Day Job: 1985-1991

     I've had a lot of jobs in my day and, of course, many of them sucked.  There are those special ones, however, that were so shitty I ended up quitting after a few days.  Here are a few of those gems.

UAS — University Auxiliary Staff:

    This was the first legitimate job I ever had.  It was 1985 I think.  I was 15, and my friend Big'Un had been working at the SUNY Albany kitchen at 'Indian Quad.'  One day they were short one worker.  Enter me:  Mostly I remember loading trays of dishes into a huge dishwasher and leaning down to look through the window to the cafeteria at college chicks.  There was, of course the occasional conversation based on wondering  what kind of person gets three glasses of Coke and one of orange juice, yet drinks only half of one beverage.  The most vivid memory of my one and only day at this minimum wage job was the moment the supervisor came up to me and asked,  'So Mike...how does it feel to be a 'yooo ayy esss' (UAS) worker?'  He spoke as if to instill pride (?) in me or something and I can recall looking at him, trying to come up with an inoffensive reply;  no idea what said reply turned out to be.
 

     The next job Dave and I had together was with a company called 'National Exteriors.' We, however, simply call it 'George', the name of the big, ugly tooth missin' manager.  It was a telemarketing gig  based in a shabby building that stood behind a record store along a horrid strip between Albany and Schenectady, NY.  They were subcontractors for SEARS Windows and Exteriors.  As cold callers, it was our job to get leads. We had to try to convince people that they should put vinyl siding on their house.   

    We worked in a drab, windowless room at cramped cubicles (which were at most 18' wide), juggling a million pieces of paper — scripts, rebuttals ('Well y'know it would actually be cheaper in the long run to replace your wooden siding with vinyl as it paint and maintenance free' ), etc.   It paid $4.00 and hour, the break room was the parking lot.

     In my four days  there I failed to get a single lead — my heart wasn't in it.  I was even placed on 'probation' once — forced to sit at a special cubicle which George and his entourage could listen in on, so as to 'advise' me on how to do better.   On the fourth day, during break, Dave and I decided we'd had enough.  There rest of the evening we spent calling our friends and trying to make each other laugh by asking people ridiculous questions.  Memorable George quote: 'People, people stucco is good!   Stucco is good!  If you get people saying their house is stucco keep going,  we can rip it down and...' 
 

     The summer of '91 was one of my poorest ever.  Dave was staying in my loft in Williamsburg (B'klyn) while looking for his own apartment.   Neither of us had jobs at the time, so we spent our days scrounging my place for change so we could go down to the bodega for our daily sustenance (which literally consisted of one twenty-five cent 'fudge brownie' each).

     Every so often we'd come up with enough money to head into the city in search of work.  An ad in the Daily News once led us to the garment district where we sought jobs as clothing packers.  We arrived to find an enormous line of men waiting for a handful of shitty jobs.  Having enough money to either take the train home or get a piece of pizza each (we were quite hungry) we chose the latter and jumped the turnstiles to get home.  I wasn't much for jumping the turn-stiles those days — I had done it almost every day the previous summer — until I got caught twice in one week during a transit cop 'sweep' resulting in over $130 in fines. 

     Some days later we found our-selves at the 'AAA' temporary agency,  a 20'X20'  room on 12th St. and University place that looked like a small taxi company's dispatch center.  This hole in the wall boasted quite a decor:  drab wooden benches, a bullet-proof,  Plexiglas® swindow (behind which was an elevated room, and the pièce de résistance — two fully exposed urinals against the back wall.  The room was notably devoid of human presence.  It took several knocks on the window before anyone even appeared from the mysterious depths that lay beyond.  Some middle aged hack gave us our paper work and explained that guys usually just showed up at 5 or 6 in the morning to wait for assignments. Feeling less than ecstatic, we departed. 

     Soon after, Dave got a gig, and his own place on South 8th St. — two blocks away from the abode I shared with three others.  By this time there was no more loose change to be had and I had begun surviving on a diet of long forgotten pizza dough I'd found in the freezer.  When that ran out, I moved on to what I thought was pancake mix my roommates and I had bought at a nearby co-op.  It turned out to be simply wheat flour. Well, I can tell ya that if yer hungry, mixing flour with water and frying it in oil really ain't all that bad.  ANYWAY, the job...

