Barreling Right Along....

My path of employment, for the most part, continues along the expected path of most students.  Part-time, low paying, cashier type jobs.  Long, late, drunken serving jobs.  Those sorts of things.  What is most impressive/horrifying, is the vast number of positions I have held in my life time, and of course, my inability to find a job I am good at and love.  But every once in a while, a job comes along that fits into none of these categories.  A job that is strange and unbelievable, that offers me a special sort of skill set.  Something people who have grown up in cities whose main source of income is tourism will understand because we are willing to gouge the tourists for every cent they are willing to throw at us.  Ready for this?  I was once employed by Niagara Daredevil.  This is a company where people paid $16 for a polaroid picture of themselves and sometimes their loved ones, pretending to go over the Falls in a barrel.  (Side note - I was looking for some pictures to entertain you and for the sake of my own integrity, I have to inform you, if you were to go there you could also get a picture in a canoe pretending to go down the rapids.  This was not nearly as popular because, obviously, it is kind of stupid).

Every day, I would head off to work in these little booths at the base of the Skylon Tower.  The only way I can describe the set up is, pretend for Christmas as a small child you really really wanted to go over the falls in a barrel.  Your grandfather, loving you a whole lot, decided to build you a Falls and also a barrel so you could take pictures and pretend you had been.  The whole thing was a rickety construction.  The locks were ancient, the till was a drawer with a pad lock, you had to count the number of polaroid sheets you used and if you made too many mistakes you would be in trouble.  The problem with the picture taking process was you had to pull the picture sheet straight out of the monstrous camera contraption or else it would leave blotchy marks.  Then you would have to let it wait the appropriate amount of time until the ink had dried, all while having tourists impatiently waiting for the photo.  Then, once the paper was off and the picture quality was fine, it had to dry!  Can you ever imagine how many over eager customers grabbed the picture as soon as I set it down, forever leaving a thumb mark smushed into the middle of their picture??  No you probably cannot imagine.  Just as you can't imagine this was actually my real summer job, and I went here at least five days a week and sat by myself trying to pressure sell people into getting these photos.  But it is all true.  I could not make this stuff up if I tried.

I have two very clear memories of that job.  First, across the hall from me was a HUGE television that played the Marineland commercial constantly.  You know how much you hate that song when you hear it twice in a row on the radio?  Imagine EIGHT HOURS NONSTOP!!!!  I shudder every time I hear it, or see the little girl wiping the screen clear to watch the beluga whales because I know there is a triangle spot of frost on the lower left hand corner she is always going to miss.  Every time.  Until you think you will lose your mind hoping she would just pay attention to what she is doing and clear the whole screen.  You'll see....  o you'll see....

Can you find the frost she missed?

Sorry...  where was I?  O yes.  The other thing I learned was about myself.  In my head I picture myself as rather adorable.  I know I'm short and have stubby legs.  I can't help that.  But I have a cute little smile and twinkley eyes, and, I had always assumed, at least a little bit of innate sex appeal.  This job taught me otherwise.  I had to wear a baseball cap, as well as an oversized t-shirt with a picture of the owner in the barrel going over his fake falls on the back.  I was mistaken for a boy multiple times.  The other girl I worked with had long curly blonde hair and somehow made the shirt fit in ways I couldn't.  I would tie it up, wear extra make up, push up bras.  It didn't matter.  Inevitably, I would hear someone say, "Go ask the boy how much a picture costs."  I am not too proud to admit this, sometimes I would turn around to answer their question and people would say, "O dear I'm so sorry sweetheart."  but sometimes, they would not say anything and they would leave believing they had gotten directions to the elevator from a pre-pubescent boy. 

In conclusion, the rediculously useful skill of being able to successfully operate a polaroid camera from 1953 has not actually gotten me any great number of job offers.  Instead, I seem to be suffering from the fact that I spent my university summers not working towards a career but trying to avoid huge amounts of student debt and filling my resume with hilarious, but not so employable skills.  Stay tuned, I wish I could say it was all uphill from here....  but it is decidedly not.

