Workin' For the Man

While in high school and college I worked a number of different jobs. My first was at a service station owned and operated by the father of a friend of mine. For five dollars an hour I pumped gas, lubed squeaky doors, and held the flashlight. After a few months of hard work I proved my worth  and was allowed to take on slightly more manly tasks such as patching punctured tires and preparing rum and Cokes. The fact that I was sixteen when I poured and served my first cocktail didn't seem to be of great concern. Neither was the legal obligation to claim me as an employee and pay taxes.

The owner, Frank, was very old-fashioned and the station reflected this. It was a full service station meaning that each car that came in to fill up would obligate me to wash all the windows, check the air pressure in each of the four tires, and raise the hood to check the oil. There was no Speed Pass or credit card machine at the pump. No, this was a slow process that often found the driver getting out of the car to chat with me for a while or to stroll into the station to catch up on things with Frank.

It was never really that busy. I can't recall a time when there were ever more than three cars pulled up to the pumps at the same time and even these times were few and far between. This may have been because Frank, for his full service treatment, was charging $1.49 a gallon during a time when you could go a little further down the street and pay only $.99. We had no signs out front to advertise our prices so on the rare occasion that someone pulled in who was not a regular I had to deal with the shock and scolding that always followed after I walked up to their window and told them how much they owed.

Should anyone ever get too upset and try to come in to confront Frank he would have been ready. He kept a small revolver in the bottom drawer of his desk in the back. It was always loaded and on occasion he would slip it into his pocket if someone came in that made him uncomfortable. Usually this meant black people. Frank was about as racist as a man could be. Many days were filled with offensive jokes about every minority imaginable. But most were about blacks. He shared these jokes with his customers and they shared them right back. I never laughed but I never complained either. I guess I was either too young or timid or maybe I just didn't think it would make any difference.

Minus that one glaring flaw, Frank really was a good guy. Perhaps he was just a victim of his times. And, of course, his environment. Sometimes it seems hard to hold that against someone. But then at other times it doesn't at all. We can all learn to grow with the times and see the errors of our old ways. He never did.

A few years later I took a summer job at our city's ten thousand seat outdoor concert ampitheater. I, along with a good number of my friends, worked on the maintenance day crew. This meant walking around with a sweeper kit, power blasting the walkways, and wiping down the seats. Although we were called the maintenance crew we were never actually asked to fix anything. Instead we had the pleasure of taking water hoses and squeegees to the same bathroom stalls that just the night before welcomed thousands of drunken fans who either could not aim their business at the toilets or just didn't care to.

Looking back, it was a terrible job and paid next to nothing. But at the time it was heaven. We hung out and joked each day about the man, got great suntans, and held competitions to see who could collect the most left over "cigarettes" after shows like the Reggae Sunsplash.

We got off at 4:00 and then came back each evening to persuade the security guys to sneak us in to see the concerts. While there must have been a couple dozen groups that played that summer I sadly cannot remember most of them. In fact, when I think about the shows it seems that the music was always somewhere in the background. We quickly snuck back out after each show for fear of being discovered by our bosses or, worse yet, running into the maintenance night crew. They hated us and we hated them. If a caste system were alive and well here in the States then those night crew guys would definitely have been at the bottom. However, they must have been smarter than they looked because they always saved those bathrooms for us.

My next job was in the produce department of a local grocery store. I had went to the district office with a friend and applied and interviewed in the same afternoon. A few days later we both received a call offering us a job. We were told we'd have to cut our hair, though. As was hip in the day of alternative music, we both had chin length hair that we tucked behind our ears. We looked very much like really ugly girls. Tim, after carefully considering the offer, refused to cut his hair but I was desperate for a job. I had already put a new guitar on lay-a-way and still owed a little more than $600. For months I stocked apples and sliced pineapples. Because of my classes during the day I had to work the evening shift which was really boring because it meant working alone. I soon found, though, that if I worked really hard I could get everything finished and still have about two hours to wander around the store and mess with the guys in the other departments. That is, if there were any. Unfortunately nearly everyone else there was middle aged and saw this job as a career that allowed them to feed themselves and their families. I, on the other hand, knew I was going to quit the very day I had enough money to bring home my Telecaster. And I did.

As always seemed to happen, after a few months of freedom I realized I needed money. My mom knew someone who knew someone who could get me a job at K-Mart. I don't know if there ever was a day when being seen at K-Mart did not thoroughly embarrass any teenager or young adult.  If there was I can hardly imagine it. By the mid-90's I can tell you without doubt that K-Mart was not a happenin' place. The building was old, dark, and full of the worse kind of cheap clothing and merchandise. Anyone with any dignity went the extra two miles to the new Wal-Mart across the railroad tracks. There were surprisingly quite a few people without dignity. Some even showed up in their bathrobes and slippers.

I started off working the cash register. You would think that since this job requires you to accurately scan each of the items going out of the store, collect money, and make correct change that only the most qualified employees would be given this important task. But no. Instead this was where all the newbies began. I soon found out why. There is no worse job then working a K-Mart cash register. It seemed as though about a fourth of the merchandise did not ring up correctly on the register. This meant the dreaded price check. I'd reach over for the phone, hit * 7, and speak into the receiver.

"Someone from Women's Wear please call 1-4. Someone from Women's Wear please call 1-4."

By this point the customer, if not already irate, was, at the very least, angry. This was because they knew as well as I did where this was headed.

Three minutes later.

"Someone from Women's Wear please call 1-4. Someone from Women's Wear please call 1-4."

I was afraid to look the customer in the eye. Their anger would no doubt be directed toward me and I was at the complete mercy of someone else, somewhere in that store, to call me back. Sometimes they were with another customer. But other times they were on break or in the stock room and just didn't feel like taking the call.

I was yelled at a lot. It didn't matter that I wasn't at fault. I was convenient and they felt as though they were not being treated like a valued customer. Of course, they weren't. 

About a month after starting there I was promoted to the sporting goods department. This was a great job because the boss back there was soft-spoken and a truly nice, hardworking guy. I stocked shelves, drilled bowling balls, and sold guns. The guns were the only part of the job I hated. Customers would come in, hold them up to their shoulders, and proceed to ask me a series of questions. It didn't matter what the questions were because I could guarantee you that I didn't know the answer to any of them. I'd refer them to the accompanying paperwork.

Sometimes the customers were in a hurry for their rifles. I'd pull out the forms they had to fill out and explain that the state of Illinois required that we keep the gun for a set number of days before they could walk out of the store with them. They all understood this but it irritated them all the same. They somehow thought I was at liberty to ignore this law and let them carry it out the same day. I was not. If it were up to me I'd have prefered a store like K-Mart not even sell weapons. Especially to the very same customers who would soon find themselves at the checkout station waiting forever for a price check.