One crowded night in Algiers I watched a phenomenally attractive barmaid take off her t-shirt, in the bar, to trade it for a t-shirt she liked that was being worn by a patron. No beads or cajoling or other nonsense–she liked the shirt, and traded right there and then.
And beignets, oh dear dog, beignets:
OK, this is an odd coincidence, but I can say THE EXACT SAME THING. New Orleans, 1999, frog legs, sweet tea. If you were there the week before jazz fest, I will lose my shit!
I’ve never been. Do they have good barbecue?
I have so many New Orleans moments. Like:
The time I was hanging out at the bar/laundrymat and a totally naked lady walked in. There was some kind of dare going on. She hung out butt naked; after the initial whooping and hollerin’ she settled in at a bar stool and it was like it was normal.
Or the time my roommate’s boyfriend came down with a group of friends who wanted to see the sights. We took them to Bourbon Street. Two of the guys picked up on high school girls who trolled Bourbon Street looking for older guys because they thought that was cool. One of the guys and his new girlfriend ended up making out so hard on the street that someone put a box down and people started throwing quarters into it in appreciation.
Or that first time I went into a bar, scared of being caught because I was only 18, and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “That cop over there wants to see you.” Terrified, I went over. There was a handsome guy sitting on a stool in his uniform. “Hey, sugah’, how are you doin’???” He drawled. He wasn’t interested in throwing me out of the bar.
Oh geez, thankfully it wasn’t (or so I recall). Must have been early January, cause people were talking about preparing for fat Tuesday, but it hadn’t happened yet.
My resume said it was a “busy beach bar in a popular tropical tourist destination”. It was a hole, and not a very nice one. The women’s restroom was in the back of the bar and there was to toilet seat. There was a toilet though, which is more than the men got. The men’s room was a shower cubby right off the “dining” room, but there was no water, just a drain in the floor, behind a small divider.
Super classy joint. I got paid the equivalent of $1 an hour, and no tips. I was living the dream.
Generally, the job wasn’t that bad, until the week it rained for 7 days straight. The whole town flooded. Being at sea level, the septic tanks flooded, which was really special.
I was working when it overflowed and there were 6 inches of water in the “dining” room. Remember the “mens room”? Yeah, so I’m walking in 6 inches of septic tank water, and about 20 tourists WON’T FUCKING LEAVE. They were all sitting on stools, and were really mad that I wanted to close the place down, while they wanted to keep drinking.
I’m a shy, mild-mannered person, but that night, I must have channeled the spirit of some serious bitch. I kicked everyone out, closed the bar way early, and walked away with a dozen people yelling at me about ruining their vacation. I told them they could walk around in septic tank water, and I was leaving.
Leaving to walk 2 miles home, that is. That was the normal walk, no biggie, I did it every day at least once. About a quarter mile from home, the road was washed out. I was standing in the dark, in the rain, looking at a 6 foot gap in the road with a river going through it saying FUUU… when a man walks up with a 2x6 about 8 feet long. He said “I brought a bridge!” I thought it wouldn’t hold 150 pounds of me, but it did, and I made it home.
That was the worst shift EVAR. A few weeks later, I came down with dengue fever and told the gringo bar owners that they could take their job and shove it. In my haze of dengue, sweat and clouds of insecticide smoke that they pumped into my tiny apartment, I decided that I needed a better career. I decided on graphic design, without knowing exactly how to make that happen. But, it happened, thank FSM, because I never want to have to serve drinks to belligerent assholes ever again.
Reminds me of my second-worst job… Pouring a giant parking lot for tanks at Fort McCoy in WI. This was at the tail-end of the ~2 yr gap between college and grad school (working with concrete walls/slabs was my primary summer work during college).
I hadn’t really worked with concrete for a couple of years, but people kept quitting the job that my friend was working on, so he told them to give me a try. Fort McCoy is a 3 hr drive from home, so we were living out of a motel. Very long days (90+ F with 90% humidity) where the only breaks occurred when there was a gap in the arrival of the concrete trucks. The drivers would purposely cause some short delays here and there so that we could grab a quick bite (a hastily slapped together sandwich that was always a bit soggy from melted ice in the cooler). The best days were the ones where everybody was doing carpentry/iron-work to set up for the next pour – usually there were two guys doing the set-up while the other four handled the pour. The foreman was an alcoholic (the nice friendly kind) who would spend all day at the bars and then show up at the end of the day with a couple 12-packs for the 6 of us on the crew to share.
