Posted on 07/14/2015 11:28:53 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The best job I’ve ever had was cleaning deep fryers at McDonald’s at 4:30 in the morning. By “best,” I don’t mean most pleasant. Each morning, I would take a filtration device (basically a heavy bucket with a filter, on wheels) up to each deep fryer, empty the fryer’s oil into it and, while it churned away, I would scrub the sides and bottom of the fryer. After the filter was done working, I would pump the filtered oil back into the fryer and turn on the heating element to prepare it for that day’s cooking.
By the end of this process, which took about an hour, I smelled like a combination of old French fries and fish filets, and I had at least one new burn per week. After finishing this job, I was expected to start up the grills and prep for breakfast service.
It was greasy, hot, and deeply unpleasant work, but in a very important way it was the best job I’ve ever had because those mornings are what I thought about in future jobs when things seemed bad. Scrubbing deep fryers will always remind me to keep a healthy perspective about work. Now, as a stay-at-home dad, even my worst day is better than cleaning those fryers, because that job was terrible.
After McDonald’s came a steady stream of crap jobs as I worked my way through college. I’ve sliced roast beef at Arby’s, tried (unsuccessfully) to corral parents during the Christmas shopping season at Toys ‘R Us, and I’ve survived a stint at the returns desk at Wal-Mart, where getting yelled at was not uncommon.
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Hardest I’ve ever worked (and it wasn’t for much money, but as a 14 year old, you think $20 is huge) was de-tasseling corn as it was being harvested... and it was in the upper 90s out. No idea what I was paid, all, I remember is marveling at how much water I was losing through sweat, and how the day never seemed to end.
After Mickey D’s, I delivered pizzas for Domino’s. That was before those warming envelopes, and I had a lit Sterno oven in the back of my Opel Kadett station wagon to keep the pizzas warm during the trip. Made more than a few deliveries to Scottish Rite and Kinsolving dorms at UT Austin - lots of rich b*tches looking down their noses at the “pizza boy”. And lousy tippers!
My sons can’t get those jobs. And they are had by adult men who barely speak English. Now, I’ve worked as a lowly cook in kitchens with some of these men. They loved to shock me with their after work (and before they went home to their wives) exploits. I’m sorry, no way I want my teenage sons working with these amoral guys.
But there aren’t any illegals at In N Outs. Well spoken young white and black American kids. I’d be proud to have my sons work there.
I lasted a little while on a hot tar roofing crew in the middle of summertime in Southern CA when I was 18 years old. The only attraction to it was that it paid pretty well: $18.75 an hour in 1986 dollars.
The crew members were all ex-cons and the gravelly old boss used to throw shovels like a Zulu spear at people who weren’t paying attention. He also had arms burnt by years of hot tar splattering (usually caused by unaware nitwits, which is why he threw shovels at people) and had lobster-claw hands burnt down to the muscle from when he once pulled out a man who fell into a tub of molten tar. It was just hideous to look at his hands and arms. He looked like a melted doll. Everyone threatened the new guys with “If you burn me, I’m gonna burn you back.”.
On my first few days there, they made me start driving the tar truck — a giant commercial Class C vehicle with 10 manual air-shifted gears — because the ex-cons all lost their licenses to drive from being pulled over for DUI and drugs. They were all on probation, and if they got pulled over with no license they were going to county lockup. Better to let my young dumb ass drive the tar truck. I ground the gears as three guys yelled instructions at me to get us underway. By the end of the week, I kinda had it down.
Work began at 4:30am and every morning they made me stop at a Quicky-Mart where they bought a big jug of cheap vodka in a plastic bottle and Tropicana orange juice they they took turns swigging from making Screwdriver cocktails in their mouths. They drink it all day until it was gone, climbing up three stories on rickety ladders and slipping around on a fresh tarred roof. If you’ve never climbed up three stories on a rickety aluminum ladder carrying a scraper shovel, let me tell you it’s a big unnerving.
We’d spend the whole morning into the early afternoon slopping hot tar on the rooftops of supermarkets and warehouses after ripping off tar paper. They made us wear flannel and canvas pants in 109-degree F heat to keep from getting burnt with tar. After two weeks, I had a pair of old high top sneakers so covered with tar that each shoe weighed five pounds each. We’d have to load giant 200-pound cardboard wrapped slugs of tar onto the truck and then into the tar trailer once we got to the site. The sun would just come up over the horizon and that meant it was time to start tearing off old tar paper and slopping down fresh tar with a mop. Then we’d haul buckets of fine gravel up the ladder and spread it over the freshly-applied slurried tar. I simply cannot properly articulate how stupidly dangerous this job was.
After a few weeks, I said screw this and enlisted in the Marines on a Saturday morning. Asked to ship out ASAP so I didn’t have to go back to that awful hot tar roofing job.
After the Marines, I went back to school and decided never to associate with the low-class criminal element again. Today, if I get a whiff of hot tar, it brings it all back. Absolutely cannot stand the smell of hot molten tar.
My cousins 30 something year old son is currently working in one of Tysons artificial insemination plants. He jokes and says he jacks off chickens all day but hey it’s a job.
Too bad the fun jobs don’t pay what the real crappy ones do?... I’d cowboy all day.
Yeah, but it’s a dry heat. I spent a summer in New Orleans installing air conditioners in attics. Coming down from the 120 degree attic into a 90 degree house felt like stepping into a freezer.
