Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Work/ Money

Just like every other person in the world, the last thing I ever want to do on any given day is go to work. Work, as shitty as it may be, is an essential part of any given day for most people in this world. Now there are exceptions like children and lazy assholes, but those of us who want to make some money and live our lives, this is, for all intents and purposes, what we have to do to survive. I have already talked about three of my wonderful jobs already and there are still more to come, but what exactly is it about jobs that makes everyone hate their lives so much? I mean, unless you work for some happy company like Disney or something, what the hell is there to be happy about in a job environment? Well for those select couple of people who actually LIKE their jobs and actually do something they want to do, well kudos to you. The rest of us assholes are stuck in boring ass jobs toiling our lives away to uselessness.

I have had some shitty jobs; there is no doubt about it. But really people, who hasn’t? I have had a total of seven jobs now in my life and I can honestly say I only really enjoyed one of those. And to tell you the truth, I even hated aspects of it. I guess there is no real “perfect” job though. The only one I could think of is being a professional athlete. They get paid millions upon millions of dollars in some cases to play a game. Man that would be the life… unless you got severely injured being that they don’t have health insurance. So I guess that even has its drawbacks. But other than that what job could there possibly that has no stress, no stupid people to deal with, is highly paid, and is easy to do. If I had that answer don’t you think I would be doing that right now?

I wouldn’t hate my jobs so much if it weren’t for the people. When I say people, I mean the people I have to deal with, not the people I work with, though they can even get a little much sometimes. Like I said a little while back, out of my seven jobs I really only enjoyed one of those jobs, and that’s the one where I didn’t have to deal with the public. I worked for my high school during the summer for five years doing maintenance work. I worked with actual people I liked and in some cases were some of my best friends in the whole world. So who wouldn’t like that job? I got to goof off a lot, I got to be outside, I got a golf cart to ride around in, and I got to hang out. What a freaking job. But like I said, this had its downfalls to. Number one, being that it was a forty hour a week job, the hours were pretty awful. Every day was 7am-3:30p because God forbid we actually get paid for our lunch break. But before I get to deep into that job, I gotta tell you some other stuff first.

If you know absolutely nothing about me you should probably know that I am a night owl. One of my least favorite things in the world to do is get up before 11am. I am one of the crankiest people on earth in the mornings. Ask anyone, my mother, ex roommates, or ex fiance, I literally just grunt for an hour if you try and talk to me in the morning. It’s the WORST  feeling in the world. There is nothing that rivals the feeling you have when you first wake up. I don’t know about you, but I wake up and there is a film over my eyes that won’t go away, I have this layer of grossness on my body, I am always thirsty, and any sort of light makes me react like a vampire. And not one of those gay vampires either. So my first reaction is to get a shower when I wake up to wash away all of these awful feelings. That would be a great idea, but then comes number three of the top five worst feelings your body will ever feel on a regular basis… the feeling of warm water hitting your face when you just wake up. I have no idea how to explain it. It’s like a feeling of utter shock and awe while you feel even more tired because your body is relaxing under the temperature of the warm water. What are those other four feelings? That’s for me to know and for you to make your own list.

Now you can see the beginning of why I hate working so much. Most “normal” jobs start early in the morning because most “normal” people have lives and a family to go to at night. So that means I have to wake up in the morning and go to work. Not my bag baby. So I stick with jobs that are later in the day, or at least I try to. My first ever job was like this. I was in junior high school and I got a job as a newspaper delivery guy for the local newspaper. This local newspaper only came out on Thursdays and my job was to deliver it sometime during the day to the people in my neighborhood who got that paper. This wasn’t the annoying part about it. That came in the form of payments, which slipped people’s minds 90% of the time. Picture me, this 13 year old kid trying to collect a fee from these people on a monthly basis. No one takes a kid seriously, especially one who delivers their newspaper. I would have to go to these people’s houses on a daily basis in the evening to try and catch them so that they could give me their five dollar fee for the month. Half the time I could tell these people were dreading that fact that I was coming. It’s like they had a radar for me. Sometimes I would knock on people’s doors, see that they are inside, and also see that they were completely ignoring me. I mean, who does that? I was 13 years old and already could figure out that people were absolute assholes. They were getting free papers because they couldn’t pay the paper boy $5.

After this I got a job at a local chain convenient store in town as a facilities dude. This was literally three or so years after I had the newspaper job so it was a considerable amount of time between jobs for me. I had no idea what this job entailed, but I knew it was going to be my first legitimate job, so that was exciting. It turned out that this job only had about 12 hours per week which kind of sucked but was perfect for a person my age.  I mean, who needs a full time job or even a job that has 20 hours when they are 14 years old. It’s not even healthy for a person at that age to have a job in my opinion. But I wanted money and I wasn’t going to get it any other way.

