Blue Yon Belly

It was the worst thing to happen to me because I’d never worked from home before, so I didn’t yet know that unless I make a conscious effort to meet my daily physical and emotional needs, I’ll inevitably find myself slouched on the couch, dissatisfied and lonely, suffering from a case of self-inflicted immobility and watching with mild horror as cat hair sifts through the air to settle in layers on my wilting pajamas. I had no idea that inertia isn’t just something I learned about in Physics 10, but that it is, in fact, a cult in which my brain is a zealous and devout member. Since I began each day at rest, my brain went to fanatical lengths to convince me to stay at rest and would resist my (its?) attempts to change my velocity. Having never been in charge of my innate forces before, I’d always thought that my brain knew my needs best because that’s, you know, kind of its whole purpose. I had no idea my brain would argue with itself if it told me I was hungry and I would feel a resulting urge to move from the couch to the kitchen, only to have my brain turn around and deny that urge in a shrill, hysterical voice because that would involve STANDING and using my limbs to bear my own weight and then using my digits to chop things and press buttons and that’s TOO MUCH VELOCITY AND CHANGE and it’s really probably best to just wait this whole thing out until another being comes along and forces us/me into motion because you CAN’T ARGUE WITH INERTIA. It’s one of the LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE.

When I was working from home, I allowed my life to suffer. I was in control of every aspect of my day and my happiness; I just didn’t realize it. When I worked in an office, my life suffered and there was little I could do to control it. I tried–hard–and it didn’t work. (Ergo, sabbatical.) I have since learned that my brain’s fervor for inertia is as dismissible as the rantings of any religious wing nut. I can do things, lots of things, amazing things, like bike across Canada, when I defy my brain. In fact, the best things happen when I defy my brain.

So, I’m looking for work. I’m checking out my options. And I won’t be bending over for The Man, thank you very much. So. In celebration of my new found unwillingness to bend over, I’ve made a list: Top Five Worst Jobs of My Life.

5. Canada Safeway Cashier: This job paid minimum wage, offered no benefits, and had a ridiculous company-wide policy of not giving staff more than 18 hours a week. This put my monthly salary at $360 before taxes and union fees. Yes, union fees. I don’t know what kind of union negotiates a maximum of 18 hours a week, but I’m guessing a union that’s failing miserably and/or corrupt. But the real sticking point with this job was how seriously they expected you to take your cashiering. We were asked to study the produce codes outside of work, to come into work half an hour early to tour the produce section, and randomly administered written exams on the codes every week. If you didn’t get at least 80% on that damn exam, you were taken aside and given a stern lecture and a warning to improve. We were all given a “Top Banana” pin that we were required to wear on our uniform (a POLYESTER DRESS with PUFFED SLEEVES). If you got 100% on your produce code exam, you got a fruit or vegetable charm to hang from your Top Banana pin. OH HAPPY DAY.

4. Dairy Queen Counter Girl: This job was like a scene out of Mean Girls. Part of the problem was that this wasn’t the Dairy Queen from my hometown, but was from a neighbouring town, so all the other girls knew each other and weren’t especially interested in making me feel included. Specifically, they took delight in excluding me. I once got locked in the walk-in freezer for over an hour and either no one noticed I was missing or cared that I was missing. I actually suspect they knew I was locked in the freezer and wanted to be cruel. Eventually, I gave up on knocking and yelling for help and dejectedly sat on a milk crate, shivering and refusing to cry while I waited to be released.

3. The Art Store Job: For this job, I answered phones and took catalogue orders for an art supply store. This entailed dealing with flaky artists over the phone all the livelong day: “Oh, hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee. I’m doing this frog project? Papier maché frogs? It’s going to be, like, a FOREST of papier maché frogs. No. A CITY OF FROGS. It’s a STATEMENT. About society. And frogs. Purple frogs! PUCE FROGS! What do you have in a puce acrylic? No, oil! No, water colour! Wait, what kind of paint do you use with papier maché? Oh you know what? I just remembered I don’t have any money.”

