TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART II:
In the summer after my 10th grade year I worked a very peculiar job. It was once again the result of my mother’s efforts to turn me in to a productive human being. She was the human resources director at a large department store and they needed a couple of temporary workers to change all of the florescent lighting tubes in the entire building. Evidently the lights were changing the color of the clothes. The farmer I’d been working for the summer before had decided that he wasn’t making enough money and was leasing his land and working for FedEx instead. The job at the department store was going to take a little over a month and I’d be working nights from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. It was my first night job and it had the extra bonus of allowing me to meet and work with an ex-con. He’d just been released form prison and his brother was one of the all-night maintenance guys at the store. This was the mid-80s, so he had long heavy metal hair and black heavy metal T-shirts. He was an idiot. He’d complain every night about how his girlfriend wouldn’t fuck him because she’d just had a baby and it hurt too much. It was a real cultural experience for me. It only occurs to me now that my mother may have hired me with something of a supervisorial role in mind. I remember that she’d told me of the trouble that they’d had with the night workers. Evidently some of the people who they’d hired in the past had been caught asleep, drunk, or stoned on the job. This guy I was working with didn’t try any of those things but he was obnoxious and lazy. He’d constantly run his mouth and regularly want to stop to smoke a cigarette. I tried to ignore him on these occasions and just keep moving the ladder and changing lights without him. I suspect that even at that point in my life I knew that the time would go by infinitely faster if we were working. Eventually, I lost patience with his constant babbling and lack of effort. I was beginning to get angry with him and finally said, “Why don’t you just shut up and do your fucking job! It’s not like this is difficult. We’re just changing fucking lights.” At that point, I really wanted to kick his ass and all I needed for an excuse was for him to attack me, but he didn’t. He just got really angry and the angrier he got, the faster he worked. After that, we got along a lot better.
