Or, wage slavery is still slavery
I can't think of anyone more fortunate in all the world than the person who can honestly and sincerely say he or she loves work. The person who can get up Monday morning and honestly and sincerely look forward to spending the next eight or so hours doing what's necessary to pay the bills; keep the kids fed, clothed, and educated; keep a roof overhead. Work. Work....
Starting with the earliest first, here are the three worst jobs I've ever had...
I left school in 1977 at age 17. At the same time, the UK was going through a major economic depression - and my family finally fractured completely and split up. I, my mother and my sister, all went back to Scunthorpe (a hidous little town in the north of England) to take advantage of help offered by my mother's sister and her family. In many ways it was a disastrous move, but that's a tale for another blog. It did, however, lead to what my mother fondly referred to as my first real job. In honor of her let's agree that's so.
I began my life in the workplace as a clerk in the local office of Her Majesty's Inspector of Taxes. At the time I joined this august and ancient body (now known as the Inland Revenue Service) clerks in such offices were creatures so low on the scale of creation that they could stride with ease under the belly of a comatose rattlesnake. We were the least important beings on the face of the earth and we were given the most tedious, the most repetitive, the most miserably boring, work that could be found. Anything that anybody who wasn't a clerk didn't want to do (especially the hated task of dealing with the public) immediately became the responsibility of a clerk - any clerk that could be found.
I don't deal well with boredom even now, finding it horribly stressful, and back then I was far less disciplined as a worker (who isn't, at 17?) It didn't help that I earned a miserable twenty-one pounds a week (about forty three dollars) and paid eighteen of them to my harpy of a landlady - my cousin John having thrown me out of his house on the entirely baseless accusation of his wife (the never-to-be-forgotten and always loathed Norah) that I had illicitly accessed her knickers by going through her drawers while she and John were out one day. Norah's arse was as large as (and less attractive than) a barn door. So large were the knickers belonging to this immense creature that had I actually explored them it would have needed search parties to find and rescue me. I would have been lost for days. John, being both spineless, pussy-whipped and (as it later transpired) a cuckold, put up no resistance and showed me the door - forcing me into securing a shared room elsewhere at an exorbitant price - at least, exorbitant in relation to the miniscule sum I earned.
So there I was in a relentlessly boring job surrounded by relentlessly boring people doing relentlessly boring things for a pittance and at night going back to a room I shared with a bloated laborer who suffered from explosive bowels producing a stream of fetid vapours - especially after an evening on the beer.
Oh joy.
One incident from my time there (which was mercifully short - about two months) comes back with particular clarity. The lower-middle-class drones that sweated their days away in little cubicles calculating other peoples' taxes all suffered from delusions of social standing and for their lunches frequented what they thought of as a 'refined eatery', the name of which I've long since forgotten - however I have a vague memory of it being something like 'The buccaneer's platter', or something equally ridiculous - there being very few buccaneers in Scunthorpe.
I however, living as I was at the desperate edge of poverty, couldn't afford such wonders - and for my lunch went to the pub across the road where I invariably consumed a pint and a pie (a pint of bitter and a 'meat' pie of dubious origin and content). I returned one day to find the coat-rack occupied by one of the odder inhabitants of the office - a creature invariably addressed as 'Mr.' and therefore nominally male, but the hips of which were far wider than its shoulders while it appeared to be possessed of pendulous breasts. This oddity wore, when out of the office, a tiny brown velvet cap and an odious-looking (and oddly stained) raincoat - which it was in the process of hanging on the rack. I had to stand quite close to this ambulatory hulk with its immense hips and teeny shoulders, and I remember distinctly that it looked at me and in a kind of falsetto whisper of horror it said "MY GOD... He... he... smells of BEER..."
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre...
The job I was most frequently required to do, of course, was filing. This was long, long before the days of universal computerization and all filing was done by hand. Thousands upon thosands of records were stored in manila folders of different colors, all of which folders were kept in order on 'The Wall' - which was exactly as it sounds, a wall running the length of the entire building. A small mobile ladder let you access the upper reaches while to get at the bottommost records you had to bend yourself double.
All day long, apart from stints dealing with the public (whom we were encouraged to keep at bay by any means short of criminal acts) I walked up and down that bloody wall... up and down, down and up, pushing a trolley full of multicolored manila folders containing hundred and hundreds of documents absolutely vital to the proper regulation of Her Majesty's taxes upon the peasantry.
And at some point I finally abandoned any attempt to file these damnable things according to the numerical system I was supposed to use, and instead decided to file them according to where, in my opinion, each color of folder would look best on the shelves - either to contrast with or complement the colors that surrounded them. I did this for the last month of my tenure there, and by the time what I was doing was discovered I had single-handedly destroyed any sense of logical order in the sections of the Wall for which I was responsible. Naturally, Her Majesty's Inspector of Taxes was not that happy with me, so unhappy was he that I was given the choice of resigning or being fired. Naturally, being the hopeless Romantic that I then was, I chose to resign (I thought it sounded better than being fired).
