Terrible jobs

Yesterday after going to see Dahlia, the cutest child on earth, Jenny and I grabbed some DQ. While sitting out by the Admiral eating our ice cream we started talking about the shitty jobs we've had in the past. I just thought about how shitty it'd be to work at the tiny little DQ. Always a long line, lots of angry fatties, lots of bratty children, hot, stuffy ... etc.

I'm a rare breed. At 25 years old (26 this coming Monday) I've only had three jobs.

CVS
Boston Market
My current boring white guy office job.

CVS wasn't so bad. Though the location I worked at was equidistant to two old folks homes, so you'd get tracheotomy man, who'd bark orders at you through his gurgling throat hole. It petrified me to the point where I couldn't move. Him, and Franky the womanizing retarded guy not wanting to leave, and the 6'7" dude with the horned owl eyebrows who'd buy the HUGEST package of adult diapers and get pissed if you asked if he wanted a bag. "I don't give a rat's ass who sees."

I quit CVS because I only got like $20 a week because the staff was so bloated and I wouldn't get any hours.

Soon after that I worked at Boston Market.

That place was ridiculous. Me and like five or six of my scumbag friends all worked there along with a gaggle of Haitian dudes and the fat white manager.

The Haitian guys would blast jammin 94.5 in the kitchen. This was in the height of K-Ci & Jo Jo's hit "All My Life" and Puff Daddy was just getting really big. During down time I'd go back there and have dance parties with them. Then someone would inevitably throw a chunk of ham at someone and then the dishwasher hose would get put to use and the fun would end. What a scene. Black kids and white kids dousing eachother with high-pressure water cannons. It looked like Washington DC in 1963, but there was love in that room, dammit. I miss those guys.

I never did anything bad to the food. Never on purpose.

I was at the cutting station one afternoon and a guy asked for a ham dinner. I bent down to grab the ham from the ham drawer with my inadequate tongs. The huge ham slab, fresh from the kitchen and weighing in at about 16 pounds fell to the floor with a thud that sounded like a squash racquet on a wet asscheek. My eyes darted up to see the guy's reaction. He was clueless. He got his ham. Oops.

One night a kid got put on dishwashing who really really didn't want to be on dishwashing. After a few busy hours while I was manning the register, dishwasher man came out and whispered "don't eat the cornbread." He hocked a few extra ingredients into the mix before it was baked. It was with a heavy heart that I handed the little white bags to countless soccer moms that night.

There are a million episodes to speak of, but to keep it short I'll talk about the first one that comes to mind.

Charles, one of the Haitian kids went missing from the back room for a while. He had left to take the trash out and should have been back minutes later.

I finally walked out back to find him covered from fingers to elbows in white dust.

"Charles what the hell happened?"

"Come outside, whiteboy. It's fun" he said in his thick lazy creole accent.

He found a huge stash of 6 foot fluorescent bulbs that he was swinging like swords and smashing all over the dumpster, completely unaware of the poisonous dust all over his person.