Chapter 26: You Can’t Spell Funeral Without “REAL” and “FUN”

Chapter 26: You Can’t Spell Funeral Without “REAL” and “FUN”

Jobs 77 – 79

2002 -2003

Job #77: Temp Agency/Packaging Company

Shortly after I was laid off from Walmart, my sciatica was sufficiently healed to allow me to look for a new job. I had registered at several temporary staffing agencies. The most famous one (let’s call them “Smelly Services”) actually found me a job, albeit not the kind I was hoping for.

After the debacle of the Walmart truck crew, I wanted a job that was a little more…gentle. I had plenty of clerical experience, and was hoping for something where I could sit down, indoors, and not sweat so much, and not throw out my back. I took Smelly Services’ test for clerical work, and while my typing and other mundane office skills were fine, I didn’t have any experience with 10-key operation or data entry. Despite that, my handler – Curtis – explained that with my college degree, I was rather over-qualified for such work.

So I thought it was interesting that they didn’t consider me over-qualified for the job they did find me – at a company that made paperboard packaging. Their biggest contract was making six-pack holders for College Town’s world-famous brewing company. They also made six-pack carriers for other breweries, as well as packages for all kinds of products, food and otherwise.

I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of factory work, so I was pleasantly surprised by what a decent place to work it turned out to be (at least temporarily). The work wasn’t particularly strenuous, everyone was  nice, and they had a great lunch/breakroom, with a decent variety of snack vending machines. They even gave Christmas hams to the temporary staffers.

2003-2005

During this time, I even attempted to return to college. I figured that my best chance of getting any kind of geospatial job was to get a Master’s Degree. Even though most graduate courses are held at night, I knew I couldn’t work full-time at the packaging company during the day if I was going to have any time to read the endless required amounts of dry scholarly books and reports. I needed a part-time job to supplement my financial aid package.

Job #78: Mortuary Transportation Driver

I saw an interesting item in the local want ads: someone needed an on-call mortuary transportation driver. I wasn’t even sure what that might entail, but I figured, “What the heck?” and applied. I was a little confused when I went in for the interview, because it was held at the owner’s day business – a small auto repair shop and used car dealership.

The owner was a guy named Ken, and he had a contract with a mortuary in O-Town to do all their after-hours transportation. When someone passed away, and they were slated to be handled by this mortuary (who shall be named later when I can think of an appropriate alias), Ken and/or one of his employees would transport the decedent in a black van from the place of their death to the mortuary. Most of this type of business came from nursing homes and hospitals, but death can happen anywhere, so Ken also had to transport accident and crime victims. He asked me if I had a strong stomach. I wasn’t sure I did (I didn’t, really, at least not at first), but I lamely told him that my wife liked to watch surgery shows, so I had at least seen lots of blood and guts there. He thought that was funny.

During the course of that interview, I learned some things I had never really thought about before. For one thing, I found out that Butt County didn’t have a morgue. In movies and television, bodies are always shown being hauled away, either my ambulance or a coroner’s vehicle, to some mysterious place full of drawers full of dead people. That may be true in better-funded communities but in Butt County, the various mortuaries in the county took turns acting as a de facto morgue on a monthly rotating basis. If an unsupervised death occurred, the county medical examiner would travel to whichever mortuary was hosting him that month and perform the autopsy in their embalming room.

Despite my lack of experience, I got the job. I have a feeling not many other people had applied. I made Ken aware of my plans to attend school, and he said it would be no problem working around my schedule there.

I went with Ken on my first few calls, to learn the ropes, and for him to see how I handled myself. I had seen a couple of dead bodies before, including, sadly, Mrs. R’s grandmother, Mildred, who had passed away not long before, and whose final arrangements had been handled by the very mortuary Ken was contracted to. Still, it was a little weird actually handling someone who had just passed away.

Most of our first few runs together were pretty cut and dried – hospitals and nursing homes. There was one fellow who had passed away unexpectedly on the floor of his bedroom. He was a bearded guy, and was laying face-down. When we turned him over, I was a little creeped out to see his whiskers slowly relaxing en masse from the unnatural position they had been in.

Pretty soon I was ready to go solo, as it were. Ken supplied me with a pager and cell phone. If the call was at a hospital or nursing home, I could do it alone, since those places are designed to handle gurneys. One person could easily slide a normal-sized body from a hospital bed onto the gurney. If they were large, I could get a facility employee to help me. However, if the body was in a private home, or at an accident or crime scene, I had to take a helper. Even though the gurney could be lowered to just a few inches high, it usually took two people to lift the body that far. Then there might be stairs or other difficult access which would require a person at both ends of the gurney.

I had a number of helpers over the two years that I worked for Ken, including my own Step-Rimpyette. The work was strictly on-call, and I made 25 dollars per call. That may not sound like much, but I got enough calls, whether they were solo or team, that it was actually a pretty decent part-time income. However, my helpers only got 20 dollars per call, and team calls were much less frequent. It was difficult to retain people who were willing to get up at odd hours of the night and schlep dead bodies for such meager and inconsistent earnings. More than once, my boss Ken had to be my helper when no one else was available.

Ken let me keep the van (which I sensitively dubbed “the Death Mobile”) at home. He also said I could use it as I needed for errands. Ken had made the questionable choice of putting landau bars on the sides of the van. He said he wanted it to look appropriate because he occasionally used it for funerals, either as the hearse itself, or a flower van. If it hadn’t been for those bars, no one would really have had any indication that it was anything other than a black, windowless utility van.

Once I was coming back into town after picking up a body at the College Town hospital. There were two chubby hillbillies whose car had broken down or run out of gas at the off-ramp I used. I stopped to see if they needed any help. I offered to call someone for them, but told them I couldn’t offer them a ride because I had a “passenger” with me. One of the yokels was staring at the van, and when he saw the landau bars, he loudly exclaimed to his brother, “Dang, Butch, this thing is a hearse! It’s a full-on hearse!”

Another time I picked up Grandrimpy in the van from his elementary school. It was the practice at this school for a staff-member to walk the child to his or her vehicle. The staffer couldn’t tell that my van only had a front passenger seat, and since any child would ride in the back, as California law required,  she opened the side door before I could stop. She was greeted by the sight of a gurney covered by a tasteful gray velour shroud. She said, “Oh my”, while my grandson excitedly shouted, “See!? I told you it was a death mobile!” I was somewhat embarrassed.

There are many other blackly humorous and down-right gruesome tales I could tell you of my time under Ken’s employ, and perhaps I’ll include some more in subsequent drafts of this memoir. My work for Ken wasn’t my only experience in the business of death, however. I had rather quickly given up on my graduate school plans. Much like my experience with evening classes during Army AIT, I couldn’t stay awake in class at night, and I was bored to death by all the reading. All in all, I only lasted a few weeks into the semester.

Now that I was a free agent, I was able to pick up more work with Ken, including day runs. During business hours, the mortuary handled their own transportation, when they could. If they were tied up, however, they called Ken, which meant me. Because of this I got familiar with the staff at the mortuary, particularly the manager, Mike. He liked me, and more importantly, the owner liked me. The owner, a nice lady named Susan, along with her husband, had purchased the mortuary – or memorial chapel – in O-Town from a family named Lear (not their real name) and had kept the name, because it was a well-established business. They also owned a memorial chapel, named after a type of flower, in Mountain Town. Susan’s husband also ran a successful computer repair business in Mountain Town, where they lived.

Job #78: Funeral Director

I began talking to Mike about the possibility of me coming to work for Lear Memorial Chapel, and after a few months he hired me as an assistant funeral director. I continued to work for Ken for the next several months. It was an odd arrangement, to say the least. I spent my days at the chapel, which of course included making transportation calls in their vehicle. If we were too busy to pick up a body, we had to call Ken himself, which he grumbled about. He had originally hired me to take some of the burden off himself. At night, I was on-call for Ken, and was transporting bodies in Ken’s van to the same funeral home for which I worked during the day.

One of the best things about this whole arrangement was that the memorial chapel was only a block from my house. By day I would walk to and from work. At night, after a call, I didn’t have far to drive back home. It was the easiest commute I’ve ever had.

