No Work Is Good Work

I have recently begun searching for a job.

It's made me think about work and jobs in general--why do we get them, how do you pick the right one, etc.

There are some people out there who enjoy working, and who actually love their jobs. I'm not sure what traumatic even occurred in their childhood, but my heart truly goes out to them.

And then there are those of us who only work out of necessity--we want "money" so we can buy "things" and not have to "eat from other people's garbage" or "steal our clothes from hobos" or "fight a nestful of rats for a corner to sleep in."

My motivation to engage in labor in order to receive currency to exchange for goods and services began in high school. Up until that point, I made my way by on allowance. which meant making a twenty dollar bill last as looooong as possible--which isn't very long for a kid with a Coca-Cola addiction. Even at 50 cents a pop, buying up soda for a weekend could cost a good 3 bucks--do that 4 weekends a month, thats 12 bucks, only leaving about 8 to spend for the rest of the month. Let me put it this way--I had an extensive collection of pre-owned CD's for a good portion of my youth.

I worked my early high school summers lifeguarding at the neighborhood pool. This wasn't really a job--it was more like what most kids would do anyway--sitting at the pool for 6 hours--but getting paid for it. Sure, sure, we had to "make sure kids and old people didn't drown."

But the beauty of my neighborhood was this: 99% of all kids in the hood were on swim team starting at age 5. See, my neighborhood was undefeated in swim team from a few years before I joined at age 6, and for a couple years after I quit at age 17. This doens't just mean that we won the finals every season, it means that we never lost a meet in all of those years.

Let me make 2 things clear:

1) I'm not trying to impress you with this information--I don't expect you to gasp or ask for an autograph or anything--I'm just trying to explain why lifeguarding was an easy job. I'm not one of those guys strutting around, living in the past of his former glory days back when the ol' neighborhood swim team was the shit. Its not like I still have my old cap and speedo from when I was 12, and put them on late at night and admire myself in the mirror. Let's say for the sake of argument that I do actually do that--which I'm not necessarily admitting to--it wouldn't be because I am reveling in the former glory of my old swim team--it would be because I am bored and I like the snugness.

Which brings me to point 2): I am not claiming to have contributed in any way to the team's undefeated dynasty. Although I was a proficient (I might even go so far as to say strong) swimmer, I sucked as a swimming competitor. Swim meets were every saturday morning beginning at 8am and going until roughly 3pm. And, as I mentioned before, nearly every kid in the neighborhood was there. Thus, for me, swim meets were social time--gettin to hang out with all of your friends for 7 hours with very little parental supervision--it was fun, man!

Besides that, the snack bar at swim meets ROCKED. They had all kinds of soda and basically every kind of candy a young kid could dream of. I have vivid memories of buying 3-5 blowpops and a giant pixie stick, and creating what amounted to a sugar addict's version of fun dip--pour some of the giant pixie stick in your hand, roll the blow pop in it, and enjoy. I had some dizzing sugar rushes back then.

Now what the coaches didn't tell us (actually, they did, I just didn't listen), was that sugar weighs you down when you are swimming competetively, not to mention makes you crash. The amount I had every meet . . . well, let's just say there were a couple of incidents where I blacked out, went nuts and started swimming the corkscrew stroke (where you shift between freestyle and backstroke--i.e. not a real stroke at all) horizontally across all the lanes. Those were crazy times.

Anyway, my point was that due to the almost cult-like participation of the neighborhood kids in swim team, lifeguarding at the pool was an easy summer job. Sure, we may have lost a kid here or there, but nobody is perfect. When you are lounged back in the lifeguard chair and you have just put on some sun screen and you are dozing off cause you have been sitting in the sun for nearly 4 hours straight with no water, the last thing you feel like doing is standing up, blowing your whistle 2 times, and diving into the pool just to drag the kid out of the middle of the deep end to the side so he can "breathe" again. It's really too much to ask of a person.

Okay, okay, that didn't actually happen, unless it happened while I was napping on the stand--I can't account for that time, but I don't really recall hearing a lot of screaming and commotion around me when I was sleeping, and I'm sure that someone would have woke me up if someone was actually drowning.

But, however, although, nonetheless, despite that, that's not to say that lifeguarding at my neighborhood pool, i.e. the easiest job known to man, wasn't somehow difficult for some people. One day, after having made head lifeguard (boo ya!), I was sitting the stand, taking my 15 minute shift of watching the pool, desperately yearning for the 45 minute break that followed. As I was sitting, I noticed one of the other guards walking towards the pump room, in the side of the building that adjoined the pool.

Nothing out of the ordinary there--typically at the end of the day, which it was, someone needed to fill the chlorinators in the pump room with cholorine tablets. I thought, great, she is actually putting her book down (which she normally spent all day every day reading, and would have continued while on the stand if I didn't remind her that there were lives depending on her keeping an eye on the water for 15 minutes) showing some initiative and not making me do all the work.

Something odd then happened. I saw her struggling to open the door. Now, sometimes, the door to the pump room was locked. This seemed to take her a while to figure out. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her go back into the guard room for a minute or 2, and then emerge with what I assumed was the key. Good--problem solved. I resumed watching the kids play in the pool.

About 5 minutes later, I saw her again go back into the guard room. I thought, "maybe she forgot to grab the latex gloves we are supposed to wear when filling the chlorinators." I was a little concerned, though, when I saw her come out of the guard room with a hammer.

