October 18, 2006

Compared to These, My Job’s Not So Bad

I was checking out the classified advertisements in my favorite daily newspaper the other day. I do that sometimes after I’ve read all of the stories that are of interest to me. I suddenly found myself looking for ads for jobs I wouldn’t want.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t consider myself above some of the positions being offered these days to unemployed men and women. I had some bummer jobs when I was younger.

Like when I was 19 and accepted a position as a “parts specialist” at a computer company. Computers were relatively new to the world back then. My job was to dispense parts to computer repairmen. A repair guy would approach  the counter and say, “I need a x237623bc11dg26.” Then I’d scurry into the back room and start opening drawers looking for that part.

I had some fun days doing that job. Two, to be exact.

I quit three weeks after being hired, citing a “conflict of interest” when my boss asked me why I was leaving. What I didn’t tell him was I was referring to the fact that I had no interest at all in being a parts specialist.

When I walked out the front door at the computer company I was pretty sure I’d never have another job as bad as that one. But I was wrong. Five days later I landed a position as collector for a loan company.

My boss was nice enough, all right, but the company was weird. The company only loaned money to people who didn’t have any money. Even if they had money, they wouldn¹t know how to manage it. So, despite getting a loan, they eventually ended up in the same boat they were in before they got the cash - without money.

My job was to chase down these non-payers and get their loan payment money.

The company had two rules: 1) We weren’t allowed to hassle pregnant women. 2) We weren’t allowed to go trolling for deadbeats in taverns. Both rules were OK with me, especially number two because there was no way I was going to go into a tavern and hassle a guy three times bigger than me. How do I know the guy would be three times bigger than me? Because all guys who hang out in taverns are three times bigger than me.

To make a longer story much shorter, I quit that job two days after I got chewed out by my boss for loaning $50 to a woman who told me she didn’t have any money for groceries when I went to her house to find out why she was six months behind on her loan payments.

Anyway, to get back to my original premise, when I scanned the classified ads just for the fun of it to see if any of the jobs being hyped appealed to me, I discovered none did.

The worst one I found was for a tree climber, which I’m pretty sure involves heights in some way or another. I’m perfectly comfortable with widths, but being up in the air scares the hell out of me. The same thing was true with an ad for “armed and unarmed guards.” Hey, I might entertain thoughts of being an armed guard, but given the frightful state of the world these days, there’s no way I’d walk around unarmed.

As I leafed through the newspaper, the unappealing jobs just kept coming.
 

“Wanted: Babysitter for five lovely and spirited children”.  Nope.

“Laborers needed for local septic tank company.” Not on your life.

“Door-to-door magazine salesman.” No way.

In the end, after perusing all of the ads, I decided there are worse things than writing for a newspaper.

© 2006 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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