2: Office Depot Cashier: Depressingly, I had my university degree at this point, which rubbed a certain amount of salt into my wounded idealism and naïve expectations of the world. Office Depot seemed to have a special breed of obnoxious, snotty customers who were quite insistent that you know how busy and important they were and that it was because of their incredible stature in the business world that they were buying a leather desk chair. I was informed of my stupidity on numerous occasions. Never when I had done anything stupid, mind you, but when some pompous ass wasn’t getting his/her own way. For example:

Customer: What’s taking so long?!? What are you, STUPID? Are you RETARDED? I MAKE $100 AN HOUR. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO WAIT FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU.

Me: I make $7.50 an hour.

Customer: …SO?!?

Me: They don’t pay me enough to give a tiny rat’s ass about you.

Customer: [blinks]

I did get in trouble for this, although my manager was pretty forgiving due to the fact that I was one of the only people who could answer the phones AND ring in orders at the same time. See? I didn’t got to university for nothing!

1. Joey Tomatoes Waitress: Joey Tomatoes is the Italian cousin in the Earls chain of restaurants. Those from Western Canada will be familiar with the Earls franchise and its notoriety for exploiting underage girls by way of not quite officially requiring them to wear skimpy outfits. After my first day, my smarmy boss took me aside and urged me to wear a shirt that was more “formfitting.” (I ignored his suggestion.) He also liked to remind the girls pouring beers to “give good head.”

Beyond a willingness to be exploited for your looks (typically borne of a complete lack of other options), “Earlitude” was of the utmost importance. We all dashed around in our formfitting shirts, grinning like sharks and bleating “Hiiieee! It’s so great to SEE you! How are YOU today?” to anything that moved. In order to create the illusion of a fun-loving atmosphere, every time someone ordered the jambalaya, you had to yell “Jam-BA-LAAAAAAYYYYAAAAA!” for all the restaurant to hear. And all the other waitresses would roar back, “JAMBALAAAAAYYYAA!” This was generally terrifying for customers, and you would have to nervously twitter while you waited for them to stop clutching at their heart so you could take their drink order.

Customer birthdays were equally horrible. You would have to really ham it up before giving them their complimentary cake: “It’s your BIRTHDAY?!? Welllllll, you know what we do around here on BIRTHDAYS!” And then we’d all have to gather around in some happy-clappy circle and sing a song. In a fake Italian accent. “Whatsa madda you? [HEY!] You lost anodda year? [HEY!]” And so on.

This job came to an abrupt and fiery end and is the closest I’ve ever come to being fired. In fact, on the morning of my last day, I left believing that I had been fired. I mean, the smarmy manager had actually tried to fire me because of my “bad Earlitude.” You see, Skeezy McSmarmypants had “heard that I never went to any of the staff parties and after work get togethers” and “it just didn’t seem like I was a going to work out.” I was sick of him, sick of the restaurant and the stupid yelling and singing, and really just bone tired. I mean, I was working two other jobs in order to survive. I didn’t have time for after hours Earlitude. Something snapped and I just lit into his ass. Dude was stunned when I stood up to him and his jaw kind of slowly unhinged and we stood staring at each other for a long moment before he started stammering that he’d think about giving me a second chance. I turned on my heel and stormed out, mostly because I didn’t want Skeezy McSmarmypants to see that I was about to cry. Although my standing up to him was evidence of my developing backbone, the whole incident deeply upset my people pleaser nature. I went home, cried on my roommate’s bed for a while, then gathered my spirits and went out and got myself a new job: “Customer Service Representative” for Blockbuster Video. The future looked bright indeed.

