The Friday Five – done late on Sunday

1. What was your first job?

My first job was as custodian at Concordia Lutheran Seminary (not counting stuffing envelopes for the church or helping out in Mrs. Barth’s garden). I learned expert mopping techniques, floor waxing, how to melt roaches in bathroom drains with TFR floor stripping acid (it melts your tennis shoes too and is a real bitch in that hand cut), how to almost die from the toxic fumes when you single handedly polyurethane a basketball court, and how to get buff running a power buffer.

2. How much did you make?
I started at 3.25 /hour – I was fourteen – so that would have been the summer of 1987.

3. Describe your least-favorite coworker of all time.

I mostly get along with people. I don’t like petty tyrants, but then I see their intrinsic comic foibles, so who wants that around. If I had to pick a nemesis I guess I’d pick Cindy. Cindy was sort of a boss of mine when I was a manager at a Days Inn. There were an astounding number of managers for all parts of operations at this larger than most facility. There was a custodial manager, a maid service manager, a front desk staff manager, a marketing manager, a business manger (who also watered the plants) the overall manager of the managers, a custodial and operations sub manager who reported to the owner and thus managed the manager’s manager. Cindy was the head of food service and I was the Services Coordinator, which meant at any catered wedding she would cook the meal and I would cut the cake. We shared a number of duties, but in practice she ran the restaurant and I ran the bar.

Cindy wanted to be a writer, but she had never finished college and had a chip on her shoulder about that. I was actually at that point one of two staff employees with a four year degree earning my 15,000 a year (plus tips). Cindy lived in a trailer park, which is not uncommon in that part of the country and nothing to be ashamed of, but she was. She had caught her husband, who worked at the local sewage plant, having sex with her best friend as she put it, “balls in the air,” so we’ll let your imagination work that one out.

They stayed together as a couple by the odd reversal of him expressing a constant anger and jealousy of any man in her life, as though she were the partner voted most likely to commit adultery in a constant and sometimes violent denial of his own infidelity. So he constantly berated her for the affair that we were not having. I did give her a book once, ironically Thomas Pynchon’s Mason Dixon, which was only intended as loan, but then she denied having received it later for reasons still unclear to me, so I never got the book back.

To end the potentially far wandering tale, Cindy got me fired for dating an employee that I had been dating for six months without getting fired for it, that everyone knew I was dating. She went over the manager’s head to the owner with the policy violation because she got wind of a potential plan by our shared boss to give me her job in the company. They believed that they were grooming me to be a hotel manager in their little empire. After I got fired, my girlfriend and half the bar/restaurant staff quit. She and I went skiing and I started working at another bar when we got back to town. I should thank Cindy. Her paranoia pushed me into graduate school and out of a possible career in the hospitality industry.

4. What is your dream job?

Waiter, check please. I’m sorry I have to go, this conversation is getting uncomfortable. I don’t dream about working, so I really have no idea.

5. What do you currently do and do you like it?
I teach and do a little freelance writing. I guess I am also a full time student. I am quite happy right now, but that is the result of a nexus of factors. I love the life of the mind so that – in school as a student or teacher – is where I am happiest.