I stopped working for a moment, lit a cigarette and thought to myself, “How did I get here?" How did I come to be standing in a muddy ditch, chin deep in thorn bushes wiping mouse piss off my hands?
On Christmas day?
I was trying to repair a telephone line for a customer who had already flat out told me he that didn’t want me at his house on that day. Specifically, he said “It’s Christmas fucking day for Christ sake, I can wait until tomorrow! You guys were supposed to be here two days ago.”
And he was right. It was another missed appointment. We weren't keeping up with the workload.
It was a cold day. Raw and blustery. My nose was running but I wasn't about to wipe it, (being that my hands were covered in mouse piss). I was being forced to work through the holidays because I was low on the seniority list.
I wasn’t always so close to the bottom. There was a time when I had twenty-seven people behind me in seniority. Today I have two, and one of those guys is about to get fired. So, really there's only one guy behind me. One guy between me and the next layoff. One guy. And I’ve been with the company close to fifteen years now. The time I had 27 behind me? That was one month after I hired in.
I had recently been promoted. Unexpectedly and certainly unasked-for. I had a new set of responsibilities which required learning, quickly, about stuff I had never had to concern myself with before. After twelve years of working Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM I was suddenly on a rotating schedule; late shifts, weekends, holidays, all the while trying to figure out my new responsibilities, much of the time in the dark (like actually in the dark, like with a flashlight in my teeth). In retrospect, it was trial by fire
My promotion got me a raise, a substantial one, which was nice.
I’ve worked a lot of shitty jobs. In fact before now I’ve only earned "decent money" a few times in my life. Before this gig came along, I had sort of resigned myself to a life of occupational mediocrity.
Mostly I bumped along at minimum wage looking for the next gig. One can go a long way on minimum wage with a sufficient amount of guile and charm and luck. And low expectations.
I’m a quick study but I get distracted quickly and bored even more quickly. This though, this was a real job and I was at a point in my life, older, nesting, where I needed to settle into something. A person can only bump along for so long.
So I put up with it. I hated it and I cursed my company’s name daily, but I did it because I needed the money. Actually, it’s more accurate to say I liked the money. What I needed was the insurance; optical, medical and dental for me and my wife. I live in suburban Detroit, Michigan and the economy here sucks. The economy in Michigan had been slow dancing with recession for close to ten years by December 2011 and I was not really in a position to walk away from what I had. So I stayed. I sucked it up and stayed.
And everyone else stayed too. We bitched but we stayed.
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