So I start this new job with open eyes and new vigor for life. I have income coming in and an alright job for someone my age, so life is pretty good. I even get to wear blue jeans to this job and a store t-shirt, so it’s not like I even had to dress up. The one drawback of that job though and it actually almost made me not actually take the job is that I wasn’t allowed to grow facial hair. If you know anything about my family, there is one thing we take pride in, our facial hair. Us Jackson's have been known to grow some mighty beards over the years including my father’s slick porn star mustache I saw him walk around with most of my life. He finally realized they went out of style around 1972 and then grew a goatee around the year 1998. I was about to let my family lineage down by not growing facial hair, and I didn’t like the fact. But I had to do what I had to do. Which brings me to another point,..

 Why can’t people grow facial hair in most places of employment? This way of thinking just strikes me as such a thing that should have been abolished by now. Sure, they can hire literally anyone, but your gonna have to shave your beard off if you want a job. Just seems like shallow thinking to me. I completely understand if you are working with food, now that makes sense, but the kind of job I had at this convenience store really shouldn’t have made me shave my beard. I get it, in some people’s opinions it looks unprofessional.  You know whose opinion that is? I’ll tell you… Its these old fucking people who went to a soda fountain shop back in the 1940’s and saw they weren’t allowed to have beards so they always think that no one should have facial hair in a place of employment. Good God we wouldn’t want grandpa to have a bad experience getting gas because the guy mopping in the back had a beard. I mean honestly, who gives a rats ass?

My job was simple. Basically all I had to do was figure out things to do for four hours so I stayed out of trouble. At first this was easy. I stocked the cooler first and foremost, mainly because my shifts were so early in the morning I could do that as a fucking zombie. I had to take out the trash, which was usually done twice a day because the people who go into these places are messy/ rude assholes. They literally just throw garbage, papers, and coffee wherever they please and then move on with their lives. It’s ridiculous. I would also have to, like I said before, mop and sweep whatever needed done in or around the store. So this entailed the daily spill or two along with a sweep around the building of cigarette butts and other items. Oddly enough, no matter HOW slow I went all of this shit never took nearly four hours. So I had to get creative. I started cleaning the gas pumps with this high power degreaser, but this could only be done once a month or so. I would make sure all the windshield wiper fluid was stocked out in front of the store which again could only be done once or twice a month. Not many people buy that shit surprisingly. So I actually had to come to terms with making multiple five minute trips to the bathroom when I really didn’t have to go. When I realized people thought I had a problem though, I quit doing that. So I had to go to desperate measures. After a couple months of doing the same shit over and over again, you get pretty good at it. I took what used to take me four hours to start down to about an hour and a half.

You may not believe this but my time was a valuable thing. After I got everything done, the rest of my time was focused on avoiding any sort of other employee crossing my path, especially a manager. So I would literally do ridiculous things such as build barriers and hide behind them. There were hundreds of boxes in the back of the store, so I would stack them up and bide my time till my shift was over. I would sometimes sit behind those damn things for hours. Other days I would sneak a radio to the back and listen to it. This was particularly nice during football season. I swear I worked every day the Steelers played, so I would listen to the game instead of working. This was particularly dangerous. Instead of paying any sort of attention to the cooler door opening, I would be paying complete attention to the tiny transistor radio at a low volume. I could have gotten caught so easily. But I never did.  Pretty much all in all, that job was a complete fringing joke. Someone who was already working could have been doing all of the things I was doing. But a job is a job and I was making easy money. But eventually all good things come to an end.

Being that I was about to graduate high school, I knew that I really couldn’t keep this convenience store job if I was going to college. At this point I was already accepted into college so there was a decision to be made. Go to college and come home and work this half ass job or go to college and quit the job. Well this was certainly a dilemma being that I would have absolutely no money coming in whatsoever. So my decision was made, I was going to be a lazy piece of shit and quit this job for the summer before I went to school. A typical Greg Jackson move.

I had my summer completely planned. I was going to relax and mentally prepare myself for my first year of college, which sounded simple enough to me. But then, out of the blue, I was offered a job that was only a summer position from the school that I just graduated from. By the way, this is that job I started telling you about before. It was a 40 hour a week job where I would work 7am-3:30pm for minimum wage. Now like I said, I really didn’t want to work at all but this was too good to pass up. Looking back on it now, I am really happy I didn’t either because I kept this job for literally four years. If you do the math, that is a couple months over a year of total work which is pretty damn good for someone my age. So I took the job. I was working with a bunch of people I knew so how bad could it be?