My last memory of the place is the look of anguished horror on the face of the clerk who was given the task of restoring order to the chaos I had caused; and the glance of furious resentment she threw my way as I walked out the office door for the last time, smiling. I faced a most uncertain future from then on, which took me to some very odd places (including the first attempt on my life) but again, that's a blog for another day.
The second of the three lasted only a week, thankfully - but at the time it's loss seemed like a disaster of the worst possible magnitude. I had been married to my first wife for twelve years, my marriage was a wreck, I lived where I lived on the sufferance of my about-to-be-ex-wfe. Actually, losing that job was the prelude to a remarkable upswing in my fortunes that saw me settled for several years in a place that I liked and with means enough to lead a relatively (for me, extraordinarily) comfortable life. I remained in that condition until shortly before the events that saw me leave England forever and begin the process of immigrating to America. At the time, of course, I knew none of that and thought I was staring utter ruin in the face - again, lol.
One of the causes of my divorce was deep-seated (but circumstantial rather than organic) depression, that kept me in a kind of mental paralysis for three years. What cured me was the shock of my wife's infidelity, of which I'd had not the least suspicion. It cured me and, once I'd accepted that that part of my life was well and truly over, propelled me rapidly out the door in a desperate search for work - since that was the only place I could think of to start rebuilding my life.
I found a job, working for a strange little company. Its business involved getting people in certain industries to accept free subscriptions to industry magazines - and then promoting these magazines as good places in which to place appropriate advertisements. As I was a newbie I got the job of touting for subscriptions to Airline Magazine... in Ethiopia. Ethiopia?
Yes, Ethiopia. Oh joy.
You can count on one finger of one hand how many airlines fly out of Ethiopia.... And how many pilots could they have...? But however few the actual number might have been, I still couldn't generate sufficient subscriptions. Partly that was due to the inconsistent functioning of telephone lines between the UK and Ethiopia. And partly it was due to the fact that the 'English' spoken by Ethiopian airline pilots, their wives, children, and assorted hangers-on, bears as much relationship to the English I know and speak as does Akkadian script to binary. In other words, none at all. They didn't speak English. I didn't speak Ethiopian: all was set for a stunning career in sales...
In helpless dismay I'd go down the list of names I'd been given on my first day. Each time I dialled a number I didn't know whether to hope for an answer at the other end (which in all probability would mean a deluge of incomprehensible gibberish) or none at all. In which case I'd be back to square one.
On one never to be forgotten occasion I did finally manage to get a line that wasn't saturated in static, that was connected to a phone that worked, which was eventually picked up.
Dead silence at the other end.
Me: may I speak to Captain Oogabooga (or whatever his name was)?
Ethiopian: series of demented wails that I eventually recognised as hysterical laughter...
Me: Please may I speak to Captain Oogabooga?
Ethiopian: series of bizarre ululations, combined with a sound like puppies being strangled - also eventually to be recognized as yet more demented laughter.
Me: Ummmm.... May I speak to Captain Oogabooga, please....
Ethiopian: sounds as of small creatures being done violently to death while wailing plaintively, extending over a considerable period and followed by...
A click. End of 'conversation', end of my patience, followed by a violent argument with my supervisor, followed by the precipitate and unlamented end to my career in advertising sales....
And that was one incident. Earlier in that week I'd (briefly) been placed in charge of an account (I forget the magazine involved) which had me calling numbers in New York. During those eight hours I was scorned, vilified, abused and shat upon from a great height. My paternity was brought into question, as was my mother's good name. When I wasn't being referred to as a 'Limey cocksucker' I was told that I was a faggot, my father was a faggot, and my mother was a 'Limey carpet munching snaggle-toothed dyke whore who sucked dick in alleys for fifty cents - when she could get that much'. That was not a happy day - and I was deemed too 'volatile' to be left in charge of New York and was rapidly returned to Ethiopia....
I lasted a week (well, from Monday to Friday) and was once again shown the door. And again, though it meant (so I thought) being reduced to desperate straits, I was profoundly glad to go. I'm not cut out for sales.... especially in Ethiopia.
Several years later, after working continuously on a long term mapping project (my first such job, but by no means my last) I once again found myself out of work as a consequence of the completion of my contract - which had been to work on the Low Voltage Schematics for East Midlands Electricity Company. Work I respected and thoroughly enjoyed, a 10 hour night shift four nights a week that gave me four day weekends for almost two years, among people whom, for the most part, I liked and which paid the magnificent sum of almost twenty-five dollars per hour. This was in the late nineties and, for where I lived at the time, was a wage beyond the imagination of almost all who lived in that area.