Since I have secured a new job and subsequently had a heart-to-heart with my boss wherein I had to honestly explain why I was unwilling to stay in my current position a minute longer than the requisite two weeks (“Well…truth be told, yesterday when I was away from my desk, it was because I had to go cry hysterically in private”), I feel it’s fair game for me to say that my work environment was toxic. That my disappearing for an hour to sob in the privacy of a bathroom stall was not regarded as unusual and was, instead, greeted with a commiserating and empathetic “I know. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to do the same,” from my boss is a pretty good indicator. And while I would love to sink my teeth into this topic, delving deeper is probably ill advised. Suffice it to say, the last year has been hell on Earth for everyone involved and I am not the only one who suffered a meltdown (three out of a team of six).

Anyway, even if there are work spies reading this,* that my particular area was deemed toxic by employees and employer alike is not news to anybody. In the past few months, in an attempt to address the situation, our group has been sent to several “team building” workshops put on by various and sundry motivational speakers, none of whom did anything to challenge my perception that corporate workshop facilitators are manic lunatics from the same alien race as Tom Cruise.

The first workshop was a full two days, conducted by a woman who looked like a parody of a Russian figure skating coach: brassy dye job, blue eyeshadow, stripes of blush over leathery smoker’s skin, and both days she wore 80s era outfits with hefty shoulder pads and some kind of animal print. Her frumpy appearance was incongruous with her boundless energy and her habit of clapping and exclaiming with rabid glee, “Yaaay! Good for YOU [insert name], GOOD SHARING!” every time someone responded to one of her questions. She also responded to each personal revelation by oversharing information from her own life so that by the end of the first hour, we knew that her father never loved her, she had gone through a bitter divorce in the early 90s, and had, at one point, declared bankruptcy and lost her condo only to rebound by making, “scads of money” and marrying a man who knows how to “push her buttons.”

The purpose of this particular workshop was to get our “colours done.” Somebody somewhere has broken down the 6 billion some odd personalities of the world into four colours: blues (empathetic, sensitive), golds (organized/Type A), oranges (adventurous, outgoing), and greens (logical, analytical). The goal of the workshop was for us to use our individual colours to weave a “plaid.”

I am pretty sure this type of thing is designed specifically to torment people like me who are compulsive people pleasers suffering from a conflicting congenital cynicism.

Highlights of this workshop included: Watching a video of the fish throwing people at Pike Place Market and preparing a presentation on how having fun increases productivity; me getting a stern lecture on how I couldn’t be both blue and orange, nor an extrovert and an introvert, and having to pick one of each**; my co-worker being forced to don a tiara and wave a glittery “blue fairy” plastic wand and give us examples of how her “blue” personality is a gift (sadly, readers, I tell you this with no hyperbole whatsoever); and a dramatic demonstration wherein Oversharing Figure Skating Lady broke a single stick across her purple leopard print clad knee, but when she bundled the sticks and tied them with blue, orange, green, and gold yarn, the sticks could not be broken.

If I’m honest with myself, I must admit that most of my contempt for this workshop stems from being publicly rebuked for having equal portions of seemingly conflicting personality types.

The other workshop of note was the Laughter Workshop. Yes. A workshop to teach us how to laugh. I actually liked this facilitator because he was so good-hearted and well-intentioned that he was oblivious to how his unbridled enthusiasm was often overwhelming for many of us. You have to feel at once sorry for and touched by a man who wears a happy face tie and clown nose and bounds into a room full of hateful co-workers to force them to laugh together. You know, in the same way you at once love and are anxious about a joyful labradoodle with muddy paws who’s been set loose on a cocktail party.

Anyway, I say forced to laugh because that’s what it was. First we had a five-minute warm-up, where we had to clutch at our stomachs, saying/pretend laughing “Ha-ha-ha” (in a tenor), “Hee-hee-hee” (in a falsetto), and “HO-HO-HO” (in a booming bass), and finish each round of fake laughing by waving our hands in the air, jumping up and down, and shouting “Yaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!” This was followed by several different laughing exercises that included having to waddle around the room like penguins and tittering, pretending we were chickens and “Bok-bok-bok” laughing, and grabbing our bellies so that we could feel them shaking like bowls full of jelly when we chortled “Ho-ho-ho!” like Santa Claus. The exercises culminated in knee slapping and a crescendo of “Ah-ha-ha-ha! AH-HA-HA-HAAAAAAAAA! BWAH-HA-HA!!!” laughing.

