I've had a lot of jobs (part 2)
The odyssey continues
The end of my third decade had arrived, and many things began to change.
Welcome to Part Two of the journey of jobs. You can catch up with Part One here.
Accounting specialist at another bank, 27
After my 4-hour stint with the Clean Water Liars’ Club, I realized I no longer had any idea how to do anything else and rescinded my previous declaration that I would never work at another financial institution ever again. A friend worked at one downtown and referred me to an open position in an adjacent department. I was hired as an “accounting specialist,” which roughly translated to “stare at Excel and try to figure out what to do about the numbers.”
I replaced someone who retired and saw that all of my new coworkers were nearing that age, themselves; I was the youngest one in the department by a long shot. The woman tasked with training me answered most of my questions with some variation of “I’m not sure, that’s just the way we’ve been doing it for the past 25 years!” She ate at her desk, sharing a cube wall with mine, constantly and loudly, which made me want to violate every corporate rule against workplace violence.
My very first Spreadsheet Job.
A few months into that job, Occupy Wall Street happened and I jumped on board to help organize our own city’s occupation, which was happening right across the street from the bank. I wasn’t planning on telling my bosses about my involvement, but I joined the media committee and quickly gave several interviews on television, I guess forgetting that Boomers still watched the news. They mostly reacted with bewildered curiosity, and my boss called me into his office.
“Hey, what you’re doing is totally fine! Free speech! Just make sure you don’t do anything that would publicly associate you with your employment here, and don’t personally protest on bank property.” I was a little surprised at the casual acceptance of my conflicting extra-curricular activities, but relieved. The occupation was supposed to start that upcoming Friday, and I was bummed to have to miss the very beginning after doing so much to help plan it all, but my manager offered to give me the day off. “I know it’s a big day for you!” I was utterly perplexed, but again, grateful for the bank's bafflingly considerate flexibility regarding my involvement with the movement that essentially opposed their very existence from directly across the street.
An affinity group called Occupy Homes formed to fight foreclosures in addition to our other occupation activities. Turns out a bunch of the homes being foreclosed upon were owned by the bank I was working for, which limited my involvement in certain activities and marches, but I still wasn’t in trouble.
The OccuPirates was a needed bit of activist entertainment, the following video published on OccupyMNTV, a YouTube channel created by
. I couldn’t publicly participate in anything associated with it for obvious reasons, but I got to satiate my need to participate in a mildly devious way by lying to an executive assistant to get the pin that the “banker” is wearing in the video. I met the guy downstairs in the bank's atrium and snuck the pin into his hand like we were conducting a drug deal. I’m pretty sure I cackled about it.The official reason I was eventually fired, if you ask the people who made the final call, was because the bank was discriminating against me because of my political activities outside of the workplace. A bank representative never joined the call to dispute my unemployment appeal, so I won by default.
The real reason is much stupider. I had already been given several attendance warnings because I had been missing so much work, staying up into the wee hours doing various Occupy things like writing press releases, arguing about press releases, sending press releases, and arguing about who got access to the press lists.
I was also going through a divorce at precisely this time and had just moved. I was kind of a mess. I was given a lot of grace by the bank for which I was very grateful, but the manager had finally had enough. He told me that one more missed day would result in my immediate termination. I frankly didn’t blame him and was already starting to feel pretty bad about my extremely lacking job performance.
I made it about a week longer before my new roommate pulled out a baggie with something small and suspiciously crystal-ly in it one night.
“This is meth! Zane gave it to me. Wanna try it?”
The idea sounded utterly and completely retarded, so I said “yes, of course.”
When it comes to most drugs, I tended to have a “try anything once, except heroin” policy1, and that night in 2012 was my first, (and last) time trying meth. It tasted like gasoline and I felt nothing close to energized or euphoric, only a complete lack of desire to sleep (or shut the fuck up) ever again. I sat there at my laptop for hours doing god knows what and chatting away with my roommate until I was finally able to fall asleep around 5am or so. I clearly should have added a “not on work nights” clause to the policy.
Of course I slept through my alarm, waking up sometime after 10am; the latest I was allowed to get to work with my flex schedule was 9am. I went in anyway and was, as expected, immediately fired. My new apartment was just outside of downtown, so I used the Skyway for half the frozen walk back home instead of the bus (they confiscated my bank-subsidized transit pass), stopping at the overpriced liquor store inside of it for a bottle of coping brandy.
Macy’s, 28
I was finding it damn near impossible to find a post-Occupy job, like just about everyone in 2012, it seemed. My roommate had also been let go from his own job, so we were teetering on the edge of eviction and both rapidly running out of money. I’d finally given up on looking for jobs in or related to the financial industry, reasonably certain I’d been blacklisted. And anyway, there were hardly any left that hadn’t already employed me at some point. We both finally found jobs at a nearby Macy’s — me in merchandising, early in the morning, and him in one of the clothing departments.
I left that job after only a few horribly tedious shifts for a somewhat ironic reason: I was officially getting evicted. At the time, I didn’t have a car, but I lived in the middle of the city and just walked or rode my bike to work every day, but after we got evicted, I went to live with my family in the suburbs. The merchandising job was very early in the morning and started before any buses into the city were operating, so I had to quit. It all felt very silly, but I hated that job so I was not at all sad about it.
It was just after I moved back in with my family that I finally decided I should apply for unemployment. I really should've tried before getting evicted, but I assumed I’d be denied and never bothered. I didn’t see any reason not to try, now.
