I left off in Volume 1 mentioning that when I went back to TGI Friday's after my sophomore year of college to get my old job back it wasn't available. My solution: I just lived at home and didn't work for the summer. I sold it to my parents (who I'm sure didn't even care), by saying I would learn C++ over the summer. So, I got a book and spent about four hours everyday programming a baseball simulator. I had to use my parents' desktop (because this was back in the day when most families had a single computer for everybody, if they had one at all), so I would typically work from 10:00 pm until 2:00 am, when it was sure to be free. I love those hours, and I loved that summer. The simulator came out pretty well too. I got it to where it could play a season, but it didn't have an A.I. component to it (no platooning, pitching changes, pinch-hitting, etc.). I actually saved it and came back to it a few years ago with an intent to finish it, but it was so byzantine and the coding style was so irritatingly amateurish that I quickly abandoned that idea.
Because I didn't work for the summer I was really scraping by financially when I got back to school. Loans and an allowance from my parents covered the necessities, but I needed beer and burrito money. A friend of mine had a job at the Tutoring Center, so I got a job there as well. The Tutoring center was basically the Algebra 101 help center -- that was what 95% of the students who used it need help with. My boss there was named Heather Newfield (again, alias throughout). She was pretty cool. She was (and presumably still is) very smart, probably too smart for her job, which couldn't have paid much more than $35,000 a year. But she loved living in our college town, which undoubtedly limited her options.
She was a fine boss, although she struggled mightily the few times she had to be a disciplinarian. There was this guy who used to come late all the time, and she didn't really know how to handle it. Then one day he came late, and I guess it was the straw that broke the camel's back, because she wrote him up and gave him some sort official university demerit, which was bad if you wanted to get future jobs on campus or something like that. Unfortunately, I was also late that day and happened to walk in with this guy, as if were in let's-be-late cahoots (which we weren't), so she gave me a demerit too, even though I was almost always on time. I was quite annoyed, but then the next day she gave me a hand-written letter apologizing for the demerit and telling me she had rescinded it. It was all good after that.
---------------------
The following summer I decided I was going to live with friends in Seattle instead of at home with my parents. I had a girlfriend at the time who had a little apartment on Queen Anne Hill, so I stayed with her at first, but it was pretty clear that that relationship wasn't going to last the summer (and it didn't), so I made a back up plan to sleep on a camping mat on a friend's floor. I scored a "high-paying" construction gig -- $10 an hour, with frequent overtime -- which couldn't have fit me less, considering eighth-grade wood shop was the only class I had ever failed. But I turned out to be a decent worker. I got to the site on-time and did the things I could do -- sweeping, hauling, smashing, etc. These were the things the regulars never wanted to do, because they deemed such menial tasks beneath them, so it worked out pretty well.
Our foreman was named Rick Wagner, and he was a terrible human being and a half-decent boss. He was a burly, red-faced man with a well-groomed goatee, and a wavy mane of hair. He was only 33, but a combination of smoking, drinking, and being in the sun all day gave him the affect of a man in his mid-50s. He would throw out xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic comments on the regular. He was a Trumpist before Trumpism was even a thing. But he was very competent at his job, and he had a laudable sense of fairness that belied his general world views. He hated immigrants. He was constantly bitching about how the Mexicans were taking over construction and white people couldn't get decent manual labor jobs anymore. (We didn't have a single Hispanic person on our crew, and it was 90% white, by the way.) Yet, his favorite employee was a Vietnamese refugee named Dat. Dat was a really good carpenter, and Rick doted on him as if he was his prized protege. Dat was just there for the summer, like me, happy to make his $10-an-hour, like me, but Rick got corporate to give him a bump to $12-an-hour, just because he thought he deserved it. It was interesting (and depressing) to see a person be convinced a horde of nameless, faceless immigrants was destroying the country, and then totally look past the concrete counterexample right before his eyes.
Rick used to give me grief sometimes for being a crap carpenter, but he was never really serious about it. He knew it wasn't my bag. He found out I was studying math, and I think he really respected it. He seemed to have this vision of himself as a champion intellect who got sidetracked by mischief in his youth. (I heard rumors he went to prison for selling drugs in his early twenties.) He would always tell me how good he was at school before he became a "fuck up," and he prided himself at calculating measurements quickly in his head. I would have interesting conversations with him and forget how he was, and then he would go on a rant about how all women are bitches and feminism ruined society, and couldn't help but remember again, and so I'd go do a job on the other side of the site and wait for the workday and the summer to be over.
------------------------------------
When I went back to school, I got a promotion to the Math Center. This was a tutoring center for higher level mathematics. I liked the job in that it was a prestigious position and I got to hang out with other math nerds, but the actual tutoring kinda sucked. Most the students in there were so lost there was no way I could actually help them understand the concepts, so I would end up giving them strategies for "faking it" as best as possible (which is probably what they wanted anyway). What I really wanted to say was, "You need to go back and retake the previous class and possibly the one before that and the one before that." You'd have psych majors who had to take statistics, and they'd ask me about probability distributions, and they didn't even know how to subtract a larger number from a smaller one. (This is a real example. My roommate was a psych major, and I saw one of his tests once, and he had to solve this problem that boiled down to finding something like 23 - 55, and since the answer is a negative number, he didn't know how to do it.) There's this thing in college mathematics where the majority of the students are woefully unprepared and don't really know what they are doing, but the professors just kinda go along with it and give everybody C's and B's, because the alternative would be failing half the class, which would be politically and socially untenable, and it might cause other majors to relax their math requirements, which would cripple the structure on which math departments are built. Great system!
