: one girl picked me out of the whole lot to bafflingly try to bully in the most juvenile ways, like cutting in front of me in the microwave line and pointedly ignoring me when I politely told her I was next. Every time I, and only I, asked a question in class, she grunted or sighed impatiently. There was more nonsensical, clearly targeted behavior that I don't remember anymore, and I was glad to be assigned to a different checkpoint and schedule than her in the end, in disbelief that I’d already earned a random enemy at this place for no reason at all. It would seem that many people who worked there had only wanted the job for an excuse to be rude and aggressive to other people all day, whether that be the passengers, their coworkers, or both.
I worked on three different checkpoints; it was normal to get moved around often as you bid for new shifts every few months. Some were better than others, but one thing was consistent: I made zero lasting connections with any coworkers on any of them, which was very unusual for my experiences in different workplaces. I had started avoiding the break room during lunches because everyone talked and ate so loudly that I hoped a plane would veer off course during takeoff and crash through the break room window to end it all already, for the love of God.1
My coworkers were polite enough to me, and I to them, but I had next to nothing in common with most of them with the exception of one group of nerds on the night shift at my favorite checkpoint who would get dispersed too quickly to other checkpoints after the next shift bid. A lucky few got to go to baggage. Everyone wanted to go to baggage because there were no passengers in baggage. It was said that baggage was where all the weirdos went, and from what I saw when I got glimpses into their break rooms, I took that to mean “fellow unlikely officers who don't belong here and are just waiting for something better to come along” and, while I didn't hate the passengers, I knew I probably would eventually, and I didn't much like my checkpoint coworkers and I wanted in. My Minnesota luck for getting what I wanted even though I rarely deserved it would remain in Minnesota and I would not go to baggage.
Starting that job in March of 2020, right at the beginning of Covid, the airport was deader than dead. The internally infamous2 two-week training that took place down in Georgia that we’d all been looking forward to had been canceled and turned into a horrid Zoom thing where we had to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at our computer monitors before we started every morning.
It was extremely hard not to laugh during this ritual every morning, not having done it since I was in, like, first grade and finding it so over the top as an adult, but I’d literally taken an oath and signed up on purpose for exactly that kind of performative patriotism and I was a good sport. Despite the fact that all of us were pretty much using the job as a foot in the door for the security clearances that would hopefully qualify us for better jobs elsewhere in the agency, I still had some pride in being official federal officer Strike and at least tried to focus on the overall goal of serving people in some manner, grotesque as that sounds when I'm talking about a job that had me groping people and searching through their shit all day. Still, it would cost $10,000 and some jail time to assault me in uniform, which everyone openly hoped would happen to them in some mild but prosecutable fashion so that they could get the 45 paid days off that came with it. The managers would not threaten to fire you for expressing such a desire to not work like the deported Canadian would at the chat support job, because they all openly hoped for exactly the same thing.
Anyway, I was the least likely and least intimidating TSO in the entire airport. I like to think it’s because I was the only friendly person ever to be employed by the agency in its entire history, but really it’s probably because most people who work that job come from a security background, not a customer service background like I had and couldn’t help but fall into by default. Most of them were hard-asses and took no shit, albeit excessively, pre-emptively, and usually unnecessarily. Most of them were on a power trip or busy trying to get into the Secret Service, Customs and Border Patrol, or the Capitol Police (I had my eye on FEMA but didn't know what to do about it yet). It wasn’t unusual to see many officers walking around carrying gallons of water as part of whatever training routine they were on to qualify for one of the tougher branches of the agency.
The thing about the job is that it didn’t actually suck if you ignored the internal nonsense, like the rude coworkers, endless bureaucracy, incompetent management, and questionable existence of the agency itself. We rotated roles every 30 minutes to break it up (and to limit x-ray exposure), and I didn’t really hate any particular role other than the ones where I had to be completely alone with next to nothing to do, like manning the exit lane. That consisted of sitting there waiting for someone to accidentally start walking up the wrong way and standing up and telling them to stop. If you were lucky, a bored coworker in another station would wander over to discuss zombie books with you or something.
Patting people down was not as bad as I feared it would be. Like the old-timers frequently told us with bored looks on their faces, it would become rote very quickly. For one thing, few people ever cared, at least not out loud, and many just chose the full-body pat-downs on their own, not wanting to go through the body scanner. It was surprising how quickly the act of shoving my hands up a chick’s underwire through her shirt or firmly (it had to be firmly!) sliding my hand up an inner thigh till I hit the almost-vag would become a mundane part of my daily life (yes, we did have to practice on each other during training). Giving someone in a wheelchair with no arms or legs a full-body pat-down was sure an interesting experience, though. Thankfully she was at least used to it.
