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Shit Jobs: McDonald’s

27 Jan

mcds

Previous McDonald’s talk here and here.

I was sixteen and my mom made me get a job.  Again.  Learn the value of work.  She was right, it’s a lesson I retain decades later: the value of work is less than fucking zero, a negative eating away at your soul and your life.  So, thanks.  I applied at the McDonald’s in Kingston, Mass.

You had to buy your own McDonald’s shirt and special synthetic pocketless pants so you couldn’t walk out with a ninety nine cent hamburger warmed to ass temperature.  They took the money out of your first couple checks.   The checks came three weeks late; they’d docked sixty eight bucks for the uniforms they’d sold you, and taxes were taken out, something like a third of your check.  At that point you’d been working dozens of hours in the sweltering hissing clamoring kitchen, alarms constantly blaring, six hundred degree grills an inch away from the meat of your hands, swabbing the greasy tiles over and over with a filthy mop every time there was a two second lull in orders, getting yelled at– you got your check and it was fucking nothing.  You had known what taxes were in an abstract sense, the ten per cent federal tax bracket, but what you didn’t know was state tax, city tax, FICA, SDI… weird acronyms… your check came an ungodly amount of time later and there was nothing left.  The value of work.  Cleaning the toilet, a filthy log of shit breaching in piss yellow water with toilet paper snaked over the bowl and onto the floor about one out of every four times you went in there– the value of work. Continue reading →

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Protected: Getting Fired Diary: To Whoever Has to Monitor My Internet Activity

18 Jan

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Reader Mailbag: What Are You Gonna Do

16 Jan

Various concerned readers ask:

Did you get fired yet?  When are you getting fired?  Do you know what you’re going to do for a job?  Are you scared? Etc.

depression unemployment

I’m still working, but not for long.  Any day.  I have found no job, and that’s because I want no job.  I want to be unemployed. I want to take a break and write all day, and fuck you, that’s what I’m gonna do.  Not “fuck you” as in you, but you know, naysayers.  I have fear and insecurity about it, that my writing won’t be any good.  But fuck you, it will be good.  Or at least, it’ll start out at whatever level it’s at and, one hopes, get better as I practice.  Because what you’re seeing is 25 minutes per day.  Maybe an hour on the weekends.  As soon as I get a good idea going I have to get up and go do some work related shit.  No more.
Continue reading →

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Work Diaries, Part Three

4 Dec

November 2012

OK, how am I gonna get money.  Maybe Charles Bukowski’s Factotum was not an appropriate book to read when experiencing anxiety about finding a job.  He’s cleaning toilets.  Polishing the brass rail around the L.A. Times building.  I don’t want to do that shit.

I have cleaned toilets.  Worse, I have cleaned toilets for a boss who then inspected each toilet, maddeningly thorough about detecting the tiniest bit of excrement left behind.  As though someone would have to shit, look at the gnat-sized chunk of stubborn waste on the bowl, and scoff.  I can’t shit here!  This was in an office building that hosted small insurance companies.  This was not the president’s toilet, or Madonna’s.  These were men who shit when the spirit moved them, specks of lingering asscrust be damned.  But still.  What is this, she would ask.  I thought you scrubbed the toilet.  Why is this still here. Continue reading →

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Work Diaries, Part Two

2 Dec

main-rotating-images-telemarketer

September 2012

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty god damn motherfucking good at work today, except for, you know, I fucked some little things up.  Who cares.  I hate that menial part of my job, I hate it I hate it I hate it- it’s over.  It’s over.  God damn, it’s fucking over, thank you Jesus.  Thank you Lord.

Now all I gotta do is figure out how to get some god damn motherfucking money.  Cobble a living together.  Cover scripts for money.  Get some bullshit job.  Work for (REDACTED), doing some real estate scam.  Something.

I will make it.  It will be OK.  I came to California with no money.  Or, my grandmother had given me a $500 savings bond and I used it to buy a bicycle, a mattress, and pay the rent on a room.  I got a job out of the newspaper the next day.  Cold calling places.  The job was telemarketing.  I was good at it, but it killed me.  Jobs kill me.  I wasn’t built to work. Continue reading →

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Work Diaries, Part One

1 Dec

The hammer has fallen and I am finally losing my job. To celebrate, I am digging through my journals and reminding myself how much it sucked:

August 2012:

Work did not turn out as badly as I expected today.  This is another way of saying it is one of the top ten work days in my career history.  I expected for months and months worth of tiny fuckups and general laziness to be exposed today, and that I would be rightly castigated.  But my boss is too busy.