Eventually the unusual nature of the relationship between my two jobs created some problems. Ken’s resentment about having to pick up bodies during the day because I was unavailable finally caused him to cut me out of day runs, and he hired someone else to do that job. Then Susan’s lawyer pointed out that as an employee of Lear, if I was injured on the premises while doing a call as an employee of Ken, I wouldn’t be covered by their workers’ compensation insurance. This meant that I essentially I couldn’t work for Ken anymore, so I had to give him my notice. Amazingly, my last day was exactly two years after my first day, just like the time I left the paratransit driving job.

But at least I still had my day job, which paid a decent wage. For my first few months there, I did not have any kind of license to be a funeral director, and it didn’t seem like I needed one, because all I was doing was assisting with funerals and their arrangements. I certainly wasn’t an embalmer, which requires two years of schooling. At first, I wasn’t sure I this was something I was interested in. I would sometimes help out in the embalming room, and even assisted the medical examiner with a few autopsies. The first few times I got a little light-headed and turned an interesting shade of green, but I never actually passed out or threw up. I was used to seeing gore after having already worked for Ken, but there was something about watching someone slicing or poking a human body, especially if they were so recently deceased as to still be warm. Eventually I got used to it enough to the point of wishing I could go to embalming school. Not only would I have made more money, but I would have been more useful to the business. As a funeral director, I was supposed to be in the rotation of on-call directors for after-hours calls. Most arrangements were handled the next day, but it was desirable that any embalming, if requested, or just setting of facial features (which is way more involved than just shoving the corners of someone’s mouth into a smile) be done as soon as possible. I couldn’t do any of that stuff, so the other funeral directors, who were all also embalmers, had to take extra days on-call, which didn’t make them happy.

Susan used to be willing to finance her funeral directors’ embalming training, but had been burned by a former employer who let her pay for his education, then quit and opened a competing funeral home in O-Town. There was no financial aid available for private schooling of that kind, and I couldn’t afford it myself, let alone the fact that the nearest embalming school was in Sacramento. So I contented myself with my informal status, until one slow day I was reading up on the laws pertaining to funeral directing, and I came across a passage which said that anyone who acted as a funeral director, but who did not have a license, was guilty of a crime. I thought that described my situation exactly. I showed this to Mike, who said, “Well, I guess we’d better get you a license, then.”

Getting a license as a funeral director is pretty easy: you read up on the rules, pay 100 dollars (which Susan put up), get a background check (which was actually less involved than the one to become a cab driver), and take a test in Sacramento. If you pass, you’re a licensed funeral director. Once I had my license, a framed copy was displayed on a wall of the funeral home alongside the other directors’. I didn’t get any more money for being licensed, but I got something almost as good: my very first business card, with my funeral director’s license number right on it (as required by California law). I felt more excited about getting a real business card than I had about getting my Bachelor’s Degree.

I worked for Lear for a total of two years and a couple of months. I had many interesting experiences there, but this is getting over long, and there is one other thing which transpired there which I wish to share with you, for it was one of my proudest accomplishments.

It is well that I am writing this pseudonymously (I love any chance to use that word), for the information I am about to reveal could get me rubbed out by some secret cabal of funeral home owners. It often happens that funeral homes become the unwilling long-term custodians of cremated remains, or cremains. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a person dies without anyone to handle their final arrangements. In cases like these, the county will pay for disposition of the body, which is always cremation. Butt County has what is often called a “potter’s field” for indigent decedents, but there has not been a burial or inurnment of cremains there for many, many years. Despite this, Butt County is disinclined to actually take responsibility for the cremains. Perhaps if they had a morgue, they would have a place to keep unclaimed cremains, but as it is, the funeral homes get stuck with them.

Another reason cremains get abandoned is due to family dynamics. A survivor may have arranged for the cremation, but then either flat out refuses to take charge of the “ashes”, or can’t deal with it right away, and so leaves them at the funeral home. A week goes by, then it’s July, then it’s a couple of decades and, well, “out of sight, out of mind.”

This may not sound like much of a problem for the funeral homes, and on a practical level, it isn’t. Cremains don’t take up much room, and require no special storage. The only real problem is that in California (and probably other states, as well) it is actually against the law for a funeral home to keep cremains indefinitely. However, the funeral home cannot dispose of the remains themselves, not without something signed by a survivor. So funeral homes are in this Catch-22 of having no choice but to illegally hang on to people’s unwanted cremains, which is a lesser crime than unauthorized disposal. The keepers of the laws are no doubt aware of this conundrum, and mercifully turn a blind eye to it. So I’m sure every funeral home, at least in California, has this dirty little secret of abandoned cremains hidden away in some dark corner. In Lear’s case, the cremains were kept in a locked cabinet in the basement.

This situation bothered me. I thought it was awful that the last mortal remains of these people were just gathering dust in some musty cellar – abandoned, forgotten and un-memorialized.  I also hate an unresolved mystery, and that’s what these cremains felt like to me. I think I would have made a great detective (but a lousy police officer). Here was a chance to put my amateur sleuthing skills to work. I got Mike’s permission to undertake (see what I did there?) the task of finding the responsible parties for all those cremains, which totaled about 20 urns. He said I could try, but he didn’t think I’d have much luck. The other funeral director on the staff agreed with him.

I gathered up all the files I could find regarding the abandoned cremains, and then I began making some phone calls. A few of the cases were actually quite easy. Those were mainly the result of simple forgetfulness. Sometimes survivors said they thought that one of their siblings had picked up the cremains. That may have been just an excuse, but one lady was genuinely upset that her sister had not done what she said she would do, and came right in to get her mother’s ashes.

Other cases proved more difficult. Often the survivors had relocated, and it took a bit of digging to track them down. The first case of that kind was willing to pay for us to ship the cremains to them, but others balked at the expense. I got Mike to agree to Lear paying for any shipping to facilitate the egress of the cremains. Pretty soon ashes were practically flying out the door. Mike seemed to like to pretend as though none of this was happening. I think he was worried that word might get to the wrong ears. The other funeral director had to admit he couldn’t believe I was having as much success as I was.

One sad case turned out to have a burial plot waiting for his cremains in Susanville, California, but none of his survivors could be bothered to transport him up there. On a slow day at the funeral home, I grabbed a shovel from home, drove up there and personally buried him.

I began keeping separate files for each of my searches, with a log in each one of what I had done and the dates, so that I wouldn’t accidentally repeat some phone call or letter. After a few more months, I was down to one last stubborn case, which became quite personal to me. The decedent shared my first name: Rimpy (not my or his real first name) – Rimpy Johnson. His cremains had been there the longest - almost 20 years - so it’s not surprising that it was so difficult to find any information on his descendants. I dug and I dug and tried everything I could think of in my limited arsenal. I even consulted with a local private investigator and a detective at the Butt County Sheriff’s office (the sheriff is also the coroner for the county – which just means he is responsible for investigating suspicious and unattended deaths and signing death certificates for same) for any tips and tricks I hadn’t thought of. The private investigator told me about an amazing professional investigator’s database program, but Susan was unwilling to pay for a subscription to it.

I did manage to find a couple of sisters of Rimpy Johnson’s. I almost had some luck with the family of one of them, but suddenly they stopped answering my calls. The other sister was living in a nursing home in Texas. Unfortunately, she was too far gone with Alzheimer’s for me to talk to, and the staff couldn’t give me any information about her immediate family. Finally I just had to put Rimpy’s file away in a drawer and try to forget about it as a lost cause. One day, a few months later, I suddenly had a feeling. My funeral director/private detective sense was tingling! I pulled out Rimpy’s file and called the sister’s nursing home. I was informed that she had passed away. That was the intuition I’d had! Now that she was no long a patient, they were able to give me her granddaughter’s phone number. When I called and explained who I was and why I was calling, she was very gracious. Even though she had barely known her great-uncle Rimpy, she was willing to take responsibility for his cremains.

So Rimpy Johnson had been the first one in and he was the last one out. I had successfully found resting places for all 20-odd abandoned cremains. The other members of the staff said something to the effect of “cool, good job” and went about their business, and of course, it wasn’t something I could brag about too much, because of the weird laws regarding cremains. After an initial feeling of pride and elation on my strange and secret accomplishment, I experienced a let-down – a feeling of emptiness after all those months of obsessive work. That low feeling may have contributed to my eventual decision to leave Lear. But I’m getting ahead of myself, again.

