Monday, July 12, 2010

Tomorrow is the first day at my second new job. The second job I had to take because I can’t get enough hours at my first job. The second job I had to take so I can cover my budget. My modest budget.

I’m thrilled.

I’m trying to keep a positive attitude about the whole thing, but it’s difficult not to think about the last time I had two jobs. When I was 19, I got a full-time job as a greeter at a semi-fine-dining restaurant in a hotel near Seattle. I was making pretty good money, but this was the during the year I took off between high school and college, and I thought because I wasn’t doing anything but working, I should try to make as much money as I could while I had the opportunity. After being at the restaurant for a couple months, the sick and twisted idea of getting an additional job chomped its teeth into my brain. The fact that it would be a second job wasn’t the sick and twisted part, but the idea that I should go back to work at my last job was. The only job I had held before the restaurant (not counting the week I spent at UPS—that’s another story) was when I was 18 working as a bottom-rung customer service lackey at Blockbuster for minimum wage, and as you can imagine, it sucked balls. I know this now, and I knew this at the time, so the reason why I thought this would be an even partially good idea escapes me. My old manager hired me back on, and I spent one day doing the job I had grown to hate, learning an important lesson: coming back to an old job is like putting on a pair of dirty underwear. Not long after I got home from work, I called the manager at Blockbuster and told him I wasn’t coming back, labeling myself as the perfect turd of an employee. I didn’t even get paid for the day.

Let’s hope everything turns out better this time. (However, if it does, I’ll have a lot less to write about here. A writer’s dilemma, huh?)

3 comments:

Sandman Moon said...

Ha ha! "coming back to an old job is like putting on a pair of dirty underwear." I love it!

I worked two jobs at once when I was 18. One job was really cool: I was the radio girl at a little mountain airport. But the other job was cashiering at WalMart. Guess which one I walked out of after one week?

Twee Poppets said...

You won't have less to write about - you can write about how well things are going! Nothing wrong with that! :)

Minima Sapala said...

I worked two jobs a few years ago. The first was at a crazy private detective agency in San Francisco where my crazy boss waved his gun out the window every 30 minutes at anyone who parked in his spot down below on the street; ironically, the whole time I was there I was the one who wanted to shoot myself in the head.

The second job was on weekends at a shoe store downtown San Francisco where I shoved fat old ladies' feet into orthopedic shoes and massaged their bunions for them. It was there that my suicidal wishes turned to hanging--I specifically imagined my corpse swinging from a rafter in the back room, knocking down piles of carefully stacked shoe boxes.

I do agree, there is a sick sort of pleasure that arises, in many forms, from working two jobs.

That's the stuff stories are made of.