So, without further ado, I present this weeks six from a book I'm reworking for re-release, my humorous offer, Life is a Bowl of Toilets and I Feel Flush.
This is from the Chapter - Take This Job and Shove It.
If I were to fill out an application for work today that required listing all my previous jobs, I'm pretty sure someone would request a psychological evaluation. My first job was working for the US Air Force as a secretary for the missile safety program. I left that job to take one closer to home with the telephone company as a Service Representative. That was back in the day when you actually got service from the from the telephone company and didn't have to go through an everlasting automatic attendant.
Can you actually believe that back then, they hired people just to listen in our our conversations with you to make sure we said, "thank you," and timed us to make sure we weren't off the phone for more than ninety seconds without excusing ourself again? A board was kept in our office that charted our delays, manner discrepancies and other faux pas, pitting our office against others in the district. Now that I think about they way things were handled, all that monitoring was a pretty sick way to get people to be nice.
I left that stressful environment to accept work at a nearby university, acting as secretary for the English department. I place a lot of emphasis on the "acting" since that stint lasted only about three weeks. I discovered I was pregnant and couldn't stop throwing up. I didn't think it was fair to get paid to lay in the employees lounge all day, so I quit before they could fire me. I wasn't performing up to standards, and I admit it.
After my son turned two, I decided on a part-time job driving a school bus. What the hell was I thinking? I paid someone to watch one kid while I spent the day with 70. Not my best idea, by far, but the position did create some lasting memories, one which you may have read in my first book, Life is a Bowl of Toilets and I Clean Them. When I was recalling all the fun times then, I omitted the incident where I got my boob caught in the door and had to write an accident report on how it happened. I had a had time offering an explanation, and I'm still not sure I was totally truthful.
From there, I went on to work part-time in a landscape/nursery business as a bookkeeper. After two days, the job turned into a full-time one as the owners wife quit, left me her job and her husband...if I wanted him. As it turned out, he was quite the lady's man and she'd had it with his shenanigans. I didn't know much about sexual harassment at the time, but I think I might have had a case simply based on the fact that he call me "Chi-Chi" which I later learned meant "titties" in Spanish. Somehow my boobs kept getting me into trouble.
I won't mention my ex-employer's name to keep from being sued, but I will tell you he was quite the charmer. He was from Spain, and had killer blue eyes and a smile to match. It didn't take me long to figure out why his wife got fed up with him. Oh, I admit, at first I was dazzled by his accent and out pouring of attention, but when I noticed he said the same thing to every woman who came into the place, those lines he used on me somehow lost their appeal. There's something suspicious about calling an elderly woman with a big mole on her nose, beautiful, and then using the term when you talk to me. Okay...now I might be that elderly woman with the mole, and realize how much she appreciated his sweetness, but back then, I was rather insulted. Besides, I started to see his ex's side of the coin. There should be some things a husband reserves for the special person in his life...and trust me, he didn't reserve anything. What a crock!
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More to come next Friday, but now hop on over to my friends and see what they have cooking.
Jamie Hill
Roseanne Dowell
Taryn Raye
Sydell Voeller
Rhobin Courtright
I love this series of books and can so relate to these six paragraphs. I had an employer once who, when I returned from maternity leave, asked me if my breasts were nice and full by lunchtime and I needed to go pump milk? Makes me almost wish someone would try that now....LOL
ReplyDeleteGreat six Ginger.
Ginger, your sense of humor always brightens my day. How times have changed? Women used to quietly know who was a pervert, now everyone knows.
ReplyDeleteI've also done many different jobs, but never a school bus driver. Yikes! You're braver than I.
Thanks for the good chuckle this morning.
ReplyDeleteSorry I've been MIA this weekend for Friday Freebits- lower back trouble has kept me out of my desk chair and laying around with an icepack on my back.
I flinched a little over the boob in the door- all I could think was school bus mammogram. ;)
I've had a few jobs in my time I could tell some stories on as well.