Oh it was bad. So bad I remember my first day like it was freaking yesterday. If you remember correctly from a previous chapter, one of my least favorite things to do in the entire world is get up in the morning. In my opinion, the morning witching hour is eleven o’clock, so anything before that I am going to be a literal bear. If you are anyone who knows me, when I wake up in the morning before the so called witching hour, anything you say or do to me will be met with an angered grunt and sometimes wild aggression. For example… When my Mother used to try and wake me up for school, she did it one of two ways. She would either sing this song to me that went something like this; “good morning, good morning, you’ve slept the whole night through, good morning, good morning to you,” or she would sort of shake me. It just mattered what kind of mood she was in. My response to these situations are like I said before, I would either grunt at her or I would flail my arms and grunt at her. Take your pick, because I still do those things. Needless to say, being that this job started at the crack of dawn, I was not a happy camper.

6:30am. That’s the awful time I had to be at the maintenance shed to report for work. I would drudgingly and literally drag my feet in seconds before I had to punch, and the idiotic hicks whom I worked with would try and hold unintelligent conversations with me about things I had absolutely no desire or will to talk about. It was torture sometimes honestly. I remember specifically this one conversation the one guy had with me because it was so ludicrous. He was not a large man, but he is still one of the most intimidating people I have ever met. There is no other way of describing this man then to call him ridiculously country strong. This man could literally pick up anything and throw it, and he would do this for no reason what so ever. He did it all the time. Not to mention, for some reason he had a Mighty Mouse tattoo. Nothing says bad ass like a Mighty Mouse tattoo. But he would talk about some stupid shit called a figure eight car. I still don’t know what the hell a figure eight car is and he literally talked about it for an hour one morning. All I know is that these stupid ass cars drive on a track that is a figure eight, that’s all I really got out of that hour of mind numbing conversation.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to actually keep up with the conversation. I mean, I’m not fringing Einstein here, but I would like to think I have some level of intelligence. But trying to keep an hour long conversation going about some sort of race car is my peek. It was outrageous at times the things I had to try and have in common with some of these people. Other than the monotonous droning from these common folk, the only other thing that really bothered me was probably the main part of our job, weed whacking. Weed whacking, wee eating, trimming, whatever the hell you want to call it was literally the main purpose of why we were hired. If it was the least bit nice out we were out there with our gigantic weed eaters whacking away at anything that remotely looked long.

Now with this job came a lot of different aspects of life. Teamwork, tragedy, but mainly pain were just some of the possible things you could witness while doing this wonderful job. While there are a couple people with you doing the same thing, it’s generally not a good idea to work in tandem when having a gigantic piece of machinery in your hands. But, we did it sometimes… carefully. Tragedy would also strike at inopportune times like the time I accidentally exploded a frog with my weed whacker. But usually the only thing that really happened was pain. Having a job where we cut grass in western Pennsylvania can be risky business. Literally all of the school is on one gigantic hill, so trying to weed whack and stand on a hill could, at times, be one horrible journey. One third of your focus has to go on keeping your balance while another third is focused on not killing your coworkers and the last third focused on actually cutting the grass. It’s despicable. So as you could imagine, being the wonderful klutz I am, I spent most of the time on my ass. So falling down a hill became very painful, yet you kind of got used to it. Also, it got kind of hot during the summer. You would think that we would wear jeans because of the type of work we did, but you would be wrong. First off, Pennsylvania summer times are always blistering damn hot, so if you wanted a heat stroke then go for it. I mean the humidity is enough to drive a man to murder sometimes.  So myself, along with most of my coworkers, wasn’t ready to wear long pants while we worked. In fact, Basketball shorts were worn by all and our legs paid dearly for it. Grass, bugs, garbage, and rocks would be embedded in our legs with precision and haste. It hurt like fucking hell by the end of the week.  

But those things weren’t even the worst of it all. When you wait till weeds are the size of a four year old, bad things can happen. At times, the weeds we were cutting were sometimes as thick as a damn broom handle. They then fly at your body at speeds of about 20 mph and leave welts without there being anything you can do about it unless you are in the matrix. But again, that’s not even the worst of it. Apparently, when you let those weeds go for so long and being that my school was basically next to a forest, everything has some sort of poisonous plant next to it. Ivy, oak, and sumac, being all deciduous to western PA, had the makings of disaster for all of us.  When you are weed whacking, you have to disregard for what you are hitting. You see one color and one color only… green. Honestly, when you know what you have to get done, you just do it. You don’t care what you cut down in your path. So as you can imagine, we all hit our fair share of poison. Out of all of the people who wee whacked, I think myself and my friend Chris were the ones who go it the worse. At one point, both of my legs, along with most o my right arm and some on my left had some sort of rash or irritation from poison. It wasn’t only annoying, which is was, but after a while you have to give in to the itching. I wouldn’t advise doing this though, because I have a giant scar on my right leg to prove it. Apparently if you itch it enough and enough of the juices come out of your leg, it will create a scar. Who knew. If I never get poison in my life again, it will be spectacular. But other than the retarded people I had to work with and the awful weed whacking, the job was awesome.