My Career Path Continues....

On to grade twelve.  I was forced to quit my most favourite job at the IGA because I wanted to be a camp counsellor for the summer.  I loved camp and so gave up the hours I spent scanning food.  On a side note, one of the negatives of that job was the week there was an extreme sale on pig legs.  If you have never seen an entire pig leg, they are gigantic.  About the size of me.  Apparently the people of Niagara Falls have a secret love of them because when they were on sale people were buying in bulk.  No lie.  I would have have to try and scan five or six of them in an order.  They do not fit neatly in little styrofoam deli trays.  O no.  Instead they were wrapped up in clear plastic garbage bags.  Think Dexter, but just giant legs, with bar code stickers attached.  So I would have to manuver the leg to scan the bar code, but let me just tell you this other little piece of information, pig legs are really quite hairy.  Not hairy like mine in mid February, no these hairs are like little metal spikes, breaking open the bags and quite often scratching up my arms.  You might think this is disgusting enough, but once the bags were filled with these little hair holes all of the pig juice would come dripping out all over me.  I would return home from these pig leg sale shifts covered in all sorts of bodily pig fluids, while they seeped into my open wounds from the pig hair, exhausted from the strenuous activity of even lifting them.... 

Gag if you must, but I lifted this dang things for a whole week to satisfy the resident's of Niagara and their sick porky fetishes.

So it was time to move on.  In grade twelve my job criteria was no job interview, only on weekends.  Here is when life tricked me, I was taught if you said what you wanted enough times then you could be given it.  I repeated my request approximately four times before a class mate offered me a position as gift shop girl in a motel/hotel where the rooms were rented hourly and nobody bought anything from the giftshop but the owner's son took a liking to me because of my extreme and obvious contempt bordering on hatred for his entire family including his wife and kids.  Did I mention I was often called on to babysit?  Sometimes to waitress during breakfast or stand at the front desk while they went for cigarette breaks?  I ran food to the bar.  I cleaned rooms.  I delivered room service or extra towels or answered the phone.  What I rarely did was sell anything from the tiny little nook that was the gift shop.  I dusted meticulously, frequently showed up so hungover I could barely stand, and rarely smiled.  They had a policy about employees paying 50% for their food.  I refused to eat there or give a single cent of my hard earned (well maybe just earned....) money back to my employers.  It got so extreme that the owner's son became obsessed with forcing me to eat his food.  If you know anything about me it's that I don't eat when I'm uncomfortable.  And I especially don't eat when I'm trying to prove a point to a giant asshole.  He went so far as to tell me to order anything I wanted off the menu for free.  He would leave plates of ribs for me, or have steaks cooked up just as I was walking in.  As someone who spent a while as a vegetarian, and continues to not eat beef or pork, he clearly went the wrong way about getting me to eat.

I tried to find you a picture of a gift shop without disclosing my actual place of employment, but all that came up was Zoltar.  I thought that would be more entertaining than my past anyway.....

In conclusion, that was not a good job.  But that year I went on my very first airplane at 17 to Mexico to build houses in Ensenada and get extreme pink eye.  This opened my eyes (although not literally, literally my eyes were stuck completely closed for most of the week because my whole face had swollen shut because of the infection), to a world outside my own that I wanted desperately to explore. 

I quit my job for another summer at camp and then was off to Hamilton for my university years at McMaster.  But that....  is a story for another day.

The Beginning

Here we go, delving into the history of my career, or lack of career more accurately.... 

I began, as many 16 year olds do, working at a grocery store. I was a cashier at the IGA.  If I must be truly honest, this has been one of my favourite jobs.  I loved scanning and chatting with people.  I was quick with processing orders, and was sometimes even allowed to work on the express check out lane.  I liked memorizing vegetable and fruit codes.  4011 was bananas, 4060 broccoli.  I started refering to them at home by their numbers instead of their names.  Occasionally when trays of cookies were broken they were brought up to the front for us to eat.  My best friend worked in the deli and would make me delicious turkey sandwiches.  Yes, life was good at the IGA. 

