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Working Girl
By Haley Davis
I am not old enough to buy alcohol yet but have had enough jobs, I think, to qualify me as jaded insofar as employment goes.
My mom got me a position at a music store at the tender age of fifteen. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought of me as tender, since my first real job was simultaneous with my first real brush with sexual harassment. Getting my ass grabbed by a seldom-bathed guitar nerd ten years my senior? Welcome to the adult world, I thought, until my mom made me quit.
The toy store came next. You’d think working with the brightly-colored, battery-operated symbols of our indulgent society would have been the most rewarding of occupations but I don’t believe I’ve had a job that I’ve enjoyed less since then. What’s my damage, you ask? It was a mostly intangible combination of a paranoid boss, the incessant, sticky grabbing of rampant children and the realization that even toys can become boring if
you play with them long enough. Imagine my heartbreak when one day the Harry Potter Wizard Hats just weren't the same.
I escaped to landscaping after quitting the toy store from sheer boredom. If I had any doubts before putting in my resignation, my boss sealed the deal by leaving me with anecdote that I still don’t understand comparing working in the toy business to being a jackhammer. My father generously hired me to mow lawns, lug leaf-blowers, shovel, pick, plant, clip, etc., in order to, as he said, “put some hair” on my chest (I am not
embellishing for the sake of this piece). I finished my summer under his employment still mostly hairless and with a lower tolerance for his character-building bullshit. Plus, the fucker paid me less than minimum wage.
For my next job, I applied to the first ad I saw in the paper, and was hired on the spot. I figured this was an auspicious sign. I was wrong, so I’ll skip an in-depth description of the café that turned me into a hardened barista scarred by burns, cuts, shitty tips, and the jitters of ex-drug-addicts turning to caffeine as their last option for a high.
When my association of the scent of percolating coffee with crackheads was undeniable, I quit the cafe, and began taking care of an elderly, disabled woman. While I can honestly say – no, ladies and gentlemen, no cynicism here – that my time with her was a rewarding experience, it also desensitized me to ass-wiping, which is something that
I think no one ever wants. I stuck it out, though, until the end of my senior year of high school, because I needed the money.
Saddened to quit but ready for a new job, I moved on to other work when I left home for college. A pedantic English major who had always disdained of the hard sciences, I nonetheless hired myself out to a bunch of biologists at my university. Lab-bound, I cleaned graduated cylinders and sterilized nasty-smelling seed-pods. It was in their workspace, a series of offices posted with Gary Larson cartoons and the permanent smell of lonely semen, that I saw firsthand the subdued future of America. The lab was staffed by geniuses from all over the world who, though always very kindly to me, I resented because of their foreign-born brilliance. The United States was once the greatest superpower on our planet, but that time is now ending, if the nationalities of my employers were any indication. Now, we can only pray our successors are as kind to us as those Asian biologists were to me.
Depressing as that was, I was forced to move on. My next jump was into the field of hospitality as a maid at a local bed-and-breakfast. Charming, I assumed, until the shut-in who ran the place gave me a type-written stack of speeches to memorize for each function that I would be serving while working for her. I was prepared to do as she ordered, ridiculous as it was (though it did not stop me from concocting fantasies about her occult, incestuous, housebound antics in quiet revenge), but was finally driven to
claiming mental illness as an excuse to quit when I had to clean between the sheets of the vacated honeymoon suite. One word: kinky.
I’m looking for work as we speak, spreading out resumes and applications like a young man spreading his proverbial wild oats, experiencing the same relish and often the same disappointment as I plug away for a job. Yes, I am living the American Dream – honest work in the pursuit of bettering myself. But if this is as good as that dream gets, I’ll just get busy praying that being a writer pays off in the end.
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