I usually look forward to my turn on the Staffer Speaks column but I’ve been trying to track down my schoolwork all week and now I have a few hours to finish editing my stories and write this column. Usually I can cobble together some kind of amusing, scatological rant in an hour or so, but this time I’m coming up blank. I guess I could just write about not knowing what to write about. What a novel idea! I’m sure that’s never been done before. Here’s how I’ll do it. I’ll introduce the theme of the essay in a way that’ll grab the reader’s attention. The theme, since I have failed to think of anything else, is the fact that this editorial was written in about an hour’s time and that my life in gerneral, like this editoria,l has been slapped together at the last minute, and that only by some combination of luck and quick thinking I have avoided being shown out for the ungrateful slob that I am.
I guess I’ll start with an anecdote about this shitty job I had once that showed me out for the good-for-nothing that I am, or at least I thought so at the time. I’ll use some secondarily applicable anecdotes and ultimately, a summary that brings it all together with plain, heart-rending frankness.
I think this could work.
I got this job the summer after my Freshman year at USM. It was a terrible job. It was possibly the worst job I’ve ever had. It was the kind of job that drives people to strong liqueur and magazines about firearms and medieval swords. It was an office cleaning job at what is now the Norway Savings Bank on outer Congress Street.
I worked three hours every weekday evening for $10 an hour vacuuming and mopping three floors of the bank’s cubicles and break rooms. My boss was a little round man whose name I forget, who was unnervingly enthusiastic, especially when we encountered strange smells on the third floor which, as it turns out, was a Gastroenterologist’s office. We were also tasked with cleaning this floor, which was only half-office. The rest was equipment for the examination and treatment of diseases and disorders of the intestinal tract.
“Oh god,” he would say, peeling back the rubber matts in the examination rooms and waving his hand at the reddish-brown stains. “Oh god, what do you think that is?” He would snuffle the air with great relish. I guess he was born for that kind of work.
He was usually not there though, and normally I worked with his second-in-command, a half-crazed french-canadian lady named April, and a quiet, underfed girl named Bobby-jo. The idea was that I would do the floors while April and Bobby-jo scooted around emptying the trash cans, cleaning the toilets, and so on. The problem was that April resented my presense, especially after she learned I was a college student. I could never complete my tasks to her satisfaction. She always found a scattering of debris in some office I’d missed, or part of some tile floor that still had footprints on it. Every five minutes, it seemed, april would stomp up and browbeat me for such lapses.
“This is the same place you missed yesterday,” she would cry, pointing at my blunder, her eyes welling with shame and anger. “It’s been two weeks since you started! We’re going to have to fire you if you don’t shape up!” Only after a long discussion of my lapse, and a promise that it wouldn’t happen again, would April finally stalk off to do some of her own work.
I had a pretty good idea why the previous guy had quit this job.
Still, this played havoc on my insecurities. I would drive home in utter despair, wondering how I had made it this many years in life if I couldn’t even sweep a floor. I was certain of my own unemployability and dreaded the measly life I was doomed to lead.
One day April asked me to demonstrate how I squeezed out my mop in the squeezy device on the yellow wheely bucket (she was sure I was using too much water on the floors). I had been making small protests in the previous days, but now I wheeled on my tormenter.
“April, why do you have to freak out every time you correct me?”
April said she didn’t know how else to make me understand and stormed away, yelling and gesturing at the cieling. Several more arguments followed, escalating over a couple of days and culminating in my calling her an unprofessional little shrew, and her calling me a spoiled college kid who did everything half-ass. That was the last time that I swept and rubbed the brown stains off those floors.
That night, when I told my father about how I’d quit at work, he looked at his feet for a moment and said “Well, you are a half-ass a lot of the time.”
That’s the end of that anecdote. Besides April, the terrifying part of working this job was the strange, intimate way I would get to know all of the cubicle dwellers by their decorations.
One desk in the back of the bank had a gallery pictures of someone’s pale daughter in gaudy frames that read “Best daughter ever” and “Most beautiful girl in the world.” Somehow this poor girl took on the brunt of my working-class antagonism. There were pictures of the girl as a bleary-eyed toddler in a bunny outfit, alreadybland and unappealing. In every picture she was surprised and confused. There were pictures of the girl posing, chubby and clumsy in a ballerina outfit. Pictures of the girl in the throes of puberty, wearing baggy jeans and a huge sweatshirt, smiling wanly, uncertainly, at the camera, her skin still ghost white, her hair still thin and limp, her eyes still frightened and inadequate. I fixated on this desk. I couldn’t help but stare at all the pictures and psychoanalyze this woman and her mooncalf of a daughter, to imagine the banal conversations they must have had over their breakfast. I dreaded every moment I spent vacuuming that windowless room with its ergonomic desks and its Cathy comics and its unsympathetic neon lights. It was a preview of the jobs I always thought I would have the pinache, or the talent, or whatever else it takes not to work in a place where people need inspirational calendars to get through the day. I could not avoid the fact that I was stuck in the same building though, and the fact was, I was even lower on the ladder than these people whose desks I would scrutinize as I worked for shortcomings and vices (a jar of candy? Obviously hooked on chocolate as an emotional crutch).
I always tell people what a punk I was in high school and how I didn’t care about my grades and got Bs and Cs without ever doing my homework. I was lucky to get into college at all. My best friend had filled out the SAT application for me, knowing I would have done it at the last minute, if at all. My favorite teacher had smiled his condescending smile when I told him I was going to college, and said that even in college I would asking professors for extensions on my papers. At the time I was sure I was that he was wrong, that in college, I was definitely going to get my shit together.
Now I’m in my fourth year of college and do I care about my work now, if only out of guilt for those who are footing the bill. I have a lot of bad habits though, so I still end up doing a lot of assignments at the last minute. I would like to take this moment for those of you who have made it this far, and for my professors – that is, all of you who have patiently waded through my half-assed, last minute work – to apologize for all of it and to promise that it’s getting better all the time. That goes for everyone except for Crazy April, who I really think just needed to ease up.