Regrets, I have a few

Regrets, I have a few, and most of them have to do with not keeping a journal. I wish I had recorded my daily experiences in a myriad of jobs I held when I was young. There were so many.

Let’s see, in high school it was a mall fabric store managed by a tyrant and staffed by my best friend (a kleptomaniac as I came to find out), a guy I remember as “Jersey” due to his love of Bruce Springsteen and all things hailing from the Garden State, a crabby old lady that scared the crap out of me every time I worked with her and a really nice, but terrifyingly blind woman, who always offered to give me rides home even though she refused to wear her classes. That job was short-lived, over a holiday season when I was 15.

My next job was at Avenue 3 Pizza. This was an incestuous mostly take-out joint run by a family of red-headed brothers and one sister who married into an American-Indian family. Many of the employees were related and it was hard to tell who their kids belong to, because siblings of one family had married siblings of the other family and produced identical offspring of caramel skin tone with light brown straight hair. I worked under the table almost full-time my last two years of high school. I made $5 per hour and boy, I wish I had saved some of that money. I could have put myself through college with it. I also developed a talent there for recognizing voices. Just as a caller had said, “I would like to order” I could respond, “a large ½ pepperoni, ½ mushroom and a salad, Italian dressing on the side Mrs. Philpot, we’ll see you in 20 minutes”. I also developed large triceps from sliding pizzas into the oven and a pissed off attitude due to my mistreatment at the hands of the jerks that worked with me, not the family, the male employees that were just nasty to me. I washed dishes until my hands literally ached from the industrial dish soap and tore flour bags into shreds when I wanted to stab the jerks through the heart.

After two years of pizza business I moved on to Downey Savings as a teller, then new accounts person and ATM stocker. I had absolutely no work ethic at that point and was constantly late and full of excuses despite the fact that I lived about a mile away and didn’t have to be there until 8:45. After not caring a bit for boys in high-school, at 18 it was as if my hormones and kicked into overdrive and the entire focus of my existence was men, really boys at that point because they were my age. I had many memorable experiences there including seeing my high school teachers view me with respect because I had a “good job” and being the sole witness to an armed hold-up. I had tried to jockey the robber into my window because he was cute. No one noticed him because he was standing next to Maria Lai, a girl I went to high school with who sported a multi-colored Mohawk. In a bank line, she stood out like a beacon drawing all attention. I had spent a couple of years getting used to her kind of attention and only had eyes for men at that point. I got interrogated by the FBI and watched my supervisors completely blow through protocol as they swooped down on me for first hand accounts rather than isolating me so I could keep my memories fresh. I learned there that you can’t tell a book by it’s cover, particularly when it comes to what a person looks like and how much money they have. There were familys that had jumbo (100K) accounts in each family members named and dressed from thrift stores. There were people that looked like a million bucks and had their accounts closed for bounced checks. I also realized that I saved a lot of dogs. When someone would be particularly nasty, I called it “saving the dog”. I thought, “that bastard just took it out on me, at least he won’t be kicking the dog tonight”. People are nasty to those in service jobs; really nasty sometimes.

I also got two boyfriends from the people I met there, one of whom turned out to be a spoiled child despite that fact that he was 19 years old and the other my future live-in loser boyfriend that taught me a lot about what I was worth, and how my boy-craziness had led me to dismal unhappiness. I had it right in high school after all. Boys are morons and young women do best to stay away from them romantically.

I left the bank at about age 20 for the worst job of my life. I was an operator for GTE. I was “0” and my number was 80. I would answer “Operator 80, how can I help you?” And sometimes customers would think I had said, “Operator Amy, how can I help you?”. They would respond with something like, “Oh, you can say your name now, so Amy, what is the area code for Des Moines?” I could then flip through a chart and answer them, quite quickly as a matter of fact.

I worked split shifts whenever I could because I could only take the job for about four hours at a time. This lasted for all of nine months. I worked in an atomic bomb shelter of a building in Orange County. Gray cinderblock walls with smashed orange shag carpeting and miserable humans all around large workstations that contained giant finger pads, three trunks (the things the calls came in on) and flip charts. This was before operators had access to computers. The supervisors told us we could expect 1 out of 10 calls to be “problems calls”. Problem calls could be emergencies, the mentally ill, lost old ladies or kids, any number of things really. And our supervisors liked to constantly remind us of our good fortune by saying, “you are so lucky to have such an easy job with so few problems”. It was like the overuse of Shakespeare’s line me thinks you protest too much. It was such obvious misery, such obvious attempts to staunch the flow of misery.

At the phone company, I was hired on a temporary basis, which the union workers viewed as strike breaker and a potential scab. I was 20 years old and had no idea about union politics and machinations. My grandfather was a teamster and I had no intentions of being a strikebreaker. I viewed these regular “union” employees as lazy bastards that could tell each day when their three supervisor observations had been made and would then “make busy”. Making busy meant pushing buttons on their consoles that blocked calls from “falling in” (that’s how calls came to us, they fell into our headsets and trunks). These lazy unionized bastards would sit there; acting as if they were working while all of their calls came to others, to others like me. I detested their lazy, work-evading crap and the calls that came in to us because of their working the system. Now let me note that I have no hate for unions and union members, quite the opposite. I just hated these particular people that used their membership to not work, to not earn, to in fact lazily sit around accusing me of misconduct.