Hey I just heard about a possible $100k+ job opening. 
Took a job out of desperation a few years ago at a Micky D´s. Had two snotty little ¨managers¨ both young enough to be my children. One would demand something exactly this way and the other demanded it a different way. All right now and with no variations. Oh…, and smile, smile, smile. Finally I told them, ¨I don´t give a Mc fuck!¨ and walked out.
I honestly think everyone should work a stint in retail (or fast-food) when young to get an idea of how to deal with customers and to see how the retail/food world works. It’s surprisingly great training for both dealing with a ‘real’ job later on or just treating people in stores like human beings.
I worked at Kmart for three years in high school, just about every department, and most of it was a pretty decent part-time first job, honestly. “Home goods” was fun – mostly mixing paint. The hardware department was a blast, all I did was make keys and drill bowling-ball holes, and for some reason we still used an old school cash register back there instead of the modern POS laser-scan machines. The front registers were a lot of work, but only got grueling on Sundays and holidays. Worst by far was working sporting goods, which in those days (and in that part of the country) was a euphemism for the hunting department; my day was spent trying to answer questions like “what kinda gun and shells are best for killing bucks?”. I was a young little vegetarian hippie and only lasted a month there. I spent a bit of time on the floor arranging merchandise, but the floor manager was a raging asshole who liked ‘real men’ and told me I ‘looked like a wimp’. He amused himself by having me build end-cap displays, take them down, and build them again, over and over, for an 8 hour shift. I threw my badge at him and walked out after a week only to be rehired the next day in a different department.
The best job by far was Door Greeter. I was promoted there after being top cashier for a few months. I just stood there & handed out leaflets & straightened carts, but my ‘real’ job was security. I was supposed to scope people out, watch them as they filtered into the store, and call the security staff (or police) if anything fishy was going on. That mostly meant telling teenagers to leave their backpacks at the front desk and keeping an eye on the nearby hosiery and jewelry departments (very high theft items). Plus we got the occasional perv who’d try to make out with the womens’ underwear. Fun times.
My takeaway from crap fast-food and retail jobs is that most people are utter assholes and should be avoided as much as possible. But also, don’t treat retail/fast-food employees like dirt because they’re not, they’re people trying to make ends meet sometimes in the only way the local economy allows.
Good for you–fuck those guys. I’m no saint, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve never understood the people who so easily decide to torment other people, it just doesn’t compute for me.
To make that any better, I wish you’d 1) thrown the badge at Manager Jackhole, and mid-flight, 2) toppled the latest endcap, preferably the glass one, on your way out.
The endcap we were standing next to was a stack of paper towels that he’d asked me to build in a pyramid shape, then a square, then a stacked staircase, and then a pyramid again. After all of that, I was pretty proud of the way those Bounty paper towels looked!
So true that those jobs prepare you for other work and are great for giving you an insight into those industries.
Some moments from my stints in retail/fast food/waitressing:
Despite how bad my one restaurant job was, the boss gave me some valuable knowledge for how to behave when bringing up a problem at work: Every time you bring up a problem, suggest a solution. This is the main reason I have a good review on my current job.
That time I was working my crappy fast food job and a bus pulled up and we were totally swamped with customers all at once - while the managers got stoned in the parking lot. That night I visited the liquor store next door that would totally sell to us kids and bought a pint of cheap vodka. Let’s just say vodka and diet chocolate soda do not mix well and end the bad day there.
Same fast food job - a moment that always tears me up: watching the assistant managers - God knows they were not the swiftest or greatest people ever - risk their jobs by packing up the leftover food (they were supposed to count it and throw it away) for the boy who lives in extreme poverty.
A tender moment with a retail co-worker where I went to say goodbye as I left for college and she handed me the purse I’d been coveting. She’d swiped it for me.
That time I worked with a Pentacostal who could speak in tongues.
Ugh, bagging groceries in South Carolina.
I think I lasted six weeks. Talk about mind-numbing tedium with zero reward for anything.