After you got used to the activity itself, the worst part about it became the quick, partial ones you did when someone set off the body scanner (please don't wear sequins to the airport), because you had to change your gloves after every passenger, and it was practically impossible to do this quickly and efficiently when it was busy and your hands were sweaty, but it was gross and also against the new Covid rules not to.
I would occasionally hear accusations of racism, usually due to needing to search something like a “sensitive area” because of embellished denim pockets or a hairstyle that could potentially conceal something. Although we were allowed if we could back it up, I never once saw or heard of any officer using their ability to decide someone needed “additional screening” beyond what any machine we used told them to do, based on race, nationality (both explicitly forbidden, anyway) or anything else. Honestly most of them couldn’t be bothered to be that alert to actual danger (I’ve gotten two knives through security, by accident, while I was employed there), only alert to any opportunity to flex some authority on some confused passenger who didn’t put their bin away in the right place or step up to the body scanner quickly enough or something.
Because it was the nation’s capital’s primary airport, I got to screen a lot of politicians. My small excitements were searching a US senator's luggage, and accidentally yelling at Ivanka Trump for going the wrong way down a special lane when I thought she was just a normal passenger. I got scolded by a supervisor for that one, but damn, I didn’t know it was the back of her head until she turned around to glare at me after the second time I told her she was not allowed to go that way, not having yet seen the escorts ahead of her and her husband. And while I never got to meet him myself, a coworker told me Bernie was a very jolly passenger who always managed to get himself onto the emptiest commercial flights and spent a lot of time in the lounge.
Overall, I didn't mind the things other officers complained about the most, like explaining how things worked to passengers or helping them through the process, repetitive and annoying as it could be sometimes. I knew how intimidating it could be to be barked at for seemingly no reason by someone in a uniform and badge, no matter how little useful authority those things actually provided to us. They usually didn’t know that. I usually volunteered to do more time in the position everyone else hated where you stand at the tables before the x-ray and tell people, over and over again, what to take out of their bags and off of their bodies. I was nice about it and I never minded the opportunity to talk to people and see what kind of interesting new weirdos I could meet that day (and discover what kind of electronics people didn't realize were electronics, like entire desktop computers and Xboxes). I liked to think it was a disarming deterrent to look so many people in the eye and be nice to them right off the bat before they entered the rest of the security gauntlet, but who knows. I also got to spend most of my time in a terminal with two flights to Minneapolis during my shift, so I got to hear my beloved Minnesota accents once in a while and be reminded what it was like to talk to nice people again for a change.
The reason and way I stopped working there would honestly require a whole ‘nother essay, and I’m still dealing with some of it because the agency is from hell and there is no other way to put it. I only don’t regret it because I had the best health insurance in existence through them and actually needed to use it when I worked there.
Suffice it to say, the place was about as miserable on the inside as it feels from the outside. I recommend buying Pre-Check; it is well worth the money for a much faster process through the gates of hell dealing with the angriest people on earth who come to work every day actively looking for a fight.
I would not smoke weed for entirety of my time here because they did random drug tests all the time. That first bowl I smoked a year and a half later after I quit was magical.
Cardiac clinic scheduling, 37
This shit wasn’t scheduling at all; it was a goddamned tiny call center in a private practice clinic.
I lasted one week. Well, four days total, since my first week included the 4th of July, which I had off. My new record for shortest time in a call center. If I’m ever desperate and dumb enough to try again, I’ll last about 30 minutes before probably running straight out the door to my car, crying, never to return.
Outback, 38
I went into this job kicking and screaming. I was done with TSA and needed to get my shit together, yet again. I had applied at the post office, thinking I’d be able to at least keep working for the government in a different capacity and get that sweet health insurance back, but their hiring process took one million years just like TSA's did. I went into Outback because it was seemingly one of the only places I hadn’t worked yet, I knew how to work at chains, and they had a busy bar. I bellied up and ordered a glass of wine and a baked potato and asked if they were hiring bartenders. I specified! I said motherfucking bartenders! And they all said yes!
I was hired as a server. I would be able to “work my way up” to bartender, which at this point I had believed just about as much as I believed a doctor when they said I’d only feel “a pinch,” which is to say not at all. I had mentally quit that job before I’d even finished my first shift, but I kept at it for about six months because I just couldn’t not have a job anymore.
