Me and Jobs, Part I

The first job I ever had was when I was in high school. A local company published a paper on antique collecting, and each issue was stuffed into a paper bag before being mailed. They hired kids for piecework to stuff the papers when a new issue came out, and my older sister and I found out about it and showed up to go to work. We collected some papers and bags and got them stuffed, and went back to collect some more, only to find that a line had formed. There wasn't a steady supply of papers and bags, for some reason. And, as it quickly became clear, our timing was fated to continue to be off. By a strange coincidence, the daughters of the publisher always turned up to collect more supplies right when large stacks of the raw materials came out, and it quickly became evident to my sister and me that we, and everybody else there, were there to sit around and waste time on our own dime until we were needed to pick up the slack on what was basically the publishers' daughters' job. As soon as we figured that one out, we went home.

After that, I didn't have a regular job until I was a senior in high school and in need of some spending money. I hadn't learned to drive, because I knew I didn't have enough money to get my hands on a car; much less to buy gasoline and pay for insurance and taxes and other related expenses. (Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me that someone else would pay for all this for me.) I did, however, sneak out of school on a regular basis with my friend Sylvia, who had a Ford Maverick, and we would go out to lunch or out to the mall. I needed a little bit of money. I got a job at the Waffle House in Northport, where another friend of mine was a cook. I waited tables after school a few nights a week.

I got paid a little over a dollar an hour, which was a high starting pay, since I was recommended by my friend. Anyway, I ended up working the shift which ran from after school to about 9 pm, which was when all the drunks in town hung out, drinking coffee until they left to hang out at the dive bars along the highway. I was seventeen, which made me the oldest person on the shift much of the time. We had another waitress, who was sixteen, and on some nights, a cook who was fifteen, but being the cook and male put him ex officio in charge. I was supposed to wear a dress, but since I was barely five feet tall and had to lean all the way across the counters and booths to wipe them down, and given the lecherous nature of the boozy good ol' boys who made up the afternoon Waffle House custom, I defied convention and wore pants. The first thing I learned was how to fend off friendly come-ons in a vague and breezy way. I was supposed to work half the restaurant, but if the other waitress didn't show up, I got to work the whole restaurant and run the cash register, for the same pay, and any shortage in the take came out of my pay. Any errors in the register's favor, of course, didn't go to me.

I worked there two months, under three managers. The third manager's girlfriend needed a job, so I was out. School was about to be out by that time, so that was okay by me.

Return of the Big Fish

Suffice it to say that the last entry took a lot out of me. I was not inclined to look at this page for some time. Busyness, laziness and stress have all played their part in my lack of attention to writing. And a good bit of thought has gone into the question of what a blog is supposed to be, anyway. The concept of a blog, a web log, is something written on an ongoing basis by somebody who is doing something interesting, or making interesting observations on something like politics, right?

I'm not any kind of a pundit or an insider. I'm not doing anything unusual or interesting. But there are two things that made me start writing on the Blogger. One was the slogan, "Push-button Publishing." Publishing! I could be published! And I wouldn't have to find an agent, send off a manuscript, and worry about whether I'd be rejected. Or, worse yet, whether anybody'd be interested in what I'd write.

You see, I'd been writing my "memoirs" for some time, in my head. I'd even written some on the computer and had it saved to a disk. I couldn't work out a chronological sequence, so I had been organizing my life experiences by subject. The working title was "Taking Up Space and Waiting to Die." Pretty good description of a life marked by long periods of severe depressive disorder. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to read it. I couldn't imagine why I would want anyone to. I had burned everything I'd written up to that point, for just those reasons. But I did want to write it.

The second reason for signing up on the Blogger was the encouragement of Kimbuck. "you should write." he said. "You should be a writer. You should be doing advertising for one of these big companies that does TV commercials. You are so creative. You are being wasted!" At least I know I'm in good company. So many geniuses and artists were clerical workers. Einstein, Melville, Cezanne, I can't remember who else.

So, what am I going to do? Just to keep my hand in, I'll post the chunks of my memoirs here, as I'd originally intended, along with whatever comes to mind. Anything that comes to mind, to keep in practice writing and thinking independently and practicing writing at an adult level and utilizing my vocabulary before it all disappears.