I always think: he’s an asshole, but it’s also true that I fucking suck at my job and I don’t give a fuck about it.  I do not give a fuck about movies and TV shows and the various processes and means of support necessary to make these things.  The whole enterprise is too much motherfucking work for very little return.  There are too many hustlers and opportunists and salesmen cluttering up the phone lines and making it impossible to actually see material that is good.  There are too many people trying to be screenwriters.  It is too easy for them to get agents and managers, and too easy for these agents and managers to call me with these shitty screenwriters’ projects and waste my time and exhaust me and it’s because I’m afraid of saying no to them.  And in some corner of my soul I find it offensive because I think I’m a better writer than these people.  Which is not the case.  Three paragraphs a day about jerking off does not compare to writing a fully realized screenplay, no matter how stupid or unfunny it might be. Continue reading →

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Protected: Diary 9-18-12: Suck My Fucking Dick, Mitt Romney

20 Sep

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Well Thank God

14 Sep

I’m getting fired.  I know it, but my boss hasn’t told me yet.  But I know it.  I can’t say how, because the way I found out was (REDACTED), and people who know me through work read this web site.    You people will soon not know me through work.  Maybe you will know me as a human being.

Anyway, I’m getting fired.  I got tipped off when the H.R. lady for the  large corporation– fuck it, I’ll just say it, who cares now.  I work for a production company that has what’s called a “term deal” at (REDACTED), the studio, not the network that you’ve actually heard of and is what any sane person would assume you mean when you say “(REDACTED)”– this is why I fucking hate show business, having to explain this god damn shit to people at parties– anyway, my boss gets a chunk of money to have an office at (REDACTED) and in return all the TV shows we make have to get underwritten by (REDACTED), the studio.

I knew when the lady from (REDACTED) corporate H.R. was calling for my boss.  And he didn’t want to take the call when I was there.  A couple times she called, meaning, he had called her back.  There is no other call he would ever make himself, when I wasn’t around. It means he’s firing me.  He shut his door and was talking to her.  He is an idiot, which means, he does not know that everyone in the entire building can hear every word of every call he’s on when both doors of his office are closed.  It causes maybe a ten per cent reduction in the noise he’s making, closing these hollow-core doors that resonate like tympanis.   I would have brought it up to him but then he would have made me get into a long involved struggle to get the doors replaced with soundproof vault doors but without him paying for it; I would have had to convince people whose entire jobs are to ensure that (REDACTED) Corporation does not spend money, to spend a ton of money replacing the doors in the building so that he wouldn’t need to speak slightly more softly, and bringing it up would have made him forever vigilant about the acoustics of the free doors and etc., so fuck it. There is no winning. Bringing up a problem means it is yours to solve, and it is ultimately unsolvable, and any problem with the solution is going to be blamed on you. So fuck it.  Anyway, obviously, I am going to eavesdrop on this call.  I can’t not eavesdrop in any of his calls; I constantly have to hear his voice. When I go to hell it will be piped in.   But this is the one time I desperately wanted to. I had to know. Continue reading →

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The McDonald’s Corporation of America Part 2

21 Jul

There were developmentally disabled kids working with us. We had two– one guy, Bob, who was very mildly retarded, just slow– he looked normal and came from kind of a white trash background, and was probably retarded because of his Mom’s prenatal drinking or some shit. The other, Brian, had Down’s, so he really looked full-bore retarded; him they put up front on the Filet-o’-Fish fryer so they could show him off.

Brian had it good. Running the Filet station was easy: you just drop the Filets out of a bag into the fry basket and then into the oil, and when the correct light and chime goes off you take them out and hang them up. The sandwiches are uncomplicated toppings-wise; the only really hard thing is that the Filet-o’-Fish buns have to be steamed, but it’s a moot point because nobody really orders Filet-o’-Fish. Brian would be up there smiling while his little chimes went off; when someone ordered his sandwich it was a big event and you could tell he felt excited and satisfied. Continue reading →

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Having a Job

10 Jul

is at once hating something and being in mortal fucking fear of losing it.  Like being married to someone who beats you up.

Like owning a subsistence farm that only grows horrible tasting fruits and stinking corpse lilies.  Like living solely off mushrooms that grow in dog shit, that taste like dog shit, but it’s the only food you have.  If you anger these fickle dog shit tasting mushrooms they will go away and you will starve and die.  You will be like nine grand in credit card debt, your car will be broken, you will have no ability to support yourself.

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