As I mentioned above, my unemployment claim was miraculously (and, let's be real, completely unfairly) approved after I appealed the initial denial. It was summer now, and I made a very bare-bones attempt at continuing to look for work for the season; I considered it my divorce/job loss/eviction recovery period. I was required to document employment attempts to continue receiving unemployment, of course, so I looked, but really only enough to fulfill the requirements. I mostly went camping instead. Like, every week. I've pretty much slept in every state park in Minnesota at this point.
Liquor store clerk, 29
Camping season was nearing its end, I had just turned 29, and I needed to get my shit together. With this goal in mind, I naturally found myself at a liquor store to buy some camping beer where I decided to ask the manager if they were hiring. In fact, they were! I got the job easily. Finally!
Cashiering has got to be one of the dullest kinds of work I have ever done in my life, whether it’s a gas station, convenience store, or liquor store. I was so goddamned bored here it drove me crazy. The only saving grace was that my coworkers were cool and my bosses were chill.
One of the other nearby locations in the liquor store chain just had their liquor license frozen for failing a sting, so corporate implemented a “card everyone, even if it’s literally your own grandmother” policy. As a result, I got to see a lot of people’s birthdates. Having been an astrology-obsessed preteen, I had long since been able to instantly know what sun sign any given birthdate was, and I started noticing certain birth months more than others on certain days. I wondered if there was anything to this, so I started keeping a tally of which zodiac signs came in next to the register for every shift I worked and I convinced whoever was working on the second register to do the same. After a few weeks, the results were in: there was a roughly equal distribution of drunk zodiac signs and I was completely imagining it. I was disappointed. Lirpa’s job-related statistical hypotheses about demographic purchasing patterns were now one for two.
I quit because I finally got a better job. Boring and low-paid as it was, the liquor store didn't totally suck, though. The ability to vibe with one’s coworkers and managers can really make or break a job experience.
Online chat support, 29
This job was honestly pretty epic. A random stand-up comedian gave me a ride home after his hilarious set that I saw with a friend one night, and he ended up referring me to a position at a third-party customer service call center that had a number of clients (he was on the Apple contract and said it was the best). I was called in for an interview for none other than… Geek Squad tech support. I sighed internally and prepared to be hired by talking up my prior Geek “experience,” be poorly trained, and stay long enough to find another, better job.
I knew I could type pretty fast, but I never took a class for it and still had to look at the keyboard. During the assessment I had to take a typing test, and it turned out I could get up to like 80wpm. I guess endlessly typing on a keyboard of some kind since the early 90s paid off. They made the last-minute decision to switch me from Geek Squad tech support to Best Buy chat support, which I didn’t even know was a thing. I was thrilled.
Chat support wasn’t technical, thank fuck. I was absolutely not interested in trying that again, and for the same company, no less. It was there to help customers find the products they wanted, tell them their order status, and repeatedly confirm that if the item they wanted said “unavailable,” that it was not, in fact, available, and then they would all-caps me, which was much better than being yelled at. We used what we called “predefines,” a Notepad document that had basic answers to all the most common questions that we could copy and paste at the customer. The best predefines would get shared around the team.
My closest rival in both typing speed (we had several contests) and most popular predefines wrote something in one of his chat boxes about how the customer he was talking to was a fucking asshole, or something (he was, though), then pasted a predefine over it to replace it, and hit send. Turns out it didn’t properly highlight the insult and pasted the intended text underneath it instead. He got fired.
The chat function was also frequently used by preteens to prank-chat us from middle school library hour (we all lived for that every morning, tbh) and they inspired us to start prank chatting each other. A bunch of us on the early morning crew decided what to do to the night crew and all went home that afternoon, logged in under fake names, and pretended to be searching desperately for a specific, obscure hot dog cooker with a built-in bun-toaster with great enthusiasm. The goal was to make everyone wonder why in the hell this random hot dog cooker was so popular all of the sudden and cause some kind of mass, hilarious confusion.
This started an epic prank-chat war that went beyond the hot dog cooker and lasted days until the Canadian (I don’t know why this detail feels important, it just does2) manager caught wind of it and shut the whole thing down, threatening write-ups if our great prank war continued. We went back to Magic the Gathering tournaments between desks and Nerf gun fights. That same manager would later threaten to fire every one of us on the chat floor for breaking out in applause once when the power briefly went out and shut down all our computers.
I heard he eventually got deported.
It seemed like everyone working there, on any contract, was some kind of cool, geeky Millennial, laid off from a better job during the recession or some other, similar story. We all formed friendships with each other quickly and easily in the training classes, as you tend to feel a sort of kinship with the people who sat with you in that boring room with unironic motivational posters on the walls for 4-6 weeks doing “ice-breakers” and learning about the new job you were all about to do. You probably went out after class together every Friday or something, or maybe to someone’s house or apartment. Maybe a few were already considering becoming roommates. At least one pair were probably already dating or hooking up.
There were also a lot of party drugs going around the office then — the first question we all asked each other on a smoke break during training was how everyone passed their drug tests. The 19-year-old chick I carpooled with for awhile claimed to have stuck a 5-Hour Energy bottle full of someone else’s urine up her vagina. Kind of disgusting/kind of brilliant, I suppose. I just used the overpriced vitamin drinks.
It would become very easy to find weed, or anything else one might want, during my time at that job. One of my coworkers had a roommate who was always ordering some new and interesting party drug from the Silk Road. One day she got ahold of something called mephedrone, or “drone” for short. We gathered some coworkers and met at their house.
…On second thought, I’ll tell that story another time. Behind a paywall.
Check out Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five!
One of these days I'll tell you about that one time I accidentally tried crack
Looking back it was probably the deportation
This style of writing is so nice.
> That same manager would later threaten to fire every one of us on the chat floor for breaking out in applause once when the power briefly went out and shut down all our computers.
This person might be the saddest human I have ever heard of.