How I Used To Feel
Posted: October 22, 2015 at 8:59 am
Tag Archives: bad job
Flap Flipper
Posted: April 23, 2015 at 10:26 am
I was a robot for two months.
When I worked in factories, a mechanized packing line of household commodities consisted of a crazy, spider-like machine which built an open carton. The carton moved along a conveyor where it intersected with another conveyor bearing the product. The product was grouped in sixes or twelves and dropped into the carton, which continued along its conveyor until another machine glued its top closed. The cartons were then stacked on pallets and taken away by forklift.
One summer, the Ivory Liquid packing line had a problem. Between the time 12 bottles of Ivory Liquid dropped into the carton and the time the carton’s flaps were glued and sealed, a nozzle was supposed to deliver a tiny puff of air toward the back flap of the moving carton. Without this air puff, the flap remained at a 30º angle, when it needed to be at a 120º angle to be properly glued shut. The air nozzle was broken, resulting in unglued cartons, log jams and crushed bottles of Ivory Liquid squirting their contents on the factory floor.
They brought in the expert, me, to solve this crisis. I sat in a chair beside the broken air nozzle for two months. Each time a box rolled by on the conveyor, I gently eased the offending flap into the correct pre-gluing position with one finger. My pinkie. Taxing. I could have mimicked the faulty nozzle and blown on the flaps instead, but I thought my factory buddies would make fun of me.
What stupid job have you had?
Nudity for the Shoe Salesman
Posted: April 10, 2015 at 2:05 pm
Three shoe salesman incidents are seared on my brain, and unsurprisingly, two involve nudity. At 16, I needed a job to help finance a school trip to England. Why I thought, why anyone thought, I was qualified to sell ladies’ shoes is a mystery. I worked Thursday and Friday nights and all day Saturdays at the Foot Pad, a tiny shoe store plopped in the middle of a large department store. I remember the day I received a five cent raise to reach $1.95 per hour.
Incident One
I was working alone one afternoon, dusting the glass shelves which held only right-foot size sevens, listening to the canned mall-music. A raven-haired, 25-year-old braless beauty in a flowered print sleeveless shift stopped to browse, bending low to grab a shoe. I faked dusting as I eyed her with my superhuman peripheral vision, and was rewarded when her right breast popped completely out of her dress. I don’t know what it feels like to have breasts (an ignorance I intend to maintain), but I would think that one would be aware if one’s bare breast was set free. Wouldn’t its unrestricted weight be noticeable? Wouldn’t it feel cooler from exposure to the air? The woman seemed not to notice, and continued browsing. Obviously, I wasn’t going anywhere, and I openly stared at her, mouth gaping. She stood and faced me, handing me a shoe.
“Do you have this in a size six?”
I looked directly at her breast, a beacon to my desires. It was large, the largest I had seen as a teenager. Don’t judge me – remember, I was only 16 that day at the Foot Pad. I don’t know how much time passed, but the woman finally realized I had neither responded, nor looked at her face. She glanced down, discovered her exposure and immediately……did nothing. Not a shriek, not a coverup. She looked up, looked me right in the eye, and smiled. When my face had completed its conversion to firetruck red, she casually tucked in her breast. I went to the storeroom to find her size six and to recommence breathing.
Incident Two
Late one Friday night, a lumpy woman, continually fussing with a lock of hair which stubbornly fell across her face, rushed into the Foot Pad.
“Yes, can you help me, I have a formal dinner to go to tonight, I need black shoes, open toe, perhaps two straps, something like that,” she said in one long sentence. Before I could respond, she pulled a shoe off of the display and continued, “Oh, this one is nice, and I think it’s my size, let me slip it on, yes that’s good, can you get me the other one, I think I’ll take them.”
I went into the storeroom and found the box with the matching shoe covered in tissue paper. The woman handed me the shoe she had tried on and I placed it in the box with its match. As I rung up her purchase, she said, “Thank you so much, I’m in such a rush, I’ve never bought a pair of shoes so fast before, but I have to run home and get ready right now. I might just make it. Bye.”