It came to an end, of course. The managers squeezed every last ounce of work out of East Midlands that they could; the Data Capture Centre was closed; and what had, over the previous five years, become a national centre for excellence in the use of GIS for mapping was lost and destroyed without a second thought, and everyone who had worked there was scattered across the country.
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.
At that time I had no means to travel out of the area and so was forced to look for work in and around Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, in the Midlands, that was and still is the equivalent of America's 'rust belt'. Work was not easy to find: but I eventually gained a job working as an International Inquiries Telephone Directory Operator. On the face of it this seemed like a straightforward and perhaps even pleasant little gig. Sit in front of a computer monitor for eight or so hours on a variable shift, finding phone numbers in other countries for people. Simple, wouldn't you say?
Except that I, like most people in the UK, had no inkling that most of these numbers (at least in the UK) are still held in paper directories, many of which were over twenty years old and long overdue for a major update, generating long searches through filthy phone books and, not infrequenly, either a completely negative result - or a completely erroneous one. Which worked wonders for the tempers of the callers... . The rest of the numbers were (and are) held in a proprietary software system of arcane complexity, that required the most intense and demanding feats of memory if the proper syntax for a particular query was to be entered in the system.
Typically, callers wanted numbers for individuals, businesses, or hotels. If the operator taking the call was lucky, the caller would know the name of the party he wanted, the name of the country involved and and the name of the region of the country, or of the city, in which the party was located. If the operator was unlucky the caller would know none of these things...
Caller: Is that International Inquiries?
Operator: Yes Sir (or Madame).
Caller: I want the number of a hotel.
Operator: Its name please?
Caller: My name? What do you want to know my name for?
Operator: No, Sir. The name of the hotel.
Caller. Oh. It's in Asia.
Operator: What country Sir (always follow the information presented by the caller, they get confused if you do anything else)?
Caller: I was there six months ago - it has a pool.
Operator: What is the name, Sir?
Caller: Of the pool?
Operator: No Sir. Of the hotel?
Caller: If I knew that I wouldn't be calling you, now would I?
Operator (while grinding teeth): In what country is the hotel located, Sir?
Caller: Asia.
Operator: What part of Asia, Sir?
Caller: I don't know. I was there six months ago. It's in Asia and it has a very nice pool. Why don't you give me the number?
Operator: (sinks head upon the desk and sobs gently...)
And so it would go on, until the caller grew so frustrated he demanded to speak to a supervisor; or so abusive the operator could rightfully terminate the call. I had drunken Irishmen calling in to demand the Pope's number so they could confess direct. I had heavy breathers demanding to know what color underwear I had on. I had people demanding the number of the American President, so they could complain direct; or the number of the Russian Premier, for the same reason. One confused old lady called every day - in order to book a cab.
And then there was the endless verbal abuse. I had no idea that the general public of the UK could be so creatively foul-mouthed; nor that women in particular would take such delight in attempting to browbeat, bully and intimidate the hapless sods who took such calls.
Operators had, of course, ways and means of retaliating. Particularly abusive callers would be left on line for twenty minutes at a time (calls to International directories are horribly expensive) while the operator 'searched' for the number required in the paper directories - only to be 'accidentally' disconnected by the operator on his or her return. Which almost inevitably produced a further call in order to complain - the operator receiving it would automatically delay transferring the call to a supervisor (since it was a complaint about a fellow operator) and not infrequently would once again 'accidentally' disconnect the call as it was in the process of being transferred...
It was infrequent, but not unknown, for an operator to receive calls from the same person in series. I once went through this sequence of events three times in a row with one particularly unpleasant man, each time having the satisfaction of hearing the hysteria mount in his voice as he realised that he had once again got the same operator to whom he had originally been abusive ... and that he had no way of breaking the loop except by chance. I calculated, later, that I'd cost the foul-mouthed wretch somewhere in the region of seventy pounds, so utterly, furiously, determined to speak to a supervisor was he. He may eventually have got his wish, but by that time he was so incoherent with rage and frustration that no supervisor would have tolerated him for more than a few seconds... and he would once again have been cut off.
I worked there for three months, until I finally secured another mapping contract, and left to follow a path that, eventually, led me here, to America and a life at once both utterly different and at the same time largely the same as the one I'd known in England. Odd to think that, in less than ten days now, I'll be walking the streets of Manhattan, looking up at the skyscrapers and wondering which of them it was that I used to call...
These are pretty much the three worst jobs of my life to date - though I've had others that, in one way or another, came close to equalling them. Now tell me about yours.