Tag Archives: weird job

Hallucinogenic Painter

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Posted: February 16, 2015 at 9:30 am

 

This short story is number six in my series of “Jobs-Less-Fun-Than-Writing”:

At 18, I spent one summer as a general labourer in the steam room of a large factory. I was assigned to help an engineer operate and service the large equipment which provided power to the factory. It was mostly holding ladders and crawling in tight places and not wincing when my engineer boss introduced me to everyone in the factory by saying, “This is my (n-word), Bill. Have you met Bill my (n-word)?” He thought that was funny because my job was to do whatever he asked me, and because everyone at the factory, including me, was white. I was too young and stupid to tell him what an incredible idiot he was.

One day my engineer asked me to paint the inside of a tank large enough for me to crawl into, but not much bigger. The tank was empty, but usually held liquids, so I had to use water-proof paint. Another summer student shone a light into a tank while I painted, but when I was half done he frantically yelled at me to get out of the tank. He became alarmed when I started babbling about rainbows and unicorns and the undulations of the steel tank’s walls. He realized that the highly toxic paint fumes were frying by brain and causing hallucinations.

I later learned that the factory’s new safety protocol demanded anyone using that paint to wear a respirator with an oxygen tank.

What dangerous job have you had?

Boiling Acid Bath Guinea Pig

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Posted: February 9, 2015 at 9:34 am

 

This short story is number five in my series of “Jobs-Less-Fun-Than-Writing”:

The summer before I went to college I worked in a metal-finishing plant, the most disgusting, dangerous and unhygienic factory in existence. I stood all day beside a boiling vat of acid, ten feet wide and taller than me. Beside the vat it was over 50º C. The acid vat was the first in a series of vats, containing various chemicals and unidentified liquids. I hooked metal frames, car parts, and other steel objects onto a rack attached to chains and an electronic pulley system. When the rack was full, another worker used a handheld device to raise the rack and lower it into the acid. Then raise it and lower it into the next vat of chemicals, and the next, and so on, until it was set aside to dry. This process coated the metal in protective zinc. The air above the vats and throughout the factory was just a big slush pile of noxious fumes.

In other parts of the factory, a similar process was used to cover nuts and bolts with zinc, but the vats were smaller and only waist height. The guys working beside these vats would often unzip and piss into the vats instead of walking to the washroom.

My doctor later told me that some of the chemicals in the factory must have entered my body through mosquito bites on my arm. Seven, to be exact. That summer I grew seven boils the length of my right arm, each larger than a golf ball. They were red and angry and I screamed each time they were lightly touched. Over the course of a week they all exploded, and what sprayed and oozed out of them was not for the weak of stomach.

Fortunately, the boils cleared up before my first day of college. But on that first day, I noticed a small pimple on the inside of my right elbow. During my freshman orientation week, that pimple grew to a prodigious boil, shaming the puny efforts of its seven dead cousins. It was so large it was flat on the top, like a plateau. For seven days I visited the Emergency Room of the college hospital and saw a different doctor each day. The only one to help me was the seventh, who said, “Well, we’ll have to drain that thing. But we can’t give you a needle to stop the pain, because of the infection. Nurse, please get me some of that spray-on freezing stuff.” The doctor probably used a more technical term for the spray-on freezing stuff, but I forget it now.

The nurse returned in a moment. “Sorry doctor, but we have run out of the spray.”

“OK,” he said. “We’ll just do without it. Bill, this may hurt a bit.”

The doctor secured my arm to the bed frame with leather straps. “Look away, Bill,” he said. I looked anyway. He took a scalpel and sliced a cross in the centre of my boil’s plateau, that same boil which was excruciatingly painful to gently touch. Then he forced a rubber tube into the hole, like a magician stuffing a large handkerchief into his closed fist. As the doctor squeezed my arm, puss drained from the hose and filled a beaker, about the size of a pint of beer. Simply stated, this entire procedure really, really hurt. I still have that scar on the inside of my elbow, after nearly 40 years.