But this is not how I started working there.  I had been at camp for the summer volunteering and came home to look for a job.  My Mom knew a manager and got me in at the IGA.  Although I had been home in August they wanted me to start in September.  They scheduled my first shift for the second week of grade eleven, to start on a Monday.  Unfortunately, that morning I woke up with a raging fever, horrible, awful couldn't get out of bed, too woozy to stand.  Absolutely no way I would be able to go into work.  I pitifully had my mother call me in sick, and then crawled back into bed with a bottle of advil, a carton of orange juice and some sad little tears.  I felt foolish for missing my first day of work, for having my Mom call me in sick, for getting sick.  Little did I know, the universe had a plan.  The universe wasn't satisfied with me starting work on that particular day because it wanted to use the most ultimate foreshadowing this side of the globe has seen in a long time.  Horrified by current events it would be years before I saw the connection between my first day of work and the rest of my professional life.  But once I made the connection, it was clear my fate had been written.  I was destined for a long and uphill battle to build my career.

That's right.  If you haven't guessed it yet.  I called in sick to work on Monday September 10, 2001.  Tuesday morning I went to school for just the morning so I could rest up in the afternoon to start work.  We know how the rest of this story goes.  Needless to say I did not rest that afternoon.  I sat alone, with the rest of the world, in my basement watching the towers crash and the people and the ash and rubble.  Then I cleaned up, put on my brand new green IGA shirt and headed in to work. 

I read a book where the main character makes the big move to NYC to have a glamorous new start and instead ends up moving in to her new apartment on Black Friday and watches the entire world collapse around her.  At the time I had felt badly for her as she tried to navigate her uncertain future and find work in a world where there were no jobs.  Little did I know, I started work on the very day that would work as a catalyst for an economic downward spiral for our American neighbours and ultimately for my own career.

I have no conclusion.  I am here to state facts.  You, my wonderful readers, are the ones to draw conclusions from my stories of employment and help me to determine where I went wrong and how to right my wrongs and lead me to the path of success and vacation time and sick days and weekends and pay that is high enough to buy me groceries.

As an aside, I also had a book review for you.  If you are fascinated by the events of September 11, and are interested in a look at how the survivors started the huge task of rebuilding their lives and families and their own jobs, there is a fantastic book called, The Woman Who Wasn't There by Fisher and Guglielmo.  It is also a documentary which I am having a hard time finding but would love to see.  Here I leave you to enjoy the rest of your Wednesday.

Summer Update!!

I'm back.  I was recently inspired by a sangria filled dinner on a patio with friends to begin a new series of posts.  These posts will focus mainly on past places of employment.  For most people this might be 3 or 4 posts, but I have had, at last count, somewhere around 30 jobs. 

My friends and I determined that I am not a failure in all aspects of life.  I am really only a failure in the employment arena.  Hopefully, with your help, and my determination to share with you the ups and downs (mostly downs) of my so called career we can figure out what has led me to this place in my life, and maybe how we can fix it! 

See you soon.

Conclusion to my Sneaky Plan.

Well in ultra-shocking news, my plan to trick the universe into giving me what I wanted (aka a career I could care passionately about and work my little head off for the next 40....  well maybe 35 at this point...  years) did not actually work out as planned.

In fact, I am just an idiot, as always.  But now I will fill you in.

So, my brilliant plan, was to give up on wanting to help anybody in the world and start applying for jobs with only my own financial gain in mind.  That's right.  Give up on the children.  Give up on the 5 years of post-secondary.  Give up on all of my part-time jobs and sacrifices and extra training and courses I have taken.  Just switch over.  No problemo. 

Not only did I apply for the most boring/high paying job I could find in manufacturing, but I sent in a good application, and spent an hour filling out a survey on myself.  Take that universe.