I did get a bit of recognition for my mystery-solving skills from an unexpected source during the time I was still “working cases”. The sheriff’s detective whom I had contacted called me one day. There was a peculiar case of someone throwing a container of cremains in a dumpster behind a gas station. The security cameras had caught the act, but the resolution of the footage wasn’t great. A local man was incorrectly identified as the culprit, but he was able to prove that he wasn’t near the area at the time. The detective called me because he knew I was well now versed in identifying the owners of cremains. The answer to his problem didn’t require the skills of an amateur cremains detective – any funeral director knows that each container of cremains includes a metal tag with the name of the crematory and a unique number identifying the decedent stamped into it. Then it was a simple matter of contacting that funeral home (which was all the way in Florida) and finding the name. The falsely accused man also called me and thanked me for proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn’t involved, since no connection between him and the cremains could be found.

I don’t remember if they ever caught whoever it was who so unceremoniously disposed of somebody’s ashes that way. That’s such a shitty thing to do to someone. He could have just emptied the cremains out on the ground somewhere (which is not always legal, depending on the location, but who’s going to know?) and then thrown the empty container away (which isn’t illegal). Maybe he was just squeamish about ashes (like I was as a kid with that woman’s cremains in my garage), but it seems like you must really have to hate someone to just trash their earthly remains in such a callous manner.

I think that’s about enough for now. In the next chapter, I will try to explain my stupid reasons for leaving Lear (I’m not sure I understand them myself), and briefly relate the brief job which immediately followed it. Then I have to deal with…DUNT DUN DUNNNN...Osmosis! Until then, you can read the long version here, or just wait for the condensed version. Tah!

The end

Chapter 25: Caged Ennui

Chapter 25: Caged Ennui

Jobs #73 – 76

2002

There was one major life event which transpired while I was a student at the university. My dear mother passed away, rather suddenly in October of 2000. Her health had been rather poorly for a number of years. She had given up smoking several years earlier, but it may have been too late. She had long suffered from angina, and had some close calls with cancer, resulting in a double mastectomy, and I think a hysterectomy as well.

Finally her health became poor enough that she sold her little house in Cambria and moved in with my sister Buff and my brother-in-law Roy at their home in Fair Oaks, near Sacramento. Then one day she had what was apparently a massive stroke. My poor sister performed CPR on her for a good hour before the paramedics could arrive.

Unfortunately, it was too late. My mom lingered for a day or so before the painful decision had to be made to turn off her life support. It all happened so quickly that I didn’t even have time to drive down to the hospital to say goodbye. Actually, that may have been one of the times we were carless. I got updates from my siblings via telephone. I had seen my mom that summer at my brother Dick’s house in Sacramento, so at least I had seen her fairly recently after a gap of a couple of years. My other brother Jack had come out from Virginia for a rare visit and my mom wanted to see all her children. Perhaps she sensed her time on this earth was short.

I was rather stunned, to say the least. It may sound callous, but I hadn’t been terribly moved by the passing of my father, so this felt like my first real experience of losing a parent. I didn’t really know how to behave. I emailed my teachers to tell them I’d be taking a couple of days off and why, but I went to work for Scot as I was scheduled to do. My heart wasn’t in my work, though. When I told Scot that my mom had just passed away, he very kindly told me I should go home, which I did.

My mom had made arrangements with the Neptune Society to handle the disposition of her earthly remains, and there were no immediate plans for a funeral. In April, which was my mother’s birth month, my sister held a memorial service at her home. In the intervening months, the settling of my mom’s estate had taken place. My mom had always been very good at being frugal – to the point of rinsing out and drying paper towels for re-use. I reckon the house in beautiful sea-side Cambria probably sold for a pretty penny as well. Whatever the reason, my mom left behind the tidy sum of almost exactly 200,000 dollars, and each of her kids got one-fourth of that. Roy said he used to try to encourage her to have some fun with her money rather than leaving it for her children, but she wouldn’t listen to him.

50,000 dollars seemed like all the money in the world to my perpetually financially-developmentally-delayed mind. Lurleen asked if we were going to buy a house. I doubted without really knowing that even that princely sum would be enough of a down payment for a person with extremely bad credit to purchase a home. To be honest, I didn’t even consider it. I figured even if we could buy a house, then we’d just be sitting – broke as ever – in a house we owned, with all the expenses involved in that. There’s something to be said for renting, especially when you’re poor. If something goes wrong with your domicile, your landlord is responsible for it (provided you have a decent landlord). Of course, it is a shame that all that money we spend on rent doesn’t build up anything, the way equity in a home does.

 A few years later, I sometimes watched “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”. I thought it was cool how the show helped struggling families, but it was interesting that these poor families always somehow owned their homes. It amused me to think that if we had somehow been able to purchase a house, we might qualify for a makeover from ABC. However, those families always had something else going on besides financial difficulty – whether it be a family member with a dread disease or life-altering disability, or they are just super-duper people who do tremendous things for their community. None of those things applied to us.

As it was, I spent some of my inheritance paying back my long-suffering brother Dick for some long-overdue loans. The largest single investments we made with our windfall were a mini-van and a maxi-family vacation. The van was just under ten years old, which made it the newest car we had ever owned. For the vacation, we drove the kids and my mother-in-law to her family’s annual reunion picnic at her brother’s house in Arlington, Washington. Mrs. R’s grandmother traveled by train every year to attend the event, but her mom, Jordana had not been for able to attend for many years. After the picnic, we took the ferry to Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The trip was spread over several days, and a splendid time was had by all.

We hadn’t been able to afford to take our kids on the kind of vacations that both Mrs. R and I remember from our childhoods. Critics may say we spent a little too much on the trip, or didn’t invest the rest of my inheritance wisely, but I (no longer) have any regrets. I used to torture myself wondering how things might have been different if I had just been smarter with money, but I finally decided that I was expecting too much of myself and 50 thousand dollars.

Okay, back to the jobs! After graduating from the university, I tried to find work in what I had just been trained to do. Unfortunately, I had a run into a problem while in my upper division classes. For one thing, I learned that while I’m generally very good at academic stuff like reading, writing papers and taking exams, I’m a little slower at learning things which are more “hands on”. Unfortunately, old-fashioned cartography and its newer incarnation – GIS (Geographic Information Systems) – are very “hands on”. I was already pretty comfortable with computers, but the software for GIS was overwhelmingly complex. Many of the younger students seemed to take to it like ducks to water, but I struggled.

I ended up passing with C grade from my GIS and cartography courses, and those were the core classes of the particular geography option I had chosen. I thought desperately of changing my option to planning – which I also found very interesting, but didn’t require so much computer gim-crackery – but it was too late to switch. If I could have repeated the classes, I’m sure I could have improved that grade, but that wasn’t an option, either. Getting C’s was a blow to my ego, and it made me worry for my chances of finding gainful employment in my chosen field.

However, the old saying says, “‘C’s get degrees”, and besides, the rest of my grades had been almost all A’s. I hoped that any potential employers wouldn’t be looking too closely at my actual grades. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to enter a field for which you have no practical experience, employers don’t have much else to judge you by. As it was, one job I applied to did ask me to send copies of my transcripts. I complied with their wishes, with little hope of success, and – as expected – I never heard back from them.

The three problems I had with finding work in geography were location, location, location. There was just nothing available in Butt County. Most of the jobs I could even hope to get would have required relocating, which wasn’t really feasible. The closest place I could have found work would have been in the state capitol, Sacramento, and that would have been a very difficult commute, as I had no desire to live there. In fact, I did apply for a state job there, and even traveled down for the civil service test, which consisted of both a written and an oral exam.

I quickly found out that oral exams are the most awful things in the whole broad spectrum of job search hurdles. Having already gotten over 70 jobs, I had become fairly adept at the art of the interview, but an oral exam combines the worst aspects of an interview with the stress of trying to answer questions without benefit of pen and paper. For some reason, oral exams always seem to involve three interrogators, rather than the usual one-on-one of an interview.  I’m not very fast at thinking on my feet, and here I had three people staring me in the face and expecting me to answer questions off the top of my nervous head. At one point, I mistook their request for an explanation of the term “topology” in relation to GIS for “topography”. I think my answer included a fairly good definition of topography, but it certainly didn’t answer the question. In fact, I’m sure I appeared to just be babbling. I did wonder at the time why they were looking at me funny, and I really wondered later why they didn’t see where the mistake lay and give me a chance to correct myself. Needless to say, I didn’t get that job.