Anyway... my boss at the Math Center, to the extent I had one at all, was a professor named Dr. Vasher. She was very cool. She became a go-to for me anytime I needed a letter of recommendation.
-----------------------------------
The next summer, Y2K, I moved back with my parents to save as much money as possible in anticipation of a semester abroad in Budapest, Hungary. I got a job working at a huge sporting goods store. I had two main tasks. The first was stocking shoes before the store opened. This required me waking up at 5:30 every morning which was brutal. The opening manager, Dana, would go on a coffee run every morning, which sounds nice, but she only did it because she didn't want to do her actual job. It was a running joke among the other employees how little she actually did. The first day she asked me if I wanted coffee, and I said I did, so she asked me to give her a dollar, which I did, and she brought me back a coffee. This went on for a few days, and then one day she didn't ask me. When I got skipped again the next day, I initiated things and asked if she could get me a coffee -- she was still going to Starbucks everyday for everybody else anyway, why couldn't I get in on it anymore? She got me a coffee, but very reluctantly, so I asked her what was up, and she said, "You only give me a dollar everyday, and the coffee is actually $1.20. I'm always having to cover you twenty cents, and it's starting to add up." Okay, but the only reason I gave her a dollar is because that's what she told me to give her. So, from then on I gave her $1.20 everyday, and everything was good. But I don't know why she didn't just tell me my coffee was more than a dollar as soon as it became an issue for her. I'm still annoyed by that interaction and it was nearly twenty years ago.
Once the store opened, I would take a lunch break (at 10:00 am), and then go in the back and scan merchandise from the loading dock into the system. The boss back there was this middle-aged bachelor named Jimmy, and he was a total tool, but I kinda liked him anyway. He reminded me of the kid in high school who drove a Camaro with an awesome stereo system and always knew where the party was. He never studied or played sports or really applied himself at anything at all, so now he worked at a sporting goods store and tried to bond with the coworkers half his age. "Hey, man, we should hang out sometime. Drink some beers, get some [hushed toned, looks around] *pussy*." I never took him up on the offer. Still, Jimmy was alright. He would genuinely make me laugh with his ridiculous stories -- like the time he broke his hand while drunk trying to break wood pole on a bet -- but maybe not for the reason he thought, or maybe so. It was hard to tell with Jimmy. He blurred the line between irony and earnestness, between laughing with and laughing at. Even now I haven't fully worked it out.
Well, that's it for today. Maybe I'll do a Volume 3 at a future date, maybe not.
Until next time...
Because I didn't work for the summer I was really scraping by financially when I got back to school. Loans and an allowance from my parents covered the necessities, but I needed beer and burrito money. A friend of mine had a job at the Tutoring Center, so I got a job there as well. The Tutoring center was basically the Algebra 101 help center -- that was what 95% of the students who used it need help with. My boss there was named Heather Newfield (again, alias throughout). She was pretty cool. She was (and presumably still is) very smart, probably too smart for her job, which couldn't have paid much more than $35,000 a year. But she loved living in our college town, which undoubtedly limited her options.
She was a fine boss, although she struggled mightily the few times she had to be a disciplinarian. There was this guy who used to come late all the time, and she didn't really know how to handle it. Then one day he came late, and I guess it was the straw that broke the camel's back, because she wrote him up and gave him some sort official university demerit, which was bad if you wanted to get future jobs on campus or something like that. Unfortunately, I was also late that day and happened to walk in with this guy, as if were in let's-be-late cahoots (which we weren't), so she gave me a demerit too, even though I was almost always on time. I was quite annoyed, but then the next day she gave me a hand-written letter apologizing for the demerit and telling me she had rescinded it. It was all good after that.
---------------------
The following summer I decided I was going to live with friends in Seattle instead of at home with my parents. I had a girlfriend at the time who had a little apartment on Queen Anne Hill, so I stayed with her at first, but it was pretty clear that that relationship wasn't going to last the summer (and it didn't), so I made a back up plan to sleep on a camping mat on a friend's floor. I scored a "high-paying" construction gig -- $10 an hour, with frequent overtime -- which couldn't have fit me less, considering eighth-grade wood shop was the only class I had ever failed. But I turned out to be a decent worker. I got to the site on-time and did the things I could do -- sweeping, hauling, smashing, etc. These were the things the regulars never wanted to do, because they deemed such menial tasks beneath them, so it worked out pretty well.