    Weeks later I received a strange call from a guy at 'AAA' .  It took me a few minutes just to figure out who the hell he was.  He had a job for me at a spice warehouse in Brooklyn, on Franklin Avenue 'just off Eastern Parkway." I picked up my work order and the next day got up bright and early for the long train ride out — I had to go into Manhattan and then back out to Brooklyn on a different train, and report by 8:30 am. 
 

     Getting off the #4 train, I'm not sure if the Franklin St. address is above or below Eastern Parkway.  I guess above, figuring I can easily turn around if I turn out to be wrong.  From the address on the work order it appeared that I have chosen the correct direction, but that the place must be many blocks away.  'Just off Eastern Parkway? That dick!' I thought. 

     After walking a couple blocks the neighborhood's looking worse and worse — 'Hmm, I mused.  Am I heading into Bed Sty?' I continue for about twenty minutes, and I know things are bad when I cross the A-train overpass.  I'm getting really red at the guy who gave me directions, thinking that — at the very least — I could have taken the A-train and saved twenty minutes of walking in the hot New York sun through a complete shithole.  I continue toward my $4.25 an hour objective, worried I might be late.

     Finally after another ten minutes I find the address...which, of course turns out to be an abandoned town house with some woman living on the steps.  'Wha-?'  I double check the address.  'What the hell is goin' on?'  I triple check the address.  'Fuck!'  The guy's handwriting is pretty hard to read, but it's still my mistake — I've been looking at the wrong line.  What I thought was the address was actually my work order number.  'Fuck,  fuck I'm gonna be late — shit!'  Within minutes I'm on a bus going back down Franklin, when suddenly it turns left, jogs a block and turns right continuing down toward Eastern Pkwy. Since I'm now on the wrong street and can't check addresses I opt to get off the bus a block past Eastern.  I walk to Franklin and there's my job — one block from the ? stop, I'd started from a half hour earlier. 

     Somehow I'm not late, and I enter the office is right out of the 19th century.  There's a couple Hasidic guys sitting at tables with old scales and scoops of spices, doing paper work.  To my left is a woman at a desk typing.  I explain who I am and she sends me 
through a door to a loading dock that leads to the ware-house.  I'm here — the token white guy. 

     I meet my supervisor, a really nice guy from Trinidad.  He gives me a pair of work gloves, two dust masks, insisting I wear both, shows me where there's a box of tissues, explaining I'll need a lot, and finally, introduces me to my work partner who's also cool (I remember all they're faces, but names?). 

     My partner shows me the ropes.  'Every day you gotta do your truck.  Newer guys like us unload one of these each day.'   'One of these' turns out to be an 18 wheeler filled with 50 pound burlap sacks of whole, dried, red chili peppers.  He gives me a pair of 
hooks, and shows me how we pick up each sack together,  and stack them on pallets for the forklift driver to haul away.

     We haven't even gotten in the truck yet 'cause the first load is right there at the back, and I'm sneezin', snottin', cryin' and burnin' like never before in my life.  I'm, also wearing the wrong clothes.    It's 100 fucking degrees and the humidity is 90% — of course you wear short sleeves right?  Wrong!  When you sweat, your pores open.  When you sweat in a truck of dried chilies, pepper seeps into your skin very quickly.  Every three minutes or so, I'm ripping off my masks, and headin' to the tissue box.  I can hardly believe what I'm doing.  Things only get worse as I get deeper into the hot, pepper dusted truck.  For some reason — I think because the truck dock was the wrong height — the forklift cannot be driven into the truck.  So we have to use these metal, wheeled pallets.  We take a regular wood pallet, stick it on top, roll the whole thing in, load it up, and roll it back out to the lift driver who takes it away.  After a couple hours we're finally done.  I sweep the truck out and it's time for lunch. 

     Our lunch break was an hour, which I thought kinda sucked 'cause there was nothing to do, and I would have preferred  to get home sooner.  Also, since I was so short on cash, my lunch of French fries ($1.00 at the Chinese take out place down the street) and a 20 Oz. 'Tropical Fantasy' soda (50 cents at the store next door) was hardly sufficient nourishment considering I left my apt. at about 7 am, busted my ass all day, and got home at about 6 each evening (whereupon you'll remember I got to eat fried 'watercakes').  Since there wasn't any place to for us to sit in the warehouse, we ate at the stone chess tables outside the 'Jackie Robin-son' housing projects across the street (where Ebbet's Field once stood).
 