Islam has the problem of saying manual labor should be for slaves and non-Muslims, better to raid and enslave than do manual labor. If slaves aren’t available, the women and children do the hard work while men graduate to “master”.
So you get a culture that despises manual labor and skilled tradespeople, along with one that hates business (raiders are more honest than traders, per the Koran, because the raider risks his life to steal).
The end result is an indolent culture, unwilling to do the work to build much or do much except conquer and live off the spoils.
Americans saying such jobs are beneath them risks replicating this model on free labor, feeding it by further importation of foreigners who hate them. It also leads to greater poverty among the native born, because they will live off welfare before cleaning toilets, either for money or their family.
“My oldest son worked at a Tyson’s chicken processing plant, in the offal room.”
I thought a person had to be Somalian to work for Tyson’s?
My daughter is a barrel racer.
It cost me a lot of money just to be able to do that “crappy” work.
Interesting.
Here in Indiana there are tons of them, 20 hours a week for 8 bucks an hour. Help wanted signs all over the place.
That's the "new normal" in the Era of Baraq.
1) Calling a list of people to listen to a country radio station and win prizes. I dislike country but I got the positive results because i changed the script when talking to people. I only stayed because not of the money but there was this cute chick in the same dept. I wanted to ask for a date..
2) TELEMARKETING a lottery (scam) to retired old people. This was the job i really had a bad conscience about but I was so good at it I made a $1000 a WEEK. Late left after my sales went down probably because my conscience was getting to me through my subconscious which affected my work..
If I had had any success at all it would have been much better. As it was, 6 months of cold calls to industries that might want to buy mom and pop digital panel meters yielded nothing but frustration.
Agree 100%. I’ve done more crap jobs than most, often quite literally. Nothing is quite as much fun as working in a crawlspace with two foot clearance filled with six inches of sewage.
Worst was oil spill cleanup, traveling job. You couldn’t wash your work clothes, you stood them in a corner and threw them away when you moved to the next job. Wash your body with plastic pot scrubber pads and Dawn. Did a train derailment where they dumped oil in a swamp and didn’t tell us they dumped acid too. We all got blisters below the navel. Most quit, he gave the few remaining a 100% raise and we continued, covered with Vaseline.
As cook/bouncer/sometimes dishwasher I cleaned my own fryers and drained my own grease, balancing a vat of boiling oil on a slippery floor as I did tai chi pouring it s l o w l y through a paper filter in a China hat. I also cleaned the grease traps, which smell like the mixture of a corpse and all the dirty diapers that should never have been.
Washing dishes alone is a cush job, as long as you can keep up and whip it when you close. Always take home free food. I went to a labor service once that sent me to an upscale restaurant when their dishwasher was sick, had a tyrant chef and a horde of frightened assistant cooks. Every time they got something wrong or something got sent back, they’d ask me if I was hungry because they could give it to me without Chef seeing and screaming at them. Hungry? With what I ate one-handed and what I took home I wasn’t hungry for a week.
To the person working with chickens, I saw the guys who went to day labor at big chicken ranches in Nebraska, what they looked like when they returned. No Thank You. Call me pussy and I’ll say meow.
I’ve scrubbed toilets. It was a job. I got paid. It’s something that needs to be done. Someone has to do it. The key is to better yourself so that you’re not stuck doing that forever, if it’s not what you want to do. Some folks may take a great deal of pride in that kind of work. Good on them, and I wish them well in it. I’ve seen some jobs that Mike Rowe has highlighted in ‘Dirty Jobs’ that I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do, but what’s important is how you do it.
“I shoveled crap from horse stalls and worked on sale barn alley ways. Did it for 2 years daylight to dark on weekends and sale days.”
All those semi rigs that haul cattle to the feed lots... They need to get cleaned out somewhere. I did that for a while on the eastern plains of Colorado. VERY high pressure hose spraying all that manure towards the doors at the rear of the trailer. Frequently there’d be trampled dead calves, or parts of them, to spray out as well. It was even more fun in the wee hours of a frozen Eastern Plains morning when the water would freeze pretty quickly and make a combo of slushy manure to slip and fall into. Plenty of the drivers were jacked up on crank back then too, so I had to keep a baseball bat handy.
I find myself hoping that the former wasn't the result of the latter. :=)
To be fair, western civ used to have similar ideas about getting rich by war being more honorable than by selling people stuff.
Absolutely fundamental to the worldview of the Greeks and Romans. Moved into the medieval worldview where the nobles, descended from the most efficient thugs, looked down their noses at the burghers and peasants who actually produced stuff.
Has made its last stand in (mostly Euro) progressive types who admire intellectuals and workers (in theory, they’ve never known any actual workers) while despising those “in trade.” Like Margaret Thatcher’s father.
Recently saw a movie about Princess Grace. Hubbie slugged a snooty Frenchman for saying her father was a Philadelphia bricklayer. Which was true, he started out as a bricklayer and became a millionaire contractor.
Personally, I’m still trying to figure out why that’s an insult. I’d consider it a compliment.
I have a friend who had his legs blown off in Afghanistan.
He was 19 then. It was his first job.
I was mopping the floors at 5 AM one morning listening to FM radio when I heard that Jim Morrison had died.
I love working by myself in the early morning.
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