A couple of years later, my mother mailed me a clipping from my hometown newspaper. The picture featured four people wearing white Haz-Mat suits, the kind with hoods and little rectangles of glass to look through. They were cleaning up the metal-finishing plant, recently closed for over 200 health violations. The plant also caused an environmental disaster by leaking chemicals into the water table. The article stated that the clean up crew was only allowed to work for three hours per day because of the extreme toxicity of the site. And they were wearing Haz-Mat suits! They were probably making more than the $6.50 per hour I made that summer. I often wonder what chemicals are still swirling inside my body, and every time I get a little pimple I start to worry……

What dangerous job have you had? Tell me.

Door-to-Door Vacuum Salesman

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Posted: February 2, 2015 at 8:45 am

 

The cosmic shift in my life was to leave 25 years of lawyering for an uncertain future as a writer. It’s easy to forget that I had many other jobs which were much less fun than writing. Here’s number four of a series:

One high school summer I didn’t get the job I coveted, lawn maintenance at a golf course. I wanted to spend the summer on a sit-down lawnmower, working on my tan. I was shocked that the position was already filled on July 1st when I applied. It never occurred to me that the smart guys applied for that job the previous winter, and the dumb guys waited until school ended in June.

My job search consisted of reading the classifieds every day. Since I wasn’t qualified to be the Senior Project Designer for an Award-Winning International Engineering Firm, Salary Commensurate With Experience, I lowered my expectations to become a Filter Queen Vacuum Salesman, 100% Commission.

I trained at Vacuum College with two other teenagers, and a woman who’d lived in Canada for three days, in a low-ceilinged, windowless room in a dingy strip mall. I couldn’t say the training sucked, because the primary rule of selling vacuums is to never say the word “suck.” It’s always, “the vacuum draws in the dirt….” I learned the Filter Queen sales script by heart, and could manipulate the vacuum’s various hoses and attachments like I was speed-assembling my rifle in an army training exercise. Filter Queen was the most expensive vacuum on the market, and I was to receive a healthy commission for each one sold. At summer’s end, I had sold ONE. To my mom.

What stupid job have you had?

My Summer as a Mountie

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Posted: January 26, 2015 at 10:00 am

 

The cosmic shift in my life was to leave 25 years of lawyering for an uncertain future as a writer. It’s easy to forget that I had many other jobs which were much less fun than writing. Here’s number three of a series:

The RCMP hired law students for summer jobs, and I went through several rounds of interviews at Mountie headquarters in Toronto. My last meeting was a psychological exam that concluded with this exchange:

Psychologist: “Who do you love more, your father or your mother?”

Me: “I love them equally.”

Psychologist: “Yes, but, if you had to choose, you must love one more than the other, so who is it?”

Me: “I can’t choose. I love them the same.”

Psychologist: “Everyone loves one parent more than the other. Pick one.”

Me: “I don’t agree. I can’t pick one over the other.”

Psychologist: “OK. If you had a personal problem, and had to talk to someone about it, who would you go to, your mother or your father?”

Me: “Well, my dad is kind of quiet, and my mum is more of a talker, so I would probably go to my mum.”

Psychologist: “So, why do you hate your father?”

I passed the interview and was placed in the RCMP detachment in Hamilton, where my job was to help the officers investigate white collar crime. I suspect the main reason I was hired was to play shortstop on the Mountie softball team.

For two weeks I left the commercial crime unit to work undercover with the drug squad. This was mostly stakeouts drinking stale coffee, and sometimes drinking in bars where the drug dealers hung out. On one memorable occasion we executed a drug kingpin, I mean, we executed a search warrant at a ramshackle biker house in Hamilton’s industrial core. Owned by a drug kingpin. Entering that slum, I was the only Mountie without a gun, which was not confidence-building. The living room décor consisted of discarded motorcycle parts and a Harley-Davidson flag nailed to the wall which said, “Live To Ride, Ride To Live.” A wailing two-year-old wearing a shirt but not pants or a diaper waddled around with dried shit on his backside. The owner of the house wore a stretched black t-shirt which displayed biceps much larger than my thighs. I nervously searched the basement where a bench press held 350 pounds. I entered and quickly left a  small washroom with a malfunctioning toilet; the toilet’s disrepair had not prevented the residents from using it as an outhouse for perhaps several months. I didn’t find any drugs, but our search was successful as one Mountie found several kilos of cocaine hidden in the soiled contents of the diaper pail.

What weird job have you had?