This is another one of those multi-part essays that I don't really expect anyone to read. If you're looking for something interesting, you might want to try the preview for Screech's sex tape.
*******
I got the first job that meant something to me, that I incorporated into my identity, when I was a senior in high school. It was my fourth actual job, unless you count childhood candy-earning schemes that involved my mom paying me fifty cents to pick up the dog poo in the backyard or clean the piano keys with milk.
It was December of 2000, and I had been working Wednesday nights as an usher at Paseo Camarillo Cinemas. For some reason, they would not give me more hours. My boss was a pale Prufrock-type named Bill, and I was not his favorite. He was wan and soft-spoken with delicate blue veins. I imagine he visited a professional dominatrix by night and afterward guiltily self-flagellated. Anyway, I'd been working there since March, and one day I meekly reminded Bill that when I started I'd been promised a fifty-cent raise after six months. He stammered that he'd look into it. On my next paycheck, my hourly rate had increased from $6.25...to $6.40.
That weekend, I decided to apply at a little cafe at the Ventura Harbor, partly because I thought the idea of working at a little cafe on the harbor was romantic, and partly because eight months earlier I'd had a successful interview there for a coveted scholarship to a summer program. The owner interviewed and hired me on the spot. (That day, I was wearing silver eyeshadow and a stretchy maroon cardigan. I mention that because yesterday, I wore silver eyeshadow and the same stretchy maroon cardigan. Fun fact!)
Where do I even begin to begin. It was very small. There was the owner, Don, giraffe-like with glasses and a black beard. The cafe was downstairs and upstairs was the big kitchen and storage space, and a chubby, smiling woman named Valerie would come in five days a week and help him bake. Once, I asked her, "How long have you known Don?" and she said, "All my life. He's my brother." I blinked at her. She was Mexican and he was white. They explained - he'd been adopted by her parents. Oh.
And then there were about five or six of...us. I don't even know what you would call us. The "help." Don and Valerie apparently called us "the kids." Whatever, we all did the same thing, which was...everything. Everything.
In high school, still leeching off my parents, minimum wage ($6.25) really seemed like a lot. The Pelican Bay paid me twenty-five cents over that, plus the contents of a tip jar divided among the other girls, which worked out to about a dollar extra per hour. During my interview for my current waitressing job, I told my now-boss that at the Pelican Bay I worked as hard as I ever did as a waitress, except I didn't get tipped. "Ouch," he said. In retrospect I can say I was being fantastically fucked over, but in retrospect there's a lot about that job that was - what's the word? - superfuckingsketchy.
For example, you'll notice I referred to my coworkers as "the girls." Except for one (I'll get to that), we were all reasonably attractive females in our late teens. We worked nonstop for eight hours (we'd get snapped at if we sat down for a second), and sometimes I'd be left alone to run the entire cafe, close it, and lock up in the dark. I was seventeen and getting paid $6.50 an hour. In cash. "Why do you care? You're not getting taxed," Don said to me when I questioned the legality of this. After that I got half my wages as a paycheck. The rest was in cash.
The job consisted of: taking orders at the register, making salads, making coffee drinks, cooking sandwiches and preparing food to order, bringing out food, bussing tables, stocking the kitchen, chopping vegetables and fruit and slicing bread and meat and cheese and everything and storing them in those plastic containers that you're very familiar with if you've ever worked in a restaurant, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning, and closing, if you were a closer, which I'm not even going to begin to get into. Basically, to those who have worked in restaurants, it was all the sidework, by yourself, alone, in the scary dark, with a camera filming you the whole time. A camera. Which I didn't know about until I'd been working there for eight months. If we were busy, there'd be one person assigned to each of the above tasks. If we were not very busy, and I was the only one there, I'd have to do it all.
More fun tomorrow!
*******
I got the first job that meant something to me, that I incorporated into my identity, when I was a senior in high school. It was my fourth actual job, unless you count childhood candy-earning schemes that involved my mom paying me fifty cents to pick up the dog poo in the backyard or clean the piano keys with milk.
It was December of 2000, and I had been working Wednesday nights as an usher at Paseo Camarillo Cinemas. For some reason, they would not give me more hours. My boss was a pale Prufrock-type named Bill, and I was not his favorite. He was wan and soft-spoken with delicate blue veins. I imagine he visited a professional dominatrix by night and afterward guiltily self-flagellated. Anyway, I'd been working there since March, and one day I meekly reminded Bill that when I started I'd been promised a fifty-cent raise after six months. He stammered that he'd look into it. On my next paycheck, my hourly rate had increased from $6.25...to $6.40.
That weekend, I decided to apply at a little cafe at the Ventura Harbor, partly because I thought the idea of working at a little cafe on the harbor was romantic, and partly because eight months earlier I'd had a successful interview there for a coveted scholarship to a summer program. The owner interviewed and hired me on the spot. (That day, I was wearing silver eyeshadow and a stretchy maroon cardigan. I mention that because yesterday, I wore silver eyeshadow and the same stretchy maroon cardigan. Fun fact!)
Where do I even begin to begin. It was very small. There was the owner, Don, giraffe-like with glasses and a black beard. The cafe was downstairs and upstairs was the big kitchen and storage space, and a chubby, smiling woman named Valerie would come in five days a week and help him bake. Once, I asked her, "How long have you known Don?" and she said, "All my life. He's my brother." I blinked at her. She was Mexican and he was white. They explained - he'd been adopted by her parents. Oh.
And then there were about five or six of...us. I don't even know what you would call us. The "help." Don and Valerie apparently called us "the kids." Whatever, we all did the same thing, which was...everything. Everything.
In high school, still leeching off my parents, minimum wage ($6.25) really seemed like a lot. The Pelican Bay paid me twenty-five cents over that, plus the contents of a tip jar divided among the other girls, which worked out to about a dollar extra per hour. During my interview for my current waitressing job, I told my now-boss that at the Pelican Bay I worked as hard as I ever did as a waitress, except I didn't get tipped. "Ouch," he said. In retrospect I can say I was being fantastically fucked over, but in retrospect there's a lot about that job that was - what's the word? - superfuckingsketchy.
For example, you'll notice I referred to my coworkers as "the girls." Except for one (I'll get to that), we were all reasonably attractive females in our late teens. We worked nonstop for eight hours (we'd get snapped at if we sat down for a second), and sometimes I'd be left alone to run the entire cafe, close it, and lock up in the dark. I was seventeen and getting paid $6.50 an hour. In cash. "Why do you care? You're not getting taxed," Don said to me when I questioned the legality of this. After that I got half my wages as a paycheck. The rest was in cash.
The job consisted of: taking orders at the register, making salads, making coffee drinks, cooking sandwiches and preparing food to order, bringing out food, bussing tables, stocking the kitchen, chopping vegetables and fruit and slicing bread and meat and cheese and everything and storing them in those plastic containers that you're very familiar with if you've ever worked in a restaurant, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning, and closing, if you were a closer, which I'm not even going to begin to get into. Basically, to those who have worked in restaurants, it was all the sidework, by yourself, alone, in the scary dark, with a camera filming you the whole time. A camera. Which I didn't know about until I'd been working there for eight months. If we were busy, there'd be one person assigned to each of the above tasks. If we were not very busy, and I was the only one there, I'd have to do it all.
More fun tomorrow!