One man’s trash… I can and have bagged groceries all day…and enjoyed the hell out of it. Back in ye olden days of primarily paper bags at the grocery store, there was always an unspoken race going on to see how fast we could bag an order and get it totally set up in the shopping cart–arranged heaviest towards the rear axles of the cart, blocky groceries at the bottom of the bags or used as walls for softer items, and never sweet fucking hell never the godamn chips at the bottom of the bag or crushed or wantonly cast here and there like some cheap trinket to be trod upon out of spite and malice…ahem
And if the bags were set up so, the bagger could move to another register and bag that order as well, emptying the incoming queue and keeping the front of the store from becoming a mayhem of stupid, hungry, tired shoppers and carts empty/full. AND if the bagger could keep up this activity and so manage the front of the store, the assistant manager (always hovering around the front of the store for the mini meet & greet and problem solving) would give that person some new task away from the chaos at the front of the store (the blasting heat of the pavement, the braying of the bluehairs as their checks did not pass muster) such as helping the stockers or filling and operating the bailer (if nobody was watching).
At worst, it was raining and hot and the customers were equally moody, but on par that job did me pretty well. And Publix, man, Publix reigns supreme.
Nobody ever came to the Food Lion. And when they did they were never in a hurry. Management? At the front of the store? Pffff.
I can always tell what cashiers at Trader Joes enjoy bagging; while some will just toss things into a bunch of bags, most will say “okay to put it all in one bag?” and when I say yes, they smile and survey my groceries and start stacking them like a game of food Tetris. A well-bagged bag is a tightly-packed thing of beauty and it’s nice to see people taking pride in it.
The rule of thumb for any job should be “no matter what your job is, do it as well as you can.”
I am absolutely that person–it was an all-day mental puzzle that, if solved correctly and well, was a beauty to behold and pure fun to create, as well as helping the bag to stay upright in the trunk and to the kitchen. And the responsibilities were so low that it wasn’t hard to shine with a little effort.
And on a good day, you might just convince the Meat department 'roid ragers and most of the Produce crew to go out to the parking lot at lunch to pick up the Produce department manager’s car and set it back down, sideways, in the spot, so he couldn’t get out unless the car behind his moved. Good times.
That job was the first time I’d ever been groped by someone of the opposite sex, too. Walked an old woman out with her stuff, and putting the last bag into the trunk, she slipped her hand into my back pocket for a whole lotta my right cheek and leaving a neatly folded $1 bill. I may have hit my head on the trunk as I stood up like I’d gotten a hot poker in the same cheek, but by that time she was closing the trunk and in the driver’s seat. Those old ladies, they’re crafty!
My worst jobs were, ironically, the worst and best paying ones I’ve ever had. The worst paying (as in 0 dollars), was some nonsense door to door sales scam. There was a different name for the company in the ad (in the newspaper!), on the front of the building, on the manager’s desk plaque, and everywhere you looked. I still have no idea what the shit we were supposed to be accomplishing, something to do with local toll phone calls and AT&T. The two guys who were ‘training’ me, themselves had no idea what we were supposed to be doing. After two days of walking all over the city, and making literally not one cent, I was out.
The best paying job I have had to date was a trashman. I have been driving Class B Commercial trucks (no trailers, and under a certain weight, 60k lbs?), and got a job driving a front loading trash truck. The kind with the forks that swing down and then dump the large dumpsters into the top of the truck. As trash jobs go, it was pretty easy, physically. Unfortunately it was still plenty hard. Lots of these dumpsters are on wheels, and you have to pull them out of whatever cute little enclosure they were in to get them with your truck. It still has to be done if there’s 2 feet of snow on the ground, or solid ice, or if the thing is surrounded by couches and desks and other assorted mess. The hardest part for me was the stress. You just have to absolutely haul ass to get your route done. Since we were paid by the hour and the other drivers would help whoever was behind, it was necessary for everyone to be ridden hard as shit to make sure they weren’t being lazy and making the other guys pick up their slack. I hardly ever got out of there in less than 12 hours, often pushing 14. The overtime pay (and benefits) were pretty great, but you don’t get the satisfaction of a good day’s work if your coworkers had to pick up all the stops you couldn’t get to. Eventually trying to drive fast enough to get it done caught up with me and I had a minor ‘incident’ involving my truck and a rental Chevy Impala. I had a daughter and my wife was pregnant with our son, and it was the first time I’d ever been fired from a job. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being at least a little bit relieved to be done with it.