I’ve had to endure a few more oral exams since then, for various types of jobs, and I can safely say that I’ve never passed a single one. I don’t know if they represent a valid way of evaluating applicants, but they certainly seem to be effective at keeping me from getting hired for the job in question.

Job #73: Cage(d) Cashier

While I was engaged in the increasingly hopeless task of looking for a job in geography, I also needed to think about how I was going to feed my family. One of the local Native American casinos was advertising for cashiers. I applied and was hired for the swing shift. I was the only guy locked in a cage with a bunch of women, which sounds like the plot of a Z-Grade exploitation film, but wasn’t nearly that fun.

It’s already established that I’ve never been good with money, and, to my chagrin, this extended to the simple task of making change. At the end of the night, my cash register drawer almost never balanced with what I had started with, usually to the negative. It was never a huge amount, but I was giving a little too much change to some lucky recipients. It became something of a joke, but amazingly, they kept me on.

Job #74: GIS Technician (!)

Meanwhile, I still kept my eye on the geography market. Soon, my fortunes seemed to take a turn for the better. A lady who ran a small consulting firm in College Town needed a part-time GIS technician. Her daughter had previously filled that role for her while she was in the geography program at the university, but she had recently departed for a real job in a city far away. Fortunately, she didn’t ask to see my grades, and I was able to talk my way into the job with a combination of sincerity, charm and a little bullshit.

I continued to work at the casino while I worked part-time at the consulting firm. My wages at the casino were decent, but my new job paid a whopping 15 dollars an hour, which the highest wage I had ever earned. So I was feeling pretty good about my situation. I occasionally felt as though I was paying for the bullshit part of my interview because I sometimes found myself stymied by some aspect of the GIS software. I had to call my employer’s daughter a couple of times for help, which caused my boss to question her hiring of me. However, in some ways that job was a bit bullshit itself. It turned out that the GIS software she had me using was the same student version I had used when I was in school. Obviously her daughter had provided her with a copy of it. So she wasn’t even paying for the software she was using for profit, which is illegal. It also meant that we could get no updates or technical support. I kept this fact in mind whenever my boss seemed dissatisfied with my lack of experience.

Soon my boss got a rather lucrative contract, and she began to pressure me to come to work full-time so we could get the project done in short order. I was a little reluctant to quit my full time casino job for short-term gain, but she assured me that she would have plenty of work for me afterward. So urgent was she that I didn’t even give the casino the standard two weeks’ notice of my departure. That was my second mistake. The first was believing my other boss.

I have no doubt that she simply fucking lied to me. I went to work full-time at her dodgy little firm, and thought that at last I had “arrived” in the job market, with a good-paying “professional” job for which I had studied at a university. I figured I was finally doing everything right. Even my long-deceased father might have grunted approvingly from the belly of whatever fish had mistakenly swallowed his bitter, bitter ashes.

I quickly finished the project she was so hot for, and no sooner had I done so, then she laid me off, with the added insult that she wished my GIS skills had been just a little better. I thought about reporting her illegal use of the software, but didn’t follow through on that.

I petitioned the casino for my job back, but it had been clearly stated at the time of my original hiring that failure to give a full two weeks’ notice was clear grounds for not being rehired. I continued to beg and plead, even taking my case all the way up to the general manager. I explained that the only reason I had not given sufficient notice was because of the pressure from my duplicitous other employer. I think I had them on the verge of relenting, and at one point one of my supervisors from the cashiers’ cage told me over the phone that I could come back, and to give her a call later to finalize the details. When I did call back, that supervisor was mysteriously unavailable, and one of her male superiors told me that she had spoken in error and under no circumstances would I be coming back. I was crushed. Perhaps if my drawers (the cash ones, not the ones I wear) had balanced more often I might have had a chance, but I’ll never know for sure.

Job #75: Cashier, 7-11 Store

Meanwhile, the winter holidays were fast approaching, and I needed work. I started applying everywhere I could. One place was at one of the three O-Town 7-11 franchises. Another was Walmart. I got hired at 7-11. Seemingly moments later, Walmart called me for an interview on what would be the second day of my new 7-11 job. I must have had an intuition. I agreed to come in for the interview, because Walmart sounded like a better deal, but I had already committed to 7-11, so I reported for training there.

It took only one day to convince me of the folly of that decision. I’ve stated before that I’ve never been comfortable in fast paced jobs, and working alone behind the counter of a busy convenience store/gas station is the very definition of “fast-paced”. I thought I was in hell. The young man who was training me seemed at ease in his job. He liked the hurly-burly of it. He told me of one incident in which he had jumped over the counter and tackled a man who was trying to run out of the store with a purloined 12-pack of beer. He had enjoyed the fracas, but I couldn’t imagine risking limb and possibly life over your employer’s money.

Another interesting thing he told me was that I was going to see “a lot of tit” (as he put it) on that job. Apparently a common way for young women to get free products was by offering to show the clerk their breasts. I guess this wouldn’t be very effective on female clerks, unless they were of a certain persuasion. I also wondered what a clerk would do if he found the proffered bosoms lacking in some way. Could he insist the woman had to pay cash, or had he already agreed to give them their Slurpee just for the viewing? Even the promise of boobs was not enough to convince me that this was a worthy job. When Mrs. R picked me up after that first day, I said, “I think I’ll see what Walmart has to offer.”

My Walmart interview was scheduled prior to when I was supposed to report for my second day of training at 7-11, so I wasn’t even in violation of any proprieties. If Walmart didn’t pan out, at least I could still go to work at 7-11 until something better came along. The first thing they had me do was take a sort of personality assessment.

I had encountered these sorts of tests before. The first one was when I had applied many years before as a driver/salesperson for Schwan’s Ice Cream. It was very similar to the infamous Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory, which I’d had a chance to look at when I worked at Children’s Services. I wasn’t expecting to be bombarded by such a thing at Schwan’s, and I almost ran screaming from the place in the middle of it. I wish I had. These tests are designed in such an insidious manner that you just can’t win. If you try to answer in a manner that you think your prospective employer would like, say on a subject such as your attitude toward minor pilfering of office supplies, you soon find yourself entrapped. Later questions may touch upon the same subject, but the multiple choice answers are worded in such a way so as to completely contradict your earlier answer.

As it was, I made it through Schwan’s first interview after the test, but quickly decided I didn’t want to work for such a weird, cultish-seeming place. I declined their offer of a second interview. If I had passed that one, the THIRD one would have been at my home. I had nothing to be ashamed of in my home life – I just felt that was very invasive and none of their damned business.

But getting back to Walmart, their personality test wasn’t nearly as mind-fucking as Schwan’s and some other places had been. Some of my answers were geared toward trying to make them happy, but at least they didn’t try to trip me up to the extent that Schwan’s test had. Right after the test, my interviewer went over my answers with me. She only had an issue with one of my responses. It had been a weird question having something to do with how an employee who had been caught stealing should be treated. The response I chose was that she should be discharged, obviously, but that was all. The response they preferred I would have made had something to do with her misdeed also being made known to her co-workers. My interviewer wanted to know why I hadn’t chosen this. I said that I thought that would be a violation of not only her rights as a person and a citizen of a free society, but that it was almost certainly in contradiction of standard human resources practices, and possibly illegal. She didn’t seem terribly satisfied with my response, but since it was the only question I had “failed”, I passed the test. It did make me worry a little, however, about what Walmart was willing to do to me if I ever violated one of their rules.

By the end of the interview, I was offered a job on the truck crew. I didn’t really know exactly what that would entail, but it sounded better than 7-11. I was essentially being hired as extra help for the approaching holiday season, but there was the possibility of continued employment after Christmas, so I accepted. I called 7-11 and said thanks, but no thanks, and I wouldn’t be coming in any more. Perhaps a slightly shitty thing to do on such short notice, but it was a shitty job.

Job #76: Walmart Truck Crew

I soon found out what truck crew was all about, and I was a little surprised that they had hired a 43 year old man for the job. Most of the people I was working with were about 20 years younger than me. I guess I somehow looked fitter than I was. I’ve had less physically demanding jobs for which I was given a physical examination to see if I was up to the tasks. Usually companies are wary of having to make payments to injured workers. Walmart seemed to have no such qualms. They probably changed their policy after me.

