My first job was when I was 10 years old as a dog walker. I was terrible at it and I think that a few of the dogs realized that I get easily lost one too many times. By the way, thank you to Margo the dog for figuring out how to get home in 1995 from the park. Since then, my journey as an employee has been nothing but ridiculous and probably some joke that I just haven't gotten yet. Still, here I am going into yet another career field during an economic slump. I know two things though as this new world emerges for me. One that I have a lot to learn and two that hijinx will surely ensure. This is probably because I have nothing but silliness to draw on from my memory leading up to this point. To back this up I made a shortlist of some of the more unreal highlights from my work history. This list makes me smile knowing now that my current bosses are normal and rational people because some of my prior ones were a bit on the eccentric side. Let's explore their oddities.
1) Complaint to file away under no go
In the times of old, when I was young. My co-worker was promoted over me when I was working at a shipyard as an office clerk. At first, it was of no interest to me that she was now slightly above me on the food chain. The only extra task that she had responsibility for was reordering monthly office supplies and for her trouble, she received a $ 0.72 pay hourly wage increase. That is until she started to go full diva in her attitude not only with me but the other people in her vicinity as well. I had had about enough of it when she told me to go to her house and clean her toilet for her in my off time (something that I didn't do) for what she said was because "it was a task for a subordinate like me." Out of frustration at her antics and knowing that I could not spend my entire day stopping other employees from beating her up as I had been, I told our boss about my problem, thinking he could help handle this dilemma. He listened intently and instead of the advice that I expected to hear, he told me to do something shocking, that I also did not do by the way. His advice was to defecate on a paper towel and then rub the soiled paper towel on her coffee mug in the office every time that she was bothersome to me. Needless to say that I never used a mug from our breakroom again and started going to night classes at the community college instead.
2) Hog hunting for a workout
I once had a summer job working as a security guard in a posh gated neighborhood. The clients were actually very friendly and I was surprised by how nice the rich people were especially since I had been warned that they could be haughty at times. The irony was that the company I worked for had the most intense group of people I had ever met. One of which was my boss, a man that apparently thought that we were in some type of special ops program because he used our required annual fitness test as a means to attempt bizarre combat style exercises and exploits. Looking back I don't know why I didn't see it coming that the company owner who was a CrossFit nut was as extreme as he was. I had just been hired on when I got a company-wide email saying to get a hunting day permit to hunt wild pigs as a mandatory fitness training, and that the company owner would be providing the spears needed to do this. The funny thing is that to this day I always get totally opposite reactions to this story. The first being of pure annoyance that I didn't go on the spear boar hunt for work and the other being totally appalled that the security team for the ritzy neighborhood hunted wild pigs for a workout. Either way, I didn't go and I can only imagine the beer bellies hanging out of the bike shorts running away from pigs on the side of the highway that I missed.