Of all the things I could say at this point, I will instead say “Goodbye old job.”

————————–

*I am not being paranoid when I refer to “work spies,” as the public service actually has a department whose duties include reading e-mails and the like, which I found out when I had lunch the other day with one of that department’s employees.

While we’re on the subject, Dear Work Spies: That time I Googled “Pete Burns pussy lips,” I was not being pervy, but was instead trying to see Pete Burns’ botched lip implants and the resulting pus-filled blisters and only realized how “pus-sy” and “pussy” lips are interchangeable after my unfortunate search results appeared. Please remove any resulting red flags off of my account.

**Note that Oversharing Figure Skating Lading was not a trained psychologist. Also note that I filled out the questionnaires honestly and that’s how my results came out. This sort of blurring the lines is, apparently, unacceptable in Four Colour World. (I chose blue and introvert, for the record.)

I started the new job and never get to sleep. Ever.

EV-VER.

This spurred a downward spiral, wherein I awake each morning in complete despair and come home each day to collapse on the couch and wait for death. I contemplated giving up on the blog altogether, as my evenings are dominated by the collosal effort of putting together a meal and then maybe, MAYBE, going to the gym, but probably watching an hour of TV and then it’s time to go to bed, be woken up 900,000 times by the cat, finally fall asleep only to find that minutes after I drift away, the alarm is shrieking away again and it’s time to repeat the whole ordeal.

But then I got a comment. A comment! (That’s brings the tally to three comments, thank you very much.) And, remembering the cathartic power of the blogging and how it made me like writing again, it lit a fire under my tail to take up the blogging again.

So here I am on my lunch hour, kinda but not REALLY blogging about work (for obvious reasons).

This whole fiasco begs the question: Why, Why, WHY is it that I can’t handle working? Can’t handle working from home and can’t handle working from an office. (I was worried/kinda knew this would happen, but what could I do? I needed a new job!)

I have to ask myself whether maybe I am one of those people who is overwhelmed by the pressure of working. You know, those people. The ones who can never hold down a job for one reason or another and they spend their lives switching jobs and complaining. I mean, all I do is edit the passive voice out of people’s letters and stuff, which is no actual pressure at all. So it’s not the WORK per se, so much as the NEVER GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP and the wearing SLACKS and nerdy blouses and the not being able to swear or express political views. You know, basically having to smother my personality and ignore my needs. It totally kills me, this stuff. Seriously, am I normal? Is it normal to hate working? Does everyone else just not talk about how they feel like the whole thing is soul-sucking? Are there any other 29-year-olds thinking, “MY GODDESS, there’s THIRTY-SIX MORE YEARS until I can retire. THIRTY-SIX MORE YEARS! How can I go on?!”

Or is it that I just haven’t found my place in the world yet? Once I have the “right job,” will I be content? Will I no longer dread going to work in the morning? Will I no longer care about not getting to wear my sneaks and having to wait until precisely noon to be able to eat lunch, even though I prefer to eat lunch at 11:30? Are there people out there who really do like their jobs? Or is it my attitude? Maybe I HAVE the right job but just can’t see it because of my bad attitude and finely honed ability to focus on the negative with laser precision.

Helllllppppppp meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Finally, if anyone anywhere has any idea of how to get my cat to shut the fuck up at night and let me get more than three hours’ sleep, I beg of you, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. By the way, those three hours aren’t consecutive. The ignoring/not-reinforcing worked briefly and then spurred her on to new heights of insanity.

(Sorry about the swearing. But, well, I swear. A lot. And I never get to swear anymore. And the words build in me like some kind of pending Tourette’s outburst, so there may be more swearing in the blog to make up for having to say things like “Ffffffffffffuu–Fooor Goodness sake!” when I kick the power supply and lose all my work.)