Our foreman was named Rick Wagner, and he was a terrible human being and a half-decent boss. He was a burly, red-faced man with a well-groomed goatee, and a wavy mane of hair. He was only 33, but a combination of smoking, drinking, and being in the sun all day gave him the affect of a man in his mid-50s. He would throw out xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic comments on the regular. He was a Trumpist before Trumpism was even a thing. But he was very competent at his job, and he had a laudable sense of fairness that belied his general world views. He hated immigrants. He was constantly bitching about how the Mexicans were taking over construction and white people couldn't get decent manual labor jobs anymore. (We didn't have a single Hispanic person on our crew, and it was 90% white, by the way.) Yet, his favorite employee was a Vietnamese refugee named Dat. Dat was a really good carpenter, and Rick doted on him as if he was his prized protege. Dat was just there for the summer, like me, happy to make his $10-an-hour, like me, but Rick got corporate to give him a bump to $12-an-hour, just because he thought he deserved it. It was interesting (and depressing) to see a person be convinced a horde of nameless, faceless immigrants was destroying the country, and then totally look past the concrete counterexample right before his eyes.
Rick used to give me grief sometimes for being a crap carpenter, but he was never really serious about it. He knew it wasn't my bag. He found out I was studying math, and I think he really respected it. He seemed to have this vision of himself as a champion intellect who got sidetracked by mischief in his youth. (I heard rumors he went to prison for selling drugs in his early twenties.) He would always tell me how good he was at school before he became a "fuck up," and he prided himself at calculating measurements quickly in his head. I would have interesting conversations with him and forget how he was, and then he would go on a rant about how all women are bitches and feminism ruined society, and couldn't help but remember again, and so I'd go do a job on the other side of the site and wait for the workday and the summer to be over.
------------------------------------
When I went back to school, I got a promotion to the Math Center. This was a tutoring center for higher level mathematics. I liked the job in that it was a prestigious position and I got to hang out with other math nerds, but the actual tutoring kinda sucked. Most the students in there were so lost there was no way I could actually help them understand the concepts, so I would end up giving them strategies for "faking it" as best as possible (which is probably what they wanted anyway). What I really wanted to say was, "You need to go back and retake the previous class and possibly the one before that and the one before that." You'd have psych majors who had to take statistics, and they'd ask me about probability distributions, and they didn't even know how to subtract a larger number from a smaller one. (This is a real example. My roommate was a psych major, and I saw one of his tests once, and he had to solve this problem that boiled down to finding something like 23 - 55, and since the answer is a negative number, he didn't know how to do it.) There's this thing in college mathematics where the majority of the students are woefully unprepared and don't really know what they are doing, but the professors just kinda go along with it and give everybody C's and B's, because the alternative would be failing half the class, which would be politically and socially untenable, and it might cause other majors to relax their math requirements, which would cripple the structure on which math departments are built. Great system!
Anyway... my boss at the Math Center, to the extent I had one at all, was a professor named Dr. Vasher. She was very cool. She became a go-to for me anytime I needed a letter of recommendation.
-----------------------------------
The next summer, Y2K, I moved back with my parents to save as much money as possible in anticipation of a semester abroad in Budapest, Hungary. I got a job working at a huge sporting goods store. I had two main tasks. The first was stocking shoes before the store opened. This required me waking up at 5:30 every morning which was brutal. The opening manager, Dana, would go on a coffee run every morning, which sounds nice, but she only did it because she didn't want to do her actual job. It was a running joke among the other employees how little she actually did. The first day she asked me if I wanted coffee, and I said I did, so she asked me to give her a dollar, which I did, and she brought me back a coffee. This went on for a few days, and then one day she didn't ask me. When I got skipped again the next day, I initiated things and asked if she could get me a coffee -- she was still going to Starbucks everyday for everybody else anyway, why couldn't I get in on it anymore? She got me a coffee, but very reluctantly, so I asked her what was up, and she said, "You only give me a dollar everyday, and the coffee is actually $1.20. I'm always having to cover you twenty cents, and it's starting to add up." Okay, but the only reason I gave her a dollar is because that's what she told me to give her. So, from then on I gave her $1.20 everyday, and everything was good. But I don't know why she didn't just tell me my coffee was more than a dollar as soon as it became an issue for her. I'm still annoyed by that interaction and it was nearly twenty years ago.
Once the store opened, I would take a lunch break (at 10:00 am), and then go in the back and scan merchandise from the loading dock into the system. The boss back there was this middle-aged bachelor named Jimmy, and he was a total tool, but I kinda liked him anyway. He reminded me of the kid in high school who drove a Camaro with an awesome stereo system and always knew where the party was. He never studied or played sports or really applied himself at anything at all, so now he worked at a sporting goods store and tried to bond with the coworkers half his age. "Hey, man, we should hang out sometime. Drink some beers, get some [hushed toned, looks around] *pussy*." I never took him up on the offer. Still, Jimmy was alright. He would genuinely make me laugh with his ridiculous stories -- like the time he broke his hand while drunk trying to break wood pole on a bet -- but maybe not for the reason he thought, or maybe so. It was hard to tell with Jimmy. He blurred the line between irony and earnestness, between laughing with and laughing at. Even now I haven't fully worked it out.
Well, that's it for today. Maybe I'll do a Volume 3 at a future date, maybe not.
Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment