Odd Jobs

Talking about my current job made me think that listing all of my jobs could be fun (and by fun I mean possibly entertaining, sad or pathetic). 

Babysitting was my first job. Sometimes it was fun, sometimes less so. I liked little kids. There was a house up the street with three little boys, one a baby. Sometimes I would wake him up on purpose after the other ones were asleep just so I could rock him back to sleep. Once I got called to the apartment building kitty-corner from us. The two little boys were hyper and I was overwhelmed, and then finally they fell asleep in front of the tv (I had been there since early and this was afternoon) and then their grandma showed up unannounced and started talking loud baby talk and woke them up and I felt like strangling her. 

Once I got a job on a recommendation from one of my friends. The friend then showed up at the babysitting job with her boyfriend and the boyfriend's brother who kind of liked me. My friend fooled around in the basement with her boyfriend and I hung out with the kids and the brother and of course the kids told their mom and she thought I had fooled around with my boyfriend in their basement and called me really mad, so that sucked. Then in middle school I took care of my mom's friend's little boy for a summer. He was a cute kid and it was not a bad gig, except that she was divorced and hated disciplining him so he could be a right little shit who tried to beat you around the head and face when he got mad. Basically, taking care of little kids is exhausting, especially when you're not really the boss of them. 

My first official job was cleaning hotel rooms at the hotel at the Bottom of the Hill (I lived in a small town, and there was a very small hill with a bunch of businesses at the bottom - the Cortina, where we went for pizza a couple of Fridays a month, the Pop Shoppe where my dad sometimes got us Lime Rickey for before bed (don't judge, it was the seventies), Pine Hill Lumber, Benvenuti's the butcher, and the hotel with the orange roof, whose name I am currently blanking on.

It was a small hotel so there weren't a ton of rooms to clean. There was a bar with strippers, so that was interesting. I was about sixteen and not very worldly, and once we went in to clean their rooms and they came out naked from the bathrooms and started dancing around two fully-dressed men sitting in chairs. I guess they figured the men had already seen them naked, but I was slightly flustered trying to dust the desk and swap out the glasses while acting unbothered. 

Oddly, I didn't find cleaning the rooms that gross. When I think about it now it kind of freaks me out - I have to go into all kinds of denial to even STAY in a hotel room. But I did do my best to really clean the rooms, so I console myself thinking that the people who clean the rooms I stay in do the same.

For my high school community service hours I volunteered in a group home for developmentally disabled adults, which led to me getting a job there the next summer. It paid really well, but it could be a lot, especially when I had to sleep over there. Most of them were very sweet and we were usually busy enough that the days went fairly quickly. I never slept well, though. Once a woman got up in the middle of the night and started calling STAFF because she could never remember my name. She said "well I don't know what to do now", and I thought she had wet her bed, so I said we could wash her clothes and she looked at me like I was stupid and said "my laundry day is Wednesday". She was worried because she was hearing voices and thought people were talking about her on the radio, which would have been really good information for me to have. Other than that, though, the people I worked with were nice, and the residents were well taken care of, which a nice thing to know. 

After that I worked the front desk at a slightly classier hotel - a woman I worked with at one of the group homes helped me get the job. This was a pretty good gig - dealing with the public always sucks to some degree, but if you're not serving them food and your time with them is limited, there's not a whole lot that can go wrong. Once I checked in a salesman for Living Lighting, which coincidentally was owned by my sister's friend's parents, and somehow my sister found out that he talked about how nice and good at customer service I was in a seminar later on, so that was nice. There was a Finnish guy who was there for a couple of months for work and could only speak Finnish at the beginning. He was in room 222, and he could eventually say "two two two" in a funny accent that would make us both smile. Before that he would say it in Finnish - in Finnish the word 'two' is 'kaks', pronounced cocks. Imagine him saying that three times every time he needed his key, and imagine what my dad said after "what's number three, *****?"

Then Red Lobster for a summer. Y'all, I'm not good at waitressing. I take everything personally, I get easily overwhelmed and I have bad feet. That's all I'll say about that. Oh, except I always had a bunch of five-dollar bills because of tips and my mom said "you know who they say always has a bunch of fives", and I did not. She said it was hookers. I thought by the late 1980s it should at least be tens, and also, my parents are generally less crude than these examples demonstrate. A little.

This has gotten long, so I will continue tomorrow. Care to tell me your weirdest job?

Oh right, Lucy tax. This is her right after I told her to stop fucking with her blanket and just lie down.