It may have been true that only 1 out of 10 calls were odd, or problems, as our supervisors liked to remind us, but don’t we human beings always focus on the negative? You can tell me you love me a thousand times but tell me you hate me once, and that is all I hear. This was 1984 or 1985. 911-service was new, and in particular, older people didn’t remember to dial 911, they dialed 0. I had countless “my husband is having a heart attack”, “my house is on file”, and “I think someone is trying to break in” type of calls. Also, the area that I serviced held lots of opportunities for nuts with access to pay phones to communicate with the outside world. My favorite was Metro, or Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk. I pictured hallways filled with payphones and mulling lunatics with lots of time on their hands while board orderlies dressed in white outfits sat around nurses stations reading magazines so they could ignore the hospital gowned mad callers. We also got the V.A. hospital in Long Beach and an endless supply of inmates, hospitals, rehab centers and plain old mystery locations. God help you if you called from certain prefixes. We hardly believed you weren’t mentally ill or incarcerated if your number was similar to say Metro or the Long Beach jail. There were also the “regulars”. Regular nuts that had voices I recognized from my pizza training. There as a man that could terrify in second before I could get him on hold because of the “Hannibal Lecter-like” threats he would spit out before I sometimes literally pulled the headset off ears because that was the fastest way to not hear him. There was a guy from Metro we called “the dog”. He would call and bark into the phone. There was also a young man that would call and tell us he was terrified of his mother’s parakeet. There were lots of lonely callers that just wanted to hear a woman talk while they did unseemly things. These type of calls came in over and over and over again. I imagine these people are still calling operators. I imagine the same lazy bastards are still foisting their work onto others so they can sit and do nothing. How horrible!

I left GTE for my aunt’s company. She didn’t own it, she just worked there and took pity on me. This was a company like Oakwood Apartments that owned a multitude of corporate apartment buildings. They could also furnish the units completely including kitchens stocked with plates, pans and food. A person only had to move in and was ready to live instantly. It was like “The Jetsons” in a way. Instant gratification. I don’t remember the name of this company; I have tried to purge it from my memory. A miserable woman that drove a Ferrari owned the business. Her drunken lout of a husband also drove a Ferrari and they parked them side-by-side in the parking lot. It felt like a constant reminder of our serfdom. The owner would pick a new person to berate and belittle each month and at the end of my month of belittlement, I walked out. I felt very guilty about this, even though I knew lots of dirty secrets, such as the fact that the owner’s daughter was high on cocaine most of the time. Oh, I divulged a dirty secret. Hah!

Because I had walked out with no job, I ended up working with my sister as a waitress, at a family restaurant called “The Grinder” in Westminster. The lifeblood of the place was regulars, and not classy regulars. These were working class regulars that knew the nightly specials, had their favorites and they were there seated and ready every Thursday night for pot roast, or every Monday for rotisserie chicken. The staff consisted of Mexican cooks and busboys, a Persian manager that had been a headmaster at a private school in Iran before the revolution and his expulsion. His wonderful daughters that I am still sorry I lost track of. His absent-minded professor of a nephew that spent weekends prostrating himself in a mosque and astounding customers when he offered responses such as “on a math problem” when he was asked by pissed-off diners where his mind was. There was also a series of 90-pound terrified Assistant Managers that would lock themselves into the office at the first hint of trouble (and there was trouble) and some very memorable waitresses. One of who may possibly still be there. We wore dark green, germanesque, Saint-Pauli Girl kind of dresses with gathered skirts and a kind of apron over poofy white sleeves and bodice. I could carry four dinners worth of plates at once and yell orders in perfect Spanish. I was the unofficial bouncer when I was there. I had to take so much crap from people that when they crossed the line, I was on them like a dog on a bloody steak. There were lots of memorable incidents including one in which I physically picked up a man by his collar, held him at least six-inches off the ground as I opened the front door and tossed him to the curb. Of course, he had to manhandle a busboy’s bike on the way to the cement (on which he landed on his feet), which led to my subsequent chase down the street until he was well out of the parking lot.

Waitressing changed me. It was kind of a culmination of the service jobs – pizza maker, teller, operator, and finally waitress – and their imprint on my psyche. These jobs that had put me at the mercy of the public had set into motion a reversal of my mother and grandmothers mantra which was “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all”. When I wasn’t dressed like someone’s idea of a beer wench, I became aggressive. If a drunk bumped into me at a show, I shoved him back. If someone was condescending to a stranger (particularly in a service job), I jumped on him or her, verbally berating him or her any way possible. It took me a long time to calm down after this, to step back and not step in. To let sleeping dogs lie so to say.

Throughout most of this time I was attending community college, never working very hard and having little of idea of what I wanted to accomplish. By the time I had progressed to waitressing, I was involved in a college radio station at Long Beach City College. I scored an internship at a radio station very near my home. I ended up being offered a temporary job there, covering for someone going on a marriage/maternity leave. I happily left my restaurant job for the temporary job assisting a bunch of sales people and their manager, which in turn rolled into five years that I think of so fondly. I still maintain friendships with many of the people I worked with at the station (KNAC) and it is this job more than any that I wish I had recorded in a journal. This was a heavy metal radio station with a rabid listenership. I attended several shows weekly, whether at clubs or stadiums, and saw a parade of bands and personalities come through the station. This was also the jumping off place for a more career-kind of job rather than job-kind of job. It all changed for me after the station. I grew up there.

I think I will try to write more about each of these jobs. Try to flush out my memories. I was only about 22 when I started at the radio station. I held these other jobs between the ages of 15 to 22. Jeez, that was a long time ago, it will be interesting to see what I can remember.