The place would end up being another one that had an absolutely batshit owner3. This particular lady threatened to lock us all inside and not let us leave on Christmas Eve because someone played a good-natured prank on her involving hiding some stupid Christmas toy she brought in. A few days later, there would be a freak snowstorm and everyone’s power would go out for several days, so the other bitchy manager who let her 10-year-old daughter run around the busy, tiny kitchen every night brought in her pet turtle, put it in a plastic cover from some tray from the kitchen, and placed it in the food window under the heat lamp to keep him warm. I immediately took a picture. She asked me to please not share it anywhere.
I would try my best to stay on Nina’s good side because she knew my brother-in-law's oldest daughter's husband who used to work there in high school (small-ass towns, man), but it was impossible. She was the worst. Her contempt for all but one or two of her favorites was impossible to hide. The fact that my nephew-in-law (is that what we call them?) was one of her former favorites did me zero favors.
Back of house staff were exceptionally vicious at this place for some reason. That kind of shit used to be part of the funny, camaraderie-building eye-rolls about life in The Industry or whatever, but by this point I was so fucking over it I couldn't even try to find it amusing anymore. It was just straight up hostile and it pissed me off the way rude bartenders start to piss you off after you turn 30 when adults with unresolved attitude problems are no longer cute.
You quickly learned the one or two cooks who would be nice to you and try to communicate only with them as often as possible, hoping they understood enough English to do so and, once again, lamenting your decision to take French in high school, but it was pretty much guaranteed that you'd be treated like an idiot or worse by any of the rest of them, no matter who you were. Even managers were afraid of them. You'd bring them back a hockey puck of a steak that you'd rung in medium-rare and they'd roll their eyes and start swearing about it. I thought the dishwasher might straight up murder me in the parking lot for the first couple months if I put a dirty dish in the wrong place. I swear to god they recruited for that position straight from the nearest prison. And god forbid you ever needed to ask Miss Kim for a side of dressing or get her to correct a mistake she made or, worse, a mistake you made. That woman would lose her shit on at least one person per shift and regularly made people cry. She wasn't even anyone's boss.
The bartenders were usually busy and had a lot of regulars and all of them were some degree of hot, all of which seemed to inflate their egos and make them feel superior to servers, who they often treated as their de facto assistants and snap at us to get bread for their tables or straws or kid cups or something. One bartender was one of those Marines who never let you forget that she was a Marine, who made a big show of working out all the time and swishing around her constantly-tangled bleached hair and would come into meetings in leggings and a crop top and loudly complain about how tired she was after her exhausting run this morning preparing for the latest Marine 5k or whatever (there are literally so many Marine races out here, I cannot keep track).
She would go through a very loud divorce, start shacking up with one of the cooks, and scream at said cook in the kitchen in front of everyone about various new home life squabbles while the other cooks elbowed him and called him whipped. I’d never before encountered so many stereotypes wrapped into one person.
I would continue to clash with my bosses, get yelled at by BOH assholes, and be mostly ignored by my coworkers (with a few exceptions, like the pregnant 19-year-old who sold me weed who refused to believe I was twice her age, which made me feel both good and a little pathetic, and the 65-year-old cokehead I'd drive home on occasion) until I finally called in sick for a few days to look desperately for a new job so I could quit. I signed up with a temp agency and texted the hostage-taking boss to tell her I was done, figuring my 6 months of half-assed employment there was notice enough.
Temp work, 38
I spent one day driving auction cars around a parking lot in Fredericksburg for $16/hr. The post office called me after that. I still haven't unsubscribed from the temp agency's daily job texts, like a Depression granny who washes generic Ziploc bags and reuses aluminum foil until it crumbles. It's been three years.
USPS, 38
Here we fuckin’ go. The great, gutted, government temp agency.
This was one of those jobs that I loved for the job itself and the customers but hated for the institution and its nonsensical operating style, which was even more incompetent and backwards than TSA, if you can imagine.
It started out on a great foot: I was called to ask why I hadn’t shown up to orientation. I asked, “what orientation?” Why, post office clerk orientation, silly! We emailed you about it!
Actually, they apparently neither copied and pasted my email address like any normal person would, nor did whomever was in charge of sending that email know the difference between a typed lower-case “L” and an upper-case “I” and sent it to some other, wrong person. They put me in the next orientation class which started the following week. It was for carriers, but would be largely the exact same orientation.
(I would later receive the orientation invitation to the correct email address one year later. Better late than never?)
I went to Richmond for a couple days for training, where I took another government oath and was assigned to my post office: a satellite office of a rural post office a 45-minute drive from me in the middle of nowhere. It was then that I learned that my part-time position with the post office was actually four and a half hours a day, six days a week. The only days I’d have off were Sundays and federal holidays, when the post office wasn’t open. This was standard for part-time employees, which I somehow didn’t know until after I was hired. Well, no going back, I guess. I counted on moving up to a career position within the year and having two days off again, like a normal person.