Truck crew is simple in concept, but brutal in practice. A tractor-trailer would back into one of the two receiving bays. We would set up a long, serpentine belt of little rollers at the back of the truck, then two people would stand in the trailer and furiously unload boxes and shove them down the line to the other workers, who would stack them on pallets according to which department they were destined for. We usually unloaded two trucks a night, but sometimes there were as many as three or four, especially the closer we got to Black Friday, that much anticipated “biggest shopping day of the year” that retailers dream off the rest of the year. However, even if it were only a “one truck night”, all trucks seemed to have to be unloaded at the same fever pitch.

I tried to keep up as best I could, but it was murder. I was so sore and tired at the end of each night, I sometimes wept when I got home. One night I was one of the pair of people in the trailer. Apparently I wasn’t getting boxes on the line fast enough, for at one point our supervisor stuck his head into the trailer and screamed, “FREIGHT!”  I thought he had said, “BREAK!”, and it was with great relief that I stepped out of the trailer. Then I noticed nobody else had stopped working. Realizing my error, I took a place along the line and began transferring the boxes I had just unloaded onto a pallet. Somebody else took my place inside the trailer and nothing was said about my mistake, if anyone even noticed. I think they were all just satisfied that the freight was now moving at an acceptable rate.

Eventually the rigors of the job took their toll upon my body, and I was stricken with a horrible case of sciatica, which I’d had problems with before. I had to go to the emergency room, and was off work for a couple of days, and then I returned to work, but on light duty. By law, Walmart couldn’t discharge with me a pending worker’s compensation case, but they didn’t really have an open position that fit the requirements of “light duty” for which I was qualified, so I was sort of left to my own devices. It may surprise you to hear it, but I do have a work ethic, so I made work for myself. I began limping about the store, finding misplaced merchandise and returning it to its proper department. I got pretty elaborate about it. I borrowed a shopping cart, and began carrying a roll of packing tape, some zip ties, a pair of scissors and a one-hole punch, so I could make repairs on torn packages that didn’t hang on their hooks properly. I kept quite busy that way, and no one seemed to worry about me. Much later I found out that this role I had taken upon myself was almost exactly the same as a position called “zoner”. Why no one had simply told me to be a zoner was beyond me

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had paused in my self-appointed tasks to converse with an acquaintance of mine who was shopping. A call came over the public address system asking me to come to the manager’s office. I thought I was in trouble because I had been spotted slacking. No, that wasn’t it at all. It was worse. It was explained to me that Black Friday hadn’t been as profitable as they had hoped, and they had to lay off some of the extra help. I’m sure the fact that I was an injured free agent factored into their decision. Now they had a legal excuse to get rid of me. They gave me my final check, which had a candy bar tied to it with a bow, and wished me goodbye, good luck and merry Christmas. I left with mixed emotions. On one hand, I hated working at Walmart, so I was glad to be rid of it. On the other hand, I wasn’t happy about being unemployed again, but at least it wasn’t my fault.

And that seems as good a place to stop as any.

The end.

Chapter 24: Mapping Out a Future

Chapter 24: Mapping Out a Future

Jobs 67 - 72

1997 - 1998

Job #67: Taxi Driver

After I left Turkey, I was able to get a job with one of O-Town’s two local cab companies. Unfortunately, I first had to pay 100 dollars I could ill afford to the city of O-Town for a permit to operate a cab. I had to pass a government-level background check and be fingerprinted and all that jazz. I was surprised that mere cab driving required such scrutiny, but considering the generally sleazy nature of most of the cab drivers I met, it’s probably for the best that not just anyone could drive a cab.

The cab company I worked for shared the name and color with the most famous cab company in the country: Yellow Cab. And by “shared”, I mean “stole” (I’m not really afraid of being sued by a guy who operates a small fleet of cabs out of a dodgy auto salvage yard; besides – he’d have to admit to stealing the name in order to sue me for saying it). It’s my understanding that Yellow Cab, whose ubiquitous name and color can be found in just about every city in the nation, franchises out those operations. There are, however, many small-time operators who just use the color/name combo without so much as a “by your leave” to the owner of the copyright. O-Town’s was one such operation, and I’m sure the real Yellow Cab corporation in Chicago couldn’t be bothered about what was going on in a Podunk town in northern California.

Yellow Cab’s rival also stole their name from another famous cab company: Checker. The owner of Checker had once worked for Yellow until going into business for himself. The competition between the two reached ridiculous levels. Yellow started painting checkers on their cabs in order to confuse and snag costumers from Checker, who responded by painting their cabs yellow. Finally the city council had to step in and order that henceforth and forevermore Yellow Cabs shall be yellow and Checker Cabs shall be checkered. The two idiots probably spent more money painting and repainting their cabs than they ever made from trying to steal each other’s passengers. Eventually Checker went out of business, and for a while Yellow Cab was the only game in town, but now there are a few smaller competitors to Yellow in O-Town. Shortly after he officially shut up shop, the former owner of Checker was rumored to still be hauling passengers for a fee in his private vehicle, which was illegal at the time, so I guess it’s a good thing that the city required permits to drive cabs. Now I suppose with the advent of such things as Uber, all bets are off.

Driving a cab was quite different from driving a paratransit vehicle. We didn’t have meters in our cabs, so we used a “zone” system drawn on a map of O-Town to determine the fares. There were two problems with this system. First, the zone map had been drawn when the cab company had been under different ownership and their office was located downtown. Now the office was a couple of miles away from its original location. The price of fares had been updated over the years, but the zones had not been redrawn to account for the new location of the origination point of the cabs. This was unfair to passengers and drivers for various reasons. If a passenger was making a short trip near the current office, they were actually paying more for their ride than someone making a trip of similar distance near the old office. By the same token, the drivers weren’t making as much money despite having to drive a couple of extra miles to transport someone near the old office. The company owner, Nick, was also losing money through this oversight, since he got a whopping 60 percent of our fares.

The other problem with the zone system was, of course, that the lines between the zones had to be drawn somewhere, usually coinciding with streets. If your destination was just on the far side of a zone line, the cost of your ride jumped up considerably. I spent so much time arguing with passengers over what they thought was a fair fare, among other things. I used to wish so badly that we had meters in the cabs, so that no matter how unreasonable the price may seem, at least the passengers couldn’t really argue with the amount showing on the screen. Besides, they could have monitored how much their ride was costing and asked to be let out short of their destination if it was starting to exceed their budget.

That’s a strange thing about cab rides – you often don’t know how much it’s going to cost until the end of the ride, and you don’t have to pay until the end. We had a flat “pick up” fee like most cab companies, and the zone system at least made it possible to know in advance how much the ride would cost. But there were additional fees, such as waiting, which was based upon a certain price per minute. IF someone wanted me to wait while they ran into a store or something before continuing their journey, that added to the price. This usually ended in an argument about how long they thought they had been away from the cab compared to my time-keeping. Again, if we’d had meters, there wouldn’t have been room for dispute.

I usually got ripped off by people who said that someone waiting for them at their destination had the money to pay for they ride. They’d disappear into the house and I’d never see them again. One time I took two teenage girls out to the reservation near one of O-Town’s two – count ‘em:TWO –  Native American casinos. At the time violent inter-tribal rivalry necessitated that the entrances to the reservation neighborhoods be closed to all vehicular traffic except those of residents. I stopped at the gate while one of the girls walked in to purportedly get the money for their fare. After several minutes of awkward waiting, I suddenly realized what was about to happened. Sure enough, the second girl suddenly jumped out of the cab and disappeared into the darkness as fast as her feet could carry her. I didn’t even bother yelling. I certainly wasn’t going to run after her – I could just imagine what might happen to a white man caught chasing a teenage girl through “the Rez” at night.

Of course, all our pick-ups and drop-offs were logged by the dispatcher, so if we got ripped off by a passenger, we still owed the owner his 60 percent for the time and use of his cab. We also had to pay for our own fuel. So I had to become very careful. The only time we actually asked anyone to pay upfront was for out-of-town trips. That was company policy. The dispatcher would calculate the cost of the trip, and the passenger paid that amount before we set out. For the local rides, though, if I didn’t know someone, or had any reason to doubt their willingness or ability to pay, I would sometimes ask to see their money before we started.