I felt very good about myself, helping the woman prepare for her fancy night out. This feeling quickly dissipated the next day when she returned to the Foot Pad in a fury to show me that the shoe I retrieved from the storeroom was not in fact the match to the shoe she had grabbed from the shelf.
Incident Three
A 30ish woman in a short dress asked to try on a sandal. She sat down and waited for me to retrieve her size from the storeroom. I placed the shoebox on the carpet and knelt at her feet to help her try on the sandal. I buckled two straps for a comfortable fit, and without looking up said, “How does that feel?”
The woman did not immediately respond, so I raised my glance, only to see, to see…..uh-oh. While I had been fiddling with her sandal, the woman had spread her legs quite wide, and I assume she knew that she was as panty-less as Britney Spears exiting a sports car. What was she thinking, what was her plan? I wouldn’t say that I quickly glanced away, but to my credit I soon stood up and pretended that nothing was amiss. I can still see details of this woman’s dirty bits in my mind, but I can’t for the life of me remember if she bought anything that day.
What weird job have you had?
Canine Counsel
Posted: March 24, 2015 at 10:11 am
My most off-the-wall professional moment occurred when I was a student working in a law firm, not yet a lawyer. A senior partner in the firm asked me to represent a client at a hearing before the disciplinary committee of the Canadian Kennel Club. The client was a 76-year-old woman. She was a dog show judge who got into an argument with a dog owner who didn’t like the score earned by his poodle at a big competition. The disagreement escalated, then quickly ended when my client (the 76-year-old woman), grabbed a folding chair and whacked the dog owner on the head, like in a fake wrestling match. At the hearing I successfully argued that my client had been provoked and should be reinstated as a dog show judge. My triumph was bittersweet because thereafter the running joke in the law firm was that I was the expert “canine counsel.”
What weird job have you had?
Hit the Roof
Posted: March 16, 2015 at 2:05 pm
During my college years, I had a job one summer as a general labourer with a shady one-man contractor operation. The contractor carried his whole construction business in a rented station wagon, the kind with fake wood on the sides, stuffed to the roof with tools and discarded coffee cups and McDonald’s wrappers. He would accept any construction job, whether he had the skill or not. He convinced one homeowner that we were roofers.
We arrived at the job to find the bundled shingles sitting on a palette on the driveway. The paper packages were damp from the previous night’s rain. With the contractor on the roof, my job was to carry each four-foot-long package up a fully-extended ladder, so long that it bowed in the middle under my weight and that of the shingles. And I don’t like ladders. The only way to carry the shingles was over one shoulder, which meant that I had only one hand free to hold the ladder…..except when I moved to another rung, at which point no hands were holding the ladder. The weight of the shingles caused the package to drape over my shoulder in an inverted “U.” As the packaging was wet, it split as I went up the ladder each time, making the shingles more unwieldy. The ripped packaging also exposed the sandpaper coating of the shingles, which rubbed my shoulder raw. By the end of the first day my right shoulder was an open, bloody sore.
At the end of the second day, the contractor asked me to take down one of the ladders leaning against the highest part of the house. I was having difficulty with the rope-pulley system used to collapse extension ladders, and asked for help.
“I’m busy,” he said from the roof. “I’m sure you can do it yourself.”
“Really, I don’t think I can do it,” I said, feeling like a wuss. “It’s fully-extended, and kinda heavy.”
“I’m on the roof, Bill. Just do it yourself.”
Predictably, I pulled on the rope and lost control of the ladder. As it fell, it scraped along the side of the house, describing a perfect arc, etched into the metal siding. To put an exclamation on the damage, at the end of its plummet, the ladder cleanly sheared off the outdoor lamp above the side door of the house.
I didn’t go back the third day.
What stupid job have you had? Tell me in the comment section below.