Because I was the only clerk in the room full of carriers, when the union people came in to talk to us, I was told to leave because my potential union as a clerk would be different, should I choose to join (I did). I was told to ask my postmaster to set me up with a union orientation on my own.4
I started at my post office and was “trained” by the postmaster. I learned I would be there by myself every day, opening and closing it, as it was only open for four hours a day. We were what’s known as a “manual” office, as opposed to one of the larger ones with modern equipment. That means I had an old-school Pitney-Bowes scale and had to write out my transactions and cash receipts by hand. There was no POS or receipt printer except on the credit card machine which went out a lot because the internet service was unreliable way out there, and my cash register was a basic calculator and the open safe.
The post office was slow, but that was frankly wonderful. Since I could hardly use my phone inside due to the poor service, I got back in the habit of reading and managed to read 74 books the first year I worked there. I also got to know the regulars who had boxes in the tiny office, most of whom were very old. I made nice with the lady my postmaster warned me about, Mrs. Brayden, who I would end up winning over and became the recipient of many of her locally-famous baked goods. She had COPD and would often call me from outside in the parking lot and ask me to bring her the mail from her box because walking was hard for her. I happily complied; as against the rules as all that was, you made exceptions for your new adopted grandparents.
I would learn a lot about the history of the area from another one of my older customers, Mr. Ewing, who was a retired attorney and had every local fact catalogued in his massive brain. He had one of those old Tidewater accents that sounded so classy and old-fashioned that are rapidly dying out in favor of whatever confused Mid-Atlantic drawl-hybrid thing is replacing it. He gave me good-natured shit about being a Northerner and told me it took him a long time to trust Yankees after everything he knew about the “War of Northern Aggression,” but that he’d eventually married a woman from Maine who turned out to be his not-so-distant cousin (it was true, I looked it up; his wedding announcement was in the New York Times). He got the Wall Street Journal delivered to his box every day and for a while, he had duplicates of the paper and told me to go ahead and take the duplicate for myself every day to read. He donated to tons of charities and got endless piles of mail and calendars and other gifts from them that he’d also pass on to me. I have more 2024 calendars than I know what to do with. We exchanged a few postcards and letters, and I am ashamed to say I have not responded to his most recent one simply because I literally cannot read his old man scrawl and have no idea what he said to me. I’ll send him a Christmas card.
I worked alone all day and made most of the daily decisions that needed to be made, and that made it feel like it was my post office. I was The Post Office Lady for the whole tiny, unincorporated town, and I leaned into my role with some reluctant enthusiasm. I tried to make the place a more friendly stop for the folks who had to use it because everyone else who worked at the post offices nearby were grouchy by default (like TSA!), and this one was run-down and full of cockroaches and mice and grime and mold. I bought seasonal decorations myself and decorated the office for Halloween, Christmas, Spring, the 4th, whatever I could find at the dollar store. I brought in candy for the first Halloween but no one ate it because I failed to account for the fact that everyone was old and diabetic. I would leave the candy out of any future offerings.
My husband was getting into woodworking and was busy building planters for everyone in our zip code that spring, so I asked him for a small one to put out front. He brought it by and helped me plant tomatoes in them that I gave away to customers. He also built a bench for the post office and we put it right out front. Mr. Dunlap would notice it and later ask if my husband could build one for him and deliver it (he would). Mr. Dunlap was a grizzled old Vietnam vet who, after you told him to have a nice day, would reply, “and you do likewise” in the voice of Cleveland from Family Guy, which was just how he normally talked.
Mr. Johnson was another older customer with a box in the office, but we would immediately clash. He saw my vanity plate outside and asked what it meant. It was a variation of the word “uffda,” a Minnesota-ism, and I started to explain what it meant and how to use it.
“It's kind of like ‘oy vey,’” I told him, “only, like, more Lutheran.”
He gasped. “That could be considered anti-Semitic, you know!”
I was appalled. Since when was “oy vey" an anti-Semitic phrase?5 It was literally something I'd only heard Jewish people say, and it was a more well-known phrase than “uffda,” so I thought it was the perfect comparison. He went on to explain that just because Jewish people say it doesn't mean I got to. I was perplexed and defensive. We would continue to not get along, and then he died. The man went to the grave thinking his post office lady was an anti-Semite and now I have a guilt complex.
Uffda.