 O-Town is not like New York, where it seems like every other car on the streets is a taxi, and you could just hail one at any time. Since we had such a small fleet, and there weren’t any “taxi stands” where someone could expect to find a cab, a person on the streets could never know when or if a cab might pass by. Most of our rides were called into the office, and then the next driver in the rotation was dispatched to pick the passenger up. People could still hail us, but I quickly learned that people hailing a cab in 0-Town usually didn’t have any money. Often their decision to take a cab was a spur-of-the-moment thing based upon the unexpected appearance of a cab crossing their path. If they’d been planning on taking a cab, they would have called for one. The fact that they didn’t call usually meant that they didn’t even have enough money for a pay phone. It’s sad to report how many times I was accurate in this cynical assessment. Such passengers were the mostly likely to “rabbit” on you at the end of the ride.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that cab driving under such conditions as existed in O-Town at that time was just a money-losing proposition. I worked a twelve-hour shift from 6 at night until 6 in the morning, and some nights I barely made any money after paying the owner his lion’s share of my fares and refueling the cab. Many nights it didn’t pay nearly as well as working a normal human-type shift at a minimum wage job would have. Shortly after the new year, I decided to call it quits. The owner actually tried to talk me out of it, which was a new experience for me. I was flattered, but I just couldn’t keep working such long hours for such low pay.

1998

Job #68: Cement Work

I found some temporary work with the step-father of our dear old family friend Becky, Lurleen’s niece. He was a free-lance cement mason, and a decent fellow. The work was sporadic, though, and nothing I could rely upon for regular income.

About this time I got pulled into one of many well-meaning programs which people on public assistance and unemployment insurance often find themselves. It was a series of job search workshops. I had been through such programs before, so they didn’t have much that was new to teach me. They did, however, offer instruction in job interview skills, which included video-taped mock job interviews. That was actually quite valuable and helpful. They also helped with job placement.

Job #69: Crop Dusting Company

With their help, I got a weird, short-lived job working for a crop-dusting company located in a remote corner of Butt County. Rice is a big crop here, and this company needed extra help during the seeding and fertilizing season, which was in full swing by now. We would meet at the company’s hangar, and then convoy in various vehicles out to whatever rice farm needed servicing that day. The basic set up was that a couple of open-top, bottom-dump hopper trailers full of seed or fertilizer would be parked alongside the “landing strip” (which was any piece of flat ground wide enough and long enough for the duster to land and take off). A couple of people would be stationed inside the hoppers with shovels to make sure the material all got out. A special loading machine, powered by a tractor, would suck up the material from underneath the trailers and transfer it into the hopper on the duster. The duster could only hold enough material for one or two passes of a typical rice paddy, so it was frequently landing and taking off. My usual job was to jump up on one wing while another guy took the other wing when the pilot landed. We would then clean the spattered bugs and dust off the windshield of the plane during the brief refilling procedure, then jump off and run clear so the pilot could roar off again for another pass or two. I really had to admire the skill and bravery of those duster pilots to operate safely under such conditions, which were often complicated by nearby power lines.

Of course, everything was done with great hustle. After a couple of days of repeatedly clambering on and off of the wings of an airplane, my nearly 40 year old body was just agonizingly sore. I begged off of that job, claiming that my car was not sufficient to the commute, which it really wasn’t. It was either that or ride with a co-worker I couldn’t stand.

It wasn’t long, though, before things started looking up for me, and good thing, too. I had been going through hell personally since leaving Turkey, and the financial fiasco of cab driving didn’t help. I went through one of the longest and darkest depressions of my life. When I wasn’t sleeping off my 12 hour shifts, I was surly and sullen to everyone around me. Mrs. R says that on at least one occasion she actually found me curled up in a ball inside our closed and dark bedroom closet. I have no memory of this, but I have no reason to doubt her. I was really low.

But there was hope on the horizon. It centered upon a kernel of an idea which had germinated when I was trucking. I was remembering how much I had actually enjoyed my time as a paratransit driver, and I realized that one of the things I liked best about the job was working with the elderly people who comprised the greater part of our ridership. Oh, sure, some of them were cranky, and some were downright demented, but for the most part they were an enjoyable group of people to work with. I thought that if I had the chance, I might like to return to school and learn to become a social worker specializing in the elderly.

Now, I’ve said before that college and I were never a great mix. I like to learn, and I’m good at it, but I don’t enjoy formalized education. I had made some faltering attempts to return to college, but they never lasted long. Despite my personal feelings about school, the real road block to further education was my outstanding student loan debt. At the time, if you owed the gubmint money, you were ineligible for further educational financial assistance. Without that, college was out of the question for me. When Clinton came into office, he changed that. I could go back to school if I wanted!

And now I wanted to go to school. After scores of dead-end jobs, I was ready to make good on my earlier idea of becoming a geriatric social worker (before I myself became a geriatric). Despite my crushing depression, I somehow managed to make all the necessary arrangements and fill out the necessary forms for financial aid. I was slated to start school in the fall of 1998. I was a little dismayed to find out that all the courses I had taken when I was younger didn’t really count toward anything, so I was looking at a full four years of college (two at the community college and two at the university) before I could earn my bachelor’s degree.

1998-1999

Job #70: Pizza Cook/Delivery "Boy"

Now all I needed was a part-time job to supplement my financial aid. That soon came in the form of a job at a pizza place. The owner had a few independent video stores, one in O-Town, two in College Town and one inside a supermarket all the way up in Alturas, California. He used to be a manager at one of the supermarket chains in Butt County, before deciding to go into the video business. He also opened a pizza restaurant next to the O-Town store, and that’s where I worked. 

That was actually one of my favorite jobs. Working in a pizza place is probably not something I would have chosen for a career, but it was perfect as a part-time job for a middle-aged college student. There were also a lot of perks. We got discounts on the food, and free video rentals from next door. We also got free movies at work. The video store had a few TVs hanging from the ceiling, as well as one piped into the pizza place to show movies to shoppers and diners. The staff of the video chose what to put on, and they weren’t always careful about whether the movie was strictly family-oriented. I remember seeing the famous shower scene from “Sixteen Candles” and the “draw me like one of your French girls” scene from “Titanic” while working. I didn’t complain.

My favorite part of the job was delivering the food. The owner provided a car, so I didn’t have to worry about fuel, insurance and wear and tear on my own vehicle. Sometimes I shake my head when I remember some of the risks I took in pursuit of higher tips for a speedy delivery.

Meanwhile, my focus at school changed almost as soon as I started. My first semester, I had to take a geography class as part of my general education requirements. I discovered that I absolutely loved geography. I quickly changed my major to it and began to pursue it with vigor. I planned on becoming a cartographer. I had always loved maps, and I had this romantic image of myself sitting at a drafting table, patiently drawing lines and dots that represented the world. I was soon to learn that the new reality was much different than my old-fashioned notion, and that would present some problems further down the road. But I didn’t know that then, and was just happy to have found something I was passionate about.

I probably could have happily worked at the pizza place for the entire time I was in school, but it seems like whenever I find a job I like, the universe seems to need to strike some kind of balance by taking it from me. After about a year, the owner announced that he was going to have to close the pizza place because it wasn’t showing a profit. I was sad. Now I had to find a new job.

1999 – 2001

Jobs # 71 and 72:
Instructional Assistant and Geography Tutor

I had just started a new school year, and had become pretty friendly with one of my professors, whose name was Scot (yes, with only one “t”). He was a few years older than me, and had been a quadriplegic most of his adult life due to an unfortunate collision with a submerged boulder while diving into a local creek. His disability had not prevented him from achieving success in college and life. He was now the chair (no pun intended) of the geography department at the community college. One day after class I pushed his wheelchair across the hall to his office, which he shared with a couple of other professors. During the course of our conversation, I revealed that I was looking for work, and he said they needed help in the geography office. I was overjoyed. To actually work alongside the professors who were teaching my favorite subject. It was like a dream come true that I hadn’t even dared to dream.

I also worked for a time as a geography tutor in the learning center at Butt College as part of my financial aid package. I didn’t get many tutees. Geography really isn’t that hard.

In summation, I continued to work for Scot at the community college even when I moved on to the university in College Town, so that was actually one of the longer jobs I’ve had, if you don’t count winter and summer breaks. I can’t really remember how I made ends meet during those lulls in financial aid from the schools. I may have picked up work with Scoop from time to time.

I will touch briefly upon some of things that happened during my time at the Big U in the next chapter. I graduated in May of 2002, and my work history continued to take some interesting turns and bumps, but the overall rate at which I changed jobs began to decrease. We only have 13 more to go until we reach my current job.

By the way, at the time of this writing (December 27, 2015), tomorrow will be my fifth-year anniversary at my current job, making it my longest job by about a year and half over its predecessor. Hurray?