     Miraculously, on my third day, there was only one pepper truck and so, for variety, my supervisor had me working with the elevator picker.  Only at this time was I able to comprehend how big this place was — floor after enormous floor packed to the ceiling with every spice on the planet — definitely the biggest warehouse I've ever worked in, and I've worked in quite a few.  In any case, helping this guy pick orders was total slack (compared to 'doing your truck'). 

     Most of the time I operated the elevator, and in addition, a lot of the floors we were working on were refrigerated!  So I was pretty comfy.  There wasn't much to do that day, so after lunch I was instructed to collect trash and contaminated stock  and throw it all in the incinerator — an open brick smokestack that stood in a lot next to the truck bay.  Here I was in the middle of Crown Heights sticking anything and everything into a fire, sending noxious smoke a hundred feet in the sky (another throwback to the 19th century — when, as long as the smoke was up, away from the street, everything was okay.)  'Wow this is great.  This is much better than hauling sacks o' pepper!' 

     Then it happened.  I was balling up empty plastic bags and chuckin'  'em into the fire when suddenly a cloud of curry powder shot up into my eyes.  It burned so much I had to shut  them tightly just to deal with the pain.  The bathroom was across the truck bay in another building so I ran blind, periodically stopping, and opening my eyes to see where I was.  I washed my eyes out for fifteen minutes or so and eventually they felt almost normal. While returning to the loading dock I noticed that my face really hurt.  The eye ordeal had over-shadowed this. 

     I walked up to someone and asked 'is my face red?' The guy looked up and, his eyes widening, said some-thing like 'Oh man, you're breakin' out.  You're breakin' out man you must be allergic to that shit, you better go home!' Considering that, after taxes, transportation, and lunch, I was netting about $28 a day, I was ready to do just that.  I approached my supervisor who also looked at me in horror. 

     'I got some stuff in my eyes and I think I'm having some kinda reaction.  I think I'm gonna go home.' 
     'Yeah, go home', he replied. 
     'Um...I don't think I'm coming back.'  He just looked at me and was kinda like 'yeah...okay.'  I think I was fine within a few hours, but that was the end of that. [Since this writing I drove by the ol' place and discovered its name is Morris J. Golombeck: Importers of Fine Spices.  It appeared to be closed permanently, though it was the day of  Farrakhan's Million Man March, so maybe a good portion of  the workforce left 'em high and dry that day.
 

     About five weeks later, I landed the gig of being an AMEX janitor, through another agency.  It being a major financial exchange, I had to take an extensive 'honesty test.'  I couldn't decide whether I should be dishonest about my honesty, or honest  about  my dishonesty, so I mixed it up a bit and ended up passing.  When I arrived on my first day, I was given an extra uniform to wear, therein assuming the identity of 'Humberto', the name sewn onto the pocket.  Most of the other guys were Haitian, and didn't really try to talk to me anyway so my new name suited me fine. 

     The first few hours of the 3 to 11 pm shift were the worst because you worked on the floor while the trading was taking place.  This one Dominican dude and I had the duty of cleaning and sweeping the trading booths and the pit.   We would each start at the top of one side of the Exchange and work our way down the stairs, cleaning the traders' booths along the way.  Inevitably some young middle aged heart attack or suave brat pack yuppie suit would throw faxes and trash onto floor or stairs you had just swept so you'd have to go back up sooner or later.  Finally, after a few hours, the floor would clear out and you could do your work in relative peace.  The biggest drawback in the slow after hours was that there was a larger-than-life clock in the center of the room which told you the exact time to the second.  Try as one might, it was impossible to avoid seeing it at least once every ten minutes. 

     Once some kind of pipe burst, creating a major flood in the hall between the boiler room and the Exchange.  Other than that, the only memories I have of that place relate to things I stole from there.  I was pretty poor at the time and once found an uneaten deli sandwich in a traders' booth.  I gobbled it up thankfully and washed it down later with a diet Pepsi that I found in another booth.  I also took a plastic name plate that said 'Mike' off a monitor next to someone's desk, someone's Victoria's Secret catalogue, and my AMEX 'Humberto' work shirt.