Other than the fact that I have had some shitty jobs, some of the hardest times I have had in my life thus far is actually trying to find a damn job. Not only is it nearly impossible to find any job what so ever (unless you want to flip burgers for no money at all), but you basically have to jump through hoops to get one. Now by jumping through hoops, I mean you have to have big boobs and attractive or had to have gone to Harvard and graduated with honors. In the rules of the work place, those are the golden rules if you want to be guaranteed a job. Being that I have neither of those characteristics, I’m fucked. Now you may be thinking to yourself, that can’t be true. If you haven’t realized it yet, I’ve been being sarcastic throughout this entire book. So get a clue. But honestly, that’s what it seems like to me. I have a fringing master’s degree and I can’t even get a damn interview for a good job. The job I am working at now was basically handed to me on a silver platter because I knew someone in the department. A lot of people actually say that’s the key to finding a good job. To that I say, bullshit. If I wanted to network and basically blow my way to a job, Id work in the porn industry. I honestly don’t think people even look at qualifications anymore. It’s all about who ya know... UNLESS you went to Harvard or have big boobs.

Other than people saying you need to know people to get in to a place of employment, there are other keys as well. People say you have to call and ask about the job and see if they got your resume. I don’t know about you, but I find that I am being overbearing when I do that. It’s basically giving a place a call and annoying the hell out of them while you waste their damn time. Let’s create a fictional setting here. If I was a successful person working for a large company and I put out a “now hiring” post on the interweb, this is word for word what it would say…

“My name is Greg and I work as a successful businessman at a multimillion dollar company. We are currently looking for a new secretary to do all the grunt work for our company. The job is very important and the person who gets hired will basically be our whipping boy. Now, with that said, we are already anticipating getting hundreds of applications and resumes for this job. So don’t even bother calling and asking about the position. You will be wasting both your time and mine. Good luck!”

Now that’s what I wish these things would say because at least its fucking honest. I mean for God sake people, do you really think you calling and bugging the hell out of them gives you a better shot at a job? I don’t know if it does or not, but if I were in that fictional setting above and you called me, I would for real throw your application in the trash because there is not much more in the world that I hate more than an annoying and domineering person. I actually laugh when people say they keep calling the places they applied at. How do you think that’s helping? You think it makes you look ambitious? No dude and dudettes, it makes you look desperate.

Now on the other end of that, one thing I wish a place you apply at would do is call you either way. What I mean by that is I wish they would call to tell you if they are interested or if they weren’t interested. Because then I wouldn’t just sit there with my thumbs up my ass wishing and praying I get that call. There are probably thousands upon thousands of people out there wondering if they are ever going to get that dream job because the places they apply never called them back. That’s probably because they filled the position months ago and didn’t bother calling and being courteous enough to tell you thanks for being interested in that position and their company. I mean, God forbid they be courteous. I have applied for hundreds of jobs in my life and I have only gotten a thanks but no thanks call/email four times. And each one of those times I went out of my way to tell them how much I appreciated them telling me that. Its common fucking courtesy, that’s all it freaking is.

Hell man, if I didn’t have to work, it would be the best thing EVER. Even when I think about it the biggest smile comes on my face. But then reality slaps it off my face and the federal government throws student loan letters in my mail box like those owls from Harry Potter. Yes kiddies I, like mostly everyone, have dept. When I finally realized I had to consolidate my loans and then realized how much money I actually owed for my useless five years of education, I could feel zits forming on my forehead from stress automatically. But I should have seen this coming. I put it off for months. And then I finally realized that literally everyone is in dept. So I will get through it, eventually.

After I realized that I owed so much money for my schooling, I did what any reasonable person would do. You have to understand one thing here, I was in some sort of denial stage where I thought I was going to make a lot of money in ridiculous ways. For one, I started writing this book. I have no idea while writing this if its going to even get published let alone make money, but I thought it was a good idea. How many people can say they actually wrote a full length book? I bet not many. Hell, for all I know by the time you read this sentence I could have made a pretty penny off this load of crap . Secondly, and less productively, I started playing the lottery. Yes, I now play the Power Ball twice a week and the closest I have ever come to wining was hitting three of the numbers and winning $5. People tell me it’s a waste of time but at least I’m giving my money to older Pennsylvanians I guess. I also started selling some of my crap that just sits there collecting dust. I’ve made quite a bit on that actually. Some stuff you just have sitting there in your house is actually pretty valuable, you wouldn’t even believe it until you check it out.

 If anyone could give me a better idea on how to make money any easier than applying for hundreds of jobs, writing a book, selling shit on the internet, and playing the lottery, then email me or something. Because obviously nothing short of prostituting my body out is going to pay the freaking bills. Now that I think of it, I don’t even think that would pay the bills. But like I said, it is what it is. Money is the root of all evils, and it aint gonna bring me down, man. It’s just gonna piss me off a bit.