The end.

Chapter 23: Student With Idiot For Trainer

Chapter 23: Student With Idiot for Trainer

Jobs 64 – 66

1997

Job 64: Long Haul Truck Driver

The next couple of years can be best described as “floundering”. I called the last chapter “Highs and Lows” (mostly because I couldn’t think of anything better), but this period of my life probably represented some of the lowest lows and highest highs I’ve experienced in my life. I especially don’t like looking back at my work record for these couple of years because I think it makes me look like an idjit. So let’s get to it, shall we?

At this time, Mrs. R and I developed what she called our “get middle-class quick scheme”. She enrolled in a vocational program to become a pharmacy technician. Sadly, she was never able to finish that course because her health took a downturn from which it has never recovered. I applied to a long-haul trucking company which provided their own training. I shouldn’t say their real name, but it’s a kind of bird which is named for its habit of flying swiftly. However, I shall call them “Turkey”.

Turkey provided the training, but it wasn’t free. Not by a long stretch. I never could have afforded it if I’d had to pay for it upfront. Instead, they financed your training, and then you paid it back out of your paycheck. This was actually a good deal if you stuck it out until the end of your obligation. Then you could go where you wanted if you didn’t like Turkey.

Of course, I was attracted to this deal mainly because I figured it was a good way to get trained for a profession which offered a decent income. However, there were also less altruistic motivations at work in the shallow end of my subconscious. I must admit that I had been having trouble completely adjusting to being a husband and father. I loved my wife and kids, but there was still a big part of me that wanted to be a loner. I confess that I had tried a few times to run away from my familial obligations, but Mrs. R was always able to talk some sense into me. I feel badly for putting her through such turmoil.

I think I saw being out on the road for weeks at a time as a sort of compromise; I would have a legitimate excuse to be by myself for long spells. I’m sure I was following my father’s fine modeling. I think he tended to take jobs that kept him away from home because he was never totally comfortable as a family man. There was a period after we moved to O-Town when he took some local jobs that allowed him to be home every day, but those never seemed to last long. Then he got that job in West Sacramento and chose to live in a trailer on the company property during the week. I guess I can’t blame anyone for not wanting a 90 minute each way daily commute, but I wonder how much of that was based on practicality and how much was him not wanting to be around his wife and son.

My training took place in a little town on Interstate 5 called Willows. It’s only about 45 miles from O-Town, but commuting was problematic. It would mean less sleep for me, and a lot of expense in gas and wear and tear on whatever usually already worn-out vehicle were driving at the time. Turkey could put me up at a motel in Willows for an additional charge on my debt to them, so I went for that. The motel was a little dodgy, but it had a pool and HBO, and my room had a kitchenette. The motel was close to the training yard, and I would ride with one of the other students who had a car but was staying at the motel because he lived in Nevada. Unfortunately, the motel was a long way from Willows proper. I had brought a bike, and one day I rode it to the local Walmart for supplies. It wasn’t a very good bike, however, and the narrow roads through the corn fields were terrible for bike riding, so I didn’t repeat the process.

The training was fairly perfunctory. The first week or two consisted of classroom lessons at Turkey’s terminal, then we shifted to the dusty training yard for the behind the wheel training. There were a couple of things about driving a big rig that were problematic for me. One of them was shifting. I already knew how to drive a stick, but I’ve never been terrible good at it, and trucks have something like 18 gears to clash through. I finally got it, but was never terribly smooth about it.

The other thing, which almost kept me from graduating, was backing and docking. Oh, I could back up in a straight line – no problem. But when it came to having to make the rear end of the trailer go in a direction other than straight, I was hopeless. There’s always been something a little funny about my brain when it comes to direction. I’m great at north, south, etc., but ask me on the spur of the moment to go left or right, and there’s a very good chance I will go the wrong way. I mean, I KNOW the difference, but sometimes I have to take a moment to remember which is which. It’s embarrassing at the least, but when it comes to working out which way to turn the wheel to make a tractor-trailer combo go backwards in a particular direction it’s downright detrimental.

Everyone else graduated from training right on schedule. I passed all the other requirements, but my backing still wasn’t up to snuff. Turkey sent me down to their main California terminal in beautiful Stockton for further training. The first day they sent me out with a local driver who delivered tires to various shops around the eastern San Francisco bay area. His truck didn’t have a sleeper cab because he was home every night, and his trailer was shorter than what I would be pulling in long-haul, so it wasn’t quite the same. The idea was that some of the amazingly tight places he had to back into would give me a good idea of how to do it, and it might have, if he had actually let me try it. His schedule was too busy to allow for my fumbling. Just watching from the passenger seat is no way to learn. After all his deliveries were done, he found an empty loading dock and let me practice, but I still wasn’t confident.

I spent the next couple of days practicing in Turkey’s Stockton terminal yard with various drivers, but I still sucked. The lady who had hired me told me that they would give me a couple of more days, and if I still couldn’t get it, they’d have to “cut their losses”, as she put it. I don’t know if I would still owe them for all the training and lodging I’d received, but I reckon I would have. I felt ridiculous and stupid. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I couldn’t master this seemingly simple skill. I’d have to go back home with my tail between my legs and admit to my family that their husband and father was an abject failure.

I tried over the next couple of days to get my shit together. Finally on Friday they decided (rather reluctantly, I thought) that I was ready. I think they realized it would be better to have a crappy driver than no driver at all after all that trouble. I certainly still didn’t feel confident, but if they were willing to take a chance, I was willing to do my best to live up to their meagre expectations. Of course, all of this was just the end of “behind the wheel” training. The next phase was to spend about six weeks OTR (“over the road”) with a driver-trainer – actually delivering loads to real customers under real world conditions.

I can’t remember my trainer’s name, which is just as well, so I’ll just call him Fred. Fred was in an elite cadre of Turkey drivers who delivered exclusively to Walmart stores. That may not sound like much, until you consider that Walmart has the largest privately-owned fleet of trucks in the country. Their drivers are the cream of the crop, and very well-compensated. Even with all those excellent drivers of their own, they still need to contract with other trucking companies to get all those goods to the stores. Of course, they hold their contractors to very high standards as well. In order for a Turkey driver to be a dedicated Walmart hauler, he or she has to have been driving for at least five years accident-free, amongst other things.

So Fred had a pretty good situation. He mainly drove the I-5 corridor from Walmart’s distribution center in Red Bluff to stores in Oregon and Washington, with occasional side trips to exotic places like Moscow, Idaho. He was usually home once a week. In fact, that was interesting. One night we had a layover in Redding, where he lived. I naturally figured that he would want to go to his home to spend the night, and I would at least have the truck to myself. I was surprised that he didn’t. He explained that if he went home, he would likely stay up too late visiting his wife (make of that what you will) and watching TV, and then be no good for driving the next day. I found his dedication to the job admirable, but I asked how his wife would feel if she knew he was in town but didn’t come home. He responded that his wife was so happy with the money he was making that she didn’t complain about the vagaries of the job.

Since Fred was home about once a week, so was I, which was nice, although it was a little less convenient for me because I didn’t live on I-5.  If Fred was returning home from the south, he could drop me at the Willows terminal. Otherwise, Mrs. R had to drive to Redding to pick me up. Fred’s travels often took us through Bend, Oregon. In Bend, there is a truck stop which has the same name as Rimpy Jr.’s real first name. Fred and I were on our way home once when we stopped in Bend. I wanted to get Rimpy Jr. an eponymous hat from the truck stop, because I thought he would enjoy having a hat with his name on it. I realized that I needed to get Rimpyette a gift as well so she wouldn’t feel left out. Like most truck stops, it had a selection of gift items for travelers, but none of them were really geared toward a three year old girl. The “cutest” thing I could find was a small, plush lobster toy.

No! Not like that! Jesus.

The lobster seemed rather lame to me, and I had the feeling that Rimpyette was not terribly impressed with my gift. Mrs. R assures me that Rimpyette loved that toy. The fact that she cut off its yarn “whiskers” meant nothing.

I have been racking my brain trying to remember exactly why I decided to quit Turkey – cold (see what I did, there?). Usually it seems like there is some decisive event or factor that pushes me over the edge into quit mode. Try as I might, I can’t recall if there was such a thing. I remember thinking that Fred seemed like a bit of an asshole. I think the main thing was that the reality of being out on the road, away from my family (but never alone because of my ever-present trainer) was starting to wear upon me. The thing with the lobster plushie bulks large in my mind as an example of the sort of life I could expect if I were to be a professional long-haul trucker, but it alone wasn’t enough to make me quit.