The relationship I had with my postmaster, who primarily worked out of the main location for that area, was a bizarre one. She was older than me by about fifteen years or so and had worked for the post office her whole adult life. She smelled like raw, unwashed butt almost every single day I saw her (blessedly less frequently as time went on) except once in a great while when she smelled like shampoo after what I assume was her once-a-month bath6. She was also astonishingly dumb, and I say this with as much respect for my elders as I can muster. She could rarely answer any of my questions that went beyond “what form do I use” and, kind of like the lady from US Bank who trained me in 2011, would not really understand how anything worked by virtue of having simply been there too long without ever having asked a single question about anything. She was possibly the least curious person I had ever met, perhaps even hostile to the idea of curiosity itself.
Plenty of absurd things happened there at the tiny rural office that would have shut the place down if it were literally anywhere else, like the canvas mail bags I had to use that were covered in mold until I finally complained enough and sent enough back that I finally started receiving ones without the spreading black spots all over them.
I would come in one day to notice that one of the front windows was broken and covered with a Priority Mail box taped to it. I texted my postmaster to ask what happened, and she would tell me that the guy who covered the day before when I had an appointment saw a bee, swatted at it with one of Mr. Ewing’s old newspapers, and shattered the apparently 19th-century single pane of glass behind it. The Priority Mail box would stay there through the winter and up until just after I left, a year later. One day part of the ceiling just fell down crashing to the floor a few feet behind me while I was sitting at my desk. It, too, would be replaced with Priority Mail boxes that would remain there until after I left. I tried to clean the bathroom once, and my postmaster laughed and asked why I’d even bother.
I would eventually lose my entire mind needing to be at this post office for 6 of the 7 days of my week, every week, for over a year now. I finally broke. It felt like I had no time to myself, and I had to share my one day off with the rest of the world. My postmaster looked at me like I was an entitled brat for not wanting to give most of my week to that place, which would again show me that these people have no dignity and accept everything without meaningful complaint. And what in the goddamned hell was that union even for if we still needed to be there 6 days a week? They couldn’t figure this shit out? 24-hour Walmarts (RIP) managed it, for fuck’s sake. I looked for other positions nearby and inquired about applying for career roles, but I realized this was all just going to be more of the same. Maybe I’d get placed in a different office that I liked more and have two days off, but more than likely, wherever I was placed would contain grumpy coworkers and all of the same bureaucratic nightmares of my current office. I’d hate whatever I did and wherever I went. I knew myself that well by now, anyway.
Serendipitously, just around that time, my husband had somewhat accidentally become the subject of a bidding war at work and came out of it with a raise that amounted to more than my entire salary from the post office. I plotted a potential course of action and asked if he minded if I quit my job to focus instead on earning certifications or credentials in another field so that I might find a job I didn’t loathe with all of my being someday. He said that sounded like a great idea. I gave the postmaster a month notice and this time it didn’t bite me in the ass and I stayed until my scheduled last day. Just in case.
I initially decided I wanted to go into data analytics and took a couple classes in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL first, but once I started yoga teacher training in the middle of the SQL class, I decided I wanted to focus on fitness and teaching. Now, after a little over a year off, I am now a certified yoga instructor and working on certifications in personal training, group fitness, and nutrition coaching through NASM.
So here we are.
I know I said this is the last part, and it is! But you can probably expect some kind of wrap-up post in a week or so, because after going through all these jobs and their various memories and photos, I have some thoughts!
Thanks for coming along on my Jobs Journey. Until next time!
Jesus H., I just realized how deeply inappropriate that joke was and why
Apparently people from previous training classes had been mass-fired for taking pictures of alcohol-fueled orgies they had in the dorms with underage trainees and posting them online.
Outbacks are franchised, so they have owners instead of general managers.
I eventually met with one, learned a year later that he was actually the wrong union rep, and was given two incorrect names before finally getting the right one. She was ready with an attitude, in a hurry to make sure I wasn't trying to blame her for not reaching out to me like she should have over the past year. Based on my experience with people who act like that straight out of the gate, I knew she would be completely useless and didn't bother reaching out to her again. (I made clear exactly why that was in my exit survey when I left, where I would go on to make lots of other things very clear as well.)
I eventually learned that apparently some people say it in a way that mocks Jews intentionally. Okay. But like, I clearly wasn’t doing that and I love Jews, so.
You may have noticed that these job essays are peppered with the way people smelled and the noises they made, and that’s because I deeply hate the way people smell and the noises they make. Unless they are pleasant. But my bar is high.
Isn’t it wild how different the people are in NoVa vs Richmond? Just tens of miles apart and yet worlds apart philosophically (and politically). When I lived in Richmond in the 90s, people had unironic portraits of Lee and Jackson in their foyers. Those old cavalier accents are cool, so different from the Scots Irish accent you hear in the western part of the state.
29 jobs since I graduated kawlej in 1998. It’s as much a sign of the disintegrating economy as anything I’ve messed up.