The universe did not like this plan.  In fact, the universe was like, "O dear, we have made a horrible mistake, we've only been toying with you in some sick cat and mouse game for the last thousand years, but really, we would like you to work at a job you would be good at instead of a job that makes your soul die."  *aside - news flash universe - that is already my life right now, currently my soul is dying, slowly and surely, day by day.

The fates, or powers that be, threw me a bone.  A little teeny tiny baby chicken wing of a bone.  Or, more accurately, you know when you are eating fish and you accidentally choke on a little invisible fish bone?  Yes.  That is what I was given.  Fish bone to choke on.  But if I don't die, at least I had some fish?  I have gotten quite lost in my own metaphor here people.  I apologize.  Back to my actual story.  What really happened is that I got a call for an interview for a part-time 8 week contract job that I would LOOOOVE!!  I got all excited about this, thinking it would be my way in to what would eventually lead to my dream job.  I know, I have thought this before, but it has never panned out, I am an eternal optimist, what can I say? 

I went to the interview and felt it had gone well, and was told to expect a call in two weeks.  Around this time I was also given an interview with the manufacturing company I had applied to.  Here is where my crazy logic came in.  I thought if I also went to that interview I could once again rile up my fate and scare it into giving me a job to prevent me from throwing away the last six and a half years of my life to work in a factory. 

And, you know the end because I started this post with the end.  That plan did not work.  In fact, just to screw me over a little bit more, I not only didn't get called back for a part-time 8 week contract, I also did not get called back from my manufacturing interview. 

I am now welcoming suggestions for other ways to trick the universe into accidentally giving me a job!  I need to step up my game a bit here I think. 

Waiting waiting waiting....

As you may have guessed....  I am still waiting for a job.  But this time I have a plan.  A sneaky plan to get back at the universe and to trick it into giving me a job.  A whole new level of desperation.  But I can't tell you about it until I find out if it has worked or not.  I will give you a sneak peek and let you know that it involves me giving up on ever doing anything useful in this world and just allowing myself to wallow in massive amounts of self-pity. 

But for now I am just waiting.  Waiting to live.  Waiting to die.  Waiting for an absolution that would never come.

Nope, that was Rose in a lifeboat in Titanic (still haven't seen the 3D version, if you were wondering).  But soon you will find out if my waiting has been successful!

Terrible Twos

Well blog readers, the time has finally come.  I am the mother of a two year old (dog).  My baby turned two on April 1st, forcibly shortening my birthday celebrations.  My birthday is my favourite holiday.  April 13.  In case you wanted to get something in the mail, there is still time.  But be quick!

When I was a very small child, I must have gotten out of hand with birthday celebrations because right before my own second birthday I was given the glorious gift of a little sister.  In mid-February.  No longer could I start planning my own parties and themes and joyous celebration in January.  She had stolen my spot light.  Understandably, I hated her for many years.

Then, right after I turned five, ANOTHER SISTER!  This one in mid-May.  Do you see how they neatly curbed my creative process?  My birthday party was effectively cut down to be slightly under eight weeks.  How is a girl to live like that? 

Then, almost exactly two years ago, I did myself in.  Adopting a dog/son whose birthday was practically the same as mine.  It must have been his snuggly little body, his puppy dog eyes, his slobbery little self, only true love could ever infringe on my favourite holiday and get away with it the way he has.  (I know, you are asking yourself, how much attention could a dog birthday get?  I am getting to that part.  Please be patient.)

If seeing dogs treated better than most of the humans on this planet makes you feel ill - well you better skip these next few pictures because it got a little out of hand!

A trip to the cottage for the most spoiled dog in the world.

His cage was decorated!

Dog cupcakes of course!

He might be all grown up, but he will always be my little baby!

With the dog's birthday as my benchmark, I hope you have a birthday that is at least this good, and maybe a little bit better.  Rainbow chip cupcakes anyone??