It seems to be the dream of many truckers to land a driving job that allows them to be home every night. You might have to pay your dues “over the road” until you’ve acquired enough years of experience to get one of those lauded local gigs. I apparently thought that I could somehow leap-frog over the “years of experience” part and parlay my commercial license and recent training into a local driving job. Even though I had signed a contract that I would work for Turkey until the money they had invested me was repaid, I went ahead and left abruptly. Little did I know just how good I’d had it.

Job 65: Milk Truck Driver

Somehow I got a job with a company that hauled milk. I can’t for the life of me remember their name, which is just as well, since I wouldn’t use it here. I seemed to have blocked out quite a few memories of this difficult time in my life. I have tried to find it out their name so I could give it an appropriate alias, but with no success. Perhaps they have gone out of business – which would be ironic, because then I could safely use their real name. They were also based in Willows, so now I had no choice but to commute there every day.

If I thought that backing was difficult before, I was really up shit creek now. Some of the dairy farms that the truckers had to back the tanker trailer into were incredibly cramped. Also, pulling a tanker full of liquid is very different from hauling a trailer full of dry goods. I had a tanker endorsement on my license, but that was only because I had correctly answered enough questions on a test. I had no real experience with it. The problem with liquids is they slosh from side to side and back and forth. You have to take extra care on curves and leave more room for smooth stops. The other milk drivers regaled me with horror stories of some of the terrible tanker wrecks they had witnessed or heard about.

The transmissions in the old beater trucks we were using were not as smooth as Turkey’s had been, and I was having a miserable time trying to get the hang of shifting while turning sharp corners on farm roads with enough RPMs to keep from stalling, but not so much speed as to tip the whole schmutz over into the corn fields.

Job 66: Long Haul Truck Driver (again)

One of the waggish acronyms that can be made out Turkey’s real name (here comes the law suit) is “Sure Wish I’d Finished Training”, and that described me perfectly. After a couple of weeks, I realized that I was in way over my empty head with the milk hauling job, and I called Turkey and begged them to take me back. Incredibly, they agreed. I guess they figured that was their best chance of getting their money back.

I was assigned a new trainer, whom I shall call Randy, which is dangerously close to his true name. If I thought Fred was an asshole, I hadn’t seen anything yet. As least Fred never yelled. Randy took a drill sergeant approach to his job as a driver-trainer. It was like being trapped in a truck cab with my father. Randy was an odd duck. He rented a dumpy house on a dead end street in an ugly industrial neighborhood in the eastern suburbs of Sacramento. He had an Asian wife who was a couple of decades his senior. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it was just unusual. Despite the shabbiness of his life, he really thought his shit didn’t stink.

He had also just become an owner-operator through Turkey’s lease program. Turkey would finance the ownership of a truck for their drivers who had been with them for a certain length of time and were generally credit worthy. The truck essentially belonged to the driver, and Turkey would take its payments for the loan out of the driver’s earnings, and in turn the driver leased the truck back to Turkey. The owner could put whatever name he liked on the side of his truck, as long as it included the phrase “leased to Turkey Trucking, Inc.” The driver was expected to save enough money to cover a balloon payment at the end of each year. Saving that money shouldn’t be a problem, because owner-operators make an insane amount of money on each load. Of course, they are also responsible for any expenses like tires and repairs, but they still make a very handsome salary. By comparison, an average OTR driver made about 22 cents a mile at the time. That may not sound like much, but you could usually drive about 500 miles a day. If you do the math, that comes to about 2200 dollars a month. Not fantastic, but better than any wage I had previously had.

Randy had just taken possession of his new truck, which was a pretty, dark blue compared to the usual Turkey white, and he was very anal about it. Unlike Fred, Randy went all over the country. I got to see a lot of places I’d never been to before. However, I learned a dirty little secret about the trucking industry, at least as practiced by Turkey. Truckers based east of the Mississippi River made slightly more than the 22 cents a mile I mentioned earlier. So when they got a western driver out east, they loved to keep him running around in the east so they only had to pay him the lower rate for the same work.

Even though I had already spent a few weeks with Fred, I was expected to restart the whole six weeks with Randy. That was one of the worst six weeks of my life.  We did manage to get home at least once or twice during that time. Of course, “home” meant Randy’s horrible house, so Mrs. R had to drive to Sacramento to get me. On one of those occasions, after they picked me up, we went to eat at a nearby Round Table Pizza. I have always been a fast eater, but I was starving by the time the food arrived, and I was just shoveling it in. Rimpyette watched me in amazement, and then in a voice loud enough to be heard by the whole restaurant, declared “Daddy eats like a dog!” She’ll probably kill me for including that story, because she still cringes in embarrassment every time we tell it.

I almost quit Turkey again while I was still in training because I couldn’t take any more of Randy. We were somewhere near Chicago O’Hare International Airport early one morning after a long night of driving. I was dead tired, and Randy was screaming at me for some minor thing (probably my backing skills). I am not ashamed to admit that I started crying. I used a phone in the warehouse we were delivering to and called our manager back in Stockton to tell him of my desire to quit. He basically talked me out of it. He may have also made a secret call to Randy’s cell phone to tell him to lighten up on me. Whether he did or not, Randy did ratchet down the abuse. Besides, I didn’t have enough money to get on a bus back home, so it was easier to just stay.

Another time, in Little Rock, Arkansas, I was sitting sad and alone in the cab while Randy was in an electronics superstore shopping for a new stereo for his precious truck. Like the famous atheist in a fox hole, I turned to prayer. I looked to the heavens and asked what I should do. To my surprise, a voice with seemed different than my usual internal monologue said, “Everything’s going to be alright”. I wasn’t really expecting any answer, let alone a rather vague one. I thought about it for a moment, then I said, “Is there someone else up there I can talk to?” There was no further communication, so I decided to have some faith and just keep doing what I was doing.

Finally my apprenticeship to rancid Randy came to end, and I was now a solo driver. I was assigned my very own truck. It was nice being on my own, without some asshole looking over my shoulder. My backing skills had become…acceptable. Unfortunately, there was no one to bail me out of trouble. I got into one such situation on my first solo runs. I was delivering to a grocery store, and access to their loading dock was extremely difficult, involving a several-point turn. If you’ve ever looked at the rear of atypical truck trailer, you may have noticed that there is a bit of metal that projects out from the roof over each door hinge. I believe that is there to protect the hinge in case you bump the corner of the trailer against something…like, oh…the wall of a grocery store. I poked a hole about 12 feet up in their cinder block wall. Fortunately, nobody noticed, and I didn’t mention it.

Turkey had promised that I would be home no less than every two to three weeks. That was an outright lie. The had me bouncing all around the country for five weeks at a time. On one of my rare weekend furloughs, Mrs. R picked me up in Stockton and we went home to O-Town. As we were driving back to Stockton, our old Dodge Polara suddenly started making a very bad noise and lost power. We pulled over at an abandoned fruit stand about 20 miles south of O-Town. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the car (turns out it was a broken timing chain). We made a desperate call to Lurleen, who came down and rescued us. She dropped me in Stockton, and took the rest of the family back to O-Town. I think we spent the next several months car-less. When Mrs. R wanted to pick me up, she rented a car.

After a few months I’d had enough “me time”, and was lonesome for my family. Long-haul trucking wasn’t panning out the way I had hoped. On a weekend at home, I discussed it with Mrs. R, and we agreed that I should quit. Unfortunately, I had left my personal belongings in my Turkey truck, so I had to drive the rental car all the way to Stockton and back to retrieve them. Someone had moved my truck from where I had left it in the terminal yard, and it took me a while to find it. When I got inside, I found a note that said “This truck is a pig sty. Clean it up!” I was offended. For one thing, it wasn’t that messy; just a few papers left here or there. I admit that the contract that I had signed with Turkey actually had in it that I would keep my truck neat and clean, but this seemed like too much. If I hadn’t already decided to quit, that might have been enough make me do so. I wrote “Fuck you!” at the bottom of the note and put it back where I had found it. Then I drove home feeling like for at least once I had made the right decision to quit. That feeling of satisfaction didn’t last for long, however.

The end.