At this point, my interest was piqued. Keeping one eye on the pool, I glanced to the side to see what this other lifeguard was doing. My concern spiked considerably when I saw her hitting the pump room door handle with the hammer. However, there was nothing I could do, since there was only me and her there and I needed to be on the stand.

I was about to yell over to her when I saw her drop the hammer on the ground in frustration, march over to the chair, throw her hands up in defeat and mutter angrily, "I give up." I cautiously inquired, "what do you mean?" She replied, "Well the door was locked, and the key wouldn't turn, so I got the hammer to try and make the key turn, but it broke off in the lock."

I was utterly speechless.

Whatever your beliefs are on the whole evolution vs. creationism debate, it's fairly indisputed that most animals with semi-developed brains have mastered tool use. Monkeys, that's a given. But even an octopus can figure out opening a jar when there is food inside. Psychology tests have shown that even pigeons can figure out moving a box around a cage so as to push a button that results in being fed.

Normally, I am a pretty understanding person, but using a hammer to turn a key that wont turn just seemed a little . . . .what's the word I'm looking for. . . . developmentally regressive (dum-dum).

I told her to get on the stand, and went to investigate the situation. sure enough, I saw the hammer lying on the ground, and the top of the key right next to it. In the lock was the tooth-ed part of the key. "Ok," I thought, "try to be fair. I can see how a person might . . . have so much trouble . . . turning a key. . . that they end up thinking a . . . hammer will make it properly turn." But something seemed odd to me--the lock has never stuck before, never given anyone any trouble when turning a key. So, just to play devil's advocate, I reached out and tried the door knob.

It opened right away and I was staring into the pump room. See, the reason the key wouldn't turn was because the door was ALREADY UNLOCKED. So when this guard had trouble opening the door, instead of telling me, instead of trying the handle to see if it's already unlocked, she went straight to "I know--I'll get a hammer to force this key to turn." I never made her fill the chlorinators again, which may have been her secret goal all along.

So, lifeguarding isn't for everyone, especially when it involves . . . opening unlocked doors.

Now, I feel kind of bad ripping on this 18 year old girl who wanted nothing more than to sit and read her book all day at the pool and not be bothered, and, to her credit, never bothered anyone else. And, despite my success as a lifeguard, which entailed sitting in a chair by the pool, I'm not exactly Rico Suave when it come to job skills. So, to be fair, I'm going to tell a story of my own occupational incompetence to even the field and bring myself down off the pedestal some might have placed me on.

When I turned 18 in September 2002, I wanted to get a tattoo. Scratch that--I wanted one before I was 18, but 18 was the first time it became a possibility. My parents, of course, really didn't want me to get one. This, in turn, made me want it more (the mind is a strange thing, huh?) Anyway, unless I wanted to wait until the next summer till the pool opened (in Colorado, the pools generally close during the winter because the kids get hurt trying to jump off the diving board and landing on 3 feet of solid ice), this meant getting a job during the school year. I was disgusted, but necessity (getting a tattoo) sometimes motivates us to take desperate measures.

I had only worked at a pool, so I wasn't quite sure where to begin finding another job. So, I decided to drive to Starbucks to ask for an application. When I parked, tho, I noticed a new building being built next to Starbucks. As I walked by, the 2 men standing there asked me if I needed work (no, don't worry, this story isn't going to end up with me turning tricks in a dark alley). I said sure, and they handed me a job application. "Maybe you can be a waiter." The one guy said. "What's the name of the restaurant?" I asked. "Cheesey Jane's Hamburgers."

So, I ended up becoming a waiter at Cheesy Janes, a new restaurant in the neighborhood that apparantly was so desparate for a wait-staff that they had dudes standing on the corner hustling high school kids. I had no experience being a waiter, but I figured "how hard can it be?"

That question was answered my very first day on the job.

See, because the restaurant was new, the owner thought it would be a good idea to have a "soft opening". For those of you who haven't seen Ocean's 13, a soft-opening is where a place of business has a practice run of sorts--simulating being open without actually having paying customers there. But, in order to get the illusion up of having customers, the owner typically, as in this case, has friends, family, and investors come.

Now, I got placed serving the table with one of the owner's friends and investors and his wife, kids, and what appeared to be either grandparents or horribly aged older sibblings. I know this because the owner pulled me aside and said "make sure to be very careful getting everything right at that table."

Everything started off strong--I took the drink orders and filled them up so as to give everyone a minute to contemplate which burger to get. That's as far as I got, though, because when I was carrying the tray full of drinks back to the table, I tripped on my shoelace, stumbled, and poured the entire drink order onto the shirt, lap, and head of the friend/investor's wife.

I didn't get fired, but I didn't exactly get the shifts I requested after that either.

That was pretty much the beginning of my working life. However, like I said, I work so I can get things, and I ended up getting my tattoo a few months later. Much to the dismay of my parents, who thought I wasn't actually going to go through with it. Needless to say, they were thrilled. . . . no, wait, thrilled isn't the word I was looking for. What is it? Ah yes, surprised/infuriated when they called me one weekend when I was in Breckenridge with friends, and I said upon answering the phone, "Sorry I can't talk now, I'm getting my tattoo." Then I hung up, showed the artist which cross I wanted, and rolled up my sleeve.

I guess that's what my parents get for making me get a job.

Don't work too hard!

Mikee P