“In my imagination, it was a hierarchy of smocks.”
Amanda Pyykonen had taken on a summer job at a local hardware store. On the first day she was given her uniform — a red smock shaped like a potato sack.
She figured it was an overt status marker: cashiers wore the smocks, floor girls had form-fitting aprons, management favored t-shirts. She figured she would have to do her time in the smock and work her way up the caste system.
She tried to sex it up. “I cinched it in, used appropriate inch long pins – flair. The thing was, in my mind, there were dues to be paid at Home Hardware, and if you were a cashier the smock was like the red “A” of the employee totem. It was depressing.”
After two months, she approached her boss. When would her day come?
“I asked about the smock and he was like ‘What? I don’t give a shit what you wear. You can wear a goddamn shirt if you want. I don’t care’.”
The tortured hierarchy was all her imagination.
The job itself meant “horrible mind-numbing boredom. And the pressure to look busy. If you had nothing to do, you had to dust tools — constantly dusting the wrenches and garden hoses and ballcocks.”
When you’re young with no experience, you are often awarded the pleasure of working with idiots and/or for tyrants. With the youth unemployment rate hovering around 13%, there’s often no choice but to tough it out. The defining moments of our life are usually eked out in the face of adversity. Having a crappy summer job at some point is a necessary evil, like childhood chicken pox.
Desireé Beck made it through a sweaty summer of landscaping with a group of misogynistic buffoons.
“These dudes were all about getting super high, and letting me know how useless women are in society.” She had to ride around in the back of a “windowless rapist van. There would be sharp gardening tools swinging above my head and no seatbelt. I got accidentally stabbed in the leg with bolt cutters once.”
But it wasn’t all for naught.
“I laid bricks, took down trees, planted and maintained gardens, and got to use some pretty awesome power tools. At the end of the summer I walked away with the confidence to know that chicks aren’t only able to do what’s deemed a “man’s job”, but I did it better than them.”
Dwayne Johnson’s worst job was in a grocery store bakery.
Scott Manley‘s soul-destroying summer job was at a tech support call centre. Management would constantly be pushing the employees to sell more RAM instead of providing actual help. He couldn’t, in good conscience, push for sales when he knew the glitches could be easily remedied by taking the time to talk people through.
“We usually took calls from Americans, so it was rare to hear someone from Ontario. This one guy had the thickest Canadian Bob & Doug Mackenzie-type accent. He had also got the run around, so he was furious. He kept reiterating that ‘I know I sound angry but…’ – while saying it in the calmest voice possible. I couldn’t help but laugh.”
One call was this guy that was a lawyer and was going off about how he should get something or other for free or at a discount because of something that was out of warranty. So for every argument he had, I countered and eventually he gave up and asked if *I* had considered going to law school.”
Manley quit at the end of the summer, with renewed gusto for finishing university.
Randall Savoy‘s worst summer job was in Exeter, Ontario at a canning factory, shucking peas and cobbing corn.
“Ten 10 hour days covered in pea sludge. Then corn. The corn comes down a conveyor belt, past an assembly line of underage Guatemalan girls waxing poetic over who’s hotter – Enrique or Ricky, in complete disregard for the job at hand.
The corn passes the assembly husk and enters the cutters. I’m deathly allergic to raw corn starch. It would splash onto my arms, causing immediate hives. It was my job to keep these 8 cutters going. Every five seconds, one of the cutters shuts down.
I was 23 when I did this shit job. My off time involved buying pointless solo albums from various shitheads in famous ’70s super groups and drinking a bottle of Jim beam every night. Just to get through.”
When she was 14, Anja Toivonen got a job as a dog groomer. It seemed pretty straightforward — shampoo dog, dry dog, repeat. The kicker was her boss, a self-proclaimed psychic who would utilize these supernatural powers solely on her canine clients. “She talked to pets. Watching a woman have a one sided conversation with a poodle is a novelty I can live without.”
She styled primarily Bichon Frisé, fluffy white poufs that caused mild snow blindness. She took to wearing sunglasses inside. In the end, her boss’s spirit guide told her to fire Toivonen.
“It was devastating. It wasn’t because I was a bad employee. Her Spirit Guide (I think she said his name was “Norman”) said my spirit was too angry and it agitated the dogs. This is why I rarely tell people this story. It’s a little humiliating to be fired by a “spirit guide.”
Would she do it again? Surprisingly, yes. “Unemployment is worse. These silly little summer jobs can be a pain in the arse but you have to do them. Everyone has to pay their dues and work a crappy job, it’s part of growing up. It helps you make career goals even if they are just I am never working in fast food again.”
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