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Who moved my cheese?
July 31, 2008
A lot of jobs I’ve had have influenced certain qualities in myself, but not in ways I would’ve guessed when I took them. Working as a maid in a retirement home resulted in my tendency to rarely be grossed out by anything. Working as a college tour guide gave me the remarkable ability to improvise statistics on the fly. Working one holiday season in the Best Buy media department, under speakers which continually cycled the same five hot music clips for three months, made it so whenever I hear Dashboard Confessional my stomach shrivels to the size of a penny and my hair turns the color of sludge.
Last summer I was a seamstress at a bridal salon and no one, not even the elderly women who would call the front desk if their bed was made four minutes behind schedule, could compare to the scorn of an anxious girl in a white gown who is accompanied by her mother and has probably been on a baby carrot diet for the last seven months of her life.
Around that time, I also had a paper route, which on several occasions, required me to clarify that no, it’s not anything like that image that comes to your head. I don’t pull on britches and a nice cotton cap, sling a gaping sack over my shoulder, and peddle on my little red road bike as the sun comes up.
Derrick, who at the time was working long hours at a car shop, would leave the house with me at 3:30AM, and we would drive to a giant warehouse where we would assemble and stuff five hundred papers before we loaded them up into one of our cars and heaved them onto doorsteps for what felt like twelve years.
It wasn’t so bad through the summer and fall, until winter hit, and we’d been doing it seven nights a week for six or so months. By that time, the hell that is the Pittsburgh holiday season made it so the papers were bigger, and the weather at 4AM was around kill you degrees, which isn’t so bad in a car except that in order to eject those bricks from the front seat, the windows had to be left down.
We were both working so much that the only quality time we were able to spend together was during those few bitter, miserable, tired hours of the day. And to have that feeling attached to the person you’re living with is like swallowing hornets. While listening to Dashboard Confessional.
I got a lot of that’s a bad idea’s when Derrick and I were thinking about living together that involved socks on the floor! and dirty dishes! and beer signs in the living room! Why these were always the given excuses for us to not live together is beyond me, because I will spend my day with one foot immersed in a bucket of grime left over from the bottoms of dirty soup bowls that my boyfriend forgot to rinse if it means that we’d never have trouble paying rent.
Categories: Daily, Derrick, Jobs
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