STUDENT JOB FIASCO
A lot has changed around student jobs since I was in the market. Many of the early jobs I had don't even exist anymore. In fact, almost every one of these experiences involve everyday things, or even what was then new-fangled technology, that are now long obsolete (as denoted by an Asterix).
I built websites during the early years of the internet, which was then the “World Wide Web”. These were made in rudimentary HTML and basically word documents. Having a touch of colour was radical and required advanced coding skills (ie. <span> / <style = color: red> / </span>). I also did OG “digital marketing” which at the time meant manually adding a site’s URL to each of the many death-by-Google search engines: Magellan*, Ask Jeeves*, Alta vista*, Infoseek*. I taught myself how to do this with the skills honed during my (couldn’t be more unrelated) Art History graduate degree: how to leech off other peoples’ work. I would cut and paste the code from another website and just switch out the text. It was digital highway robbery.
I worked in customer service for Word Perfect (*…they just don’t know it yet). My job was to deal with irate customers who couldn’t get the software to work. Basically, I got yelled at all day. Things I had to trouble shoot included figuring out that they haven’t plugged their hard drive* in. Word Perfect at the time was owned by a company called Corel. I once had a customer who yelled at me without pause for half an hour because “our product broke in the microwave”. It took another 30 minutes to determine that she had us mixed up with Corelle baking dishes (aka Corningware*). Another time someone who didn’t take kindly to our notoriously buggy software sent me a fax that just said “f-k you, f-k you” over and over on infinite repeat. The fax machine spewed out page after page of expletives all day long. This would have cost the customer money - more than the software itself cost him at Future Shop*.[1][2] I can clearly remember the singular time I had a nice customer, who very kindly offered to have me come visit her in Boca Raton. Turns out she was just lonely.
I worked in the National Archives where I spent months five floors underground in the National Library storage facility shifting through the estate of a 1980s Canadian documentary filmmaker.[3] The contents of the musty boxes would only be useful if someone was making a documentary about the documentarian. It was mostly newspaper cuttings*, which I scanned on a Xerox* machine to be added to the microfiche collection* that one would find using the card catalogue*. The final result would be that some film studies student would have the content of said microfiche printed out on the library’s dot matrix printer* with corrugated tear-off edges. I was basically a cog in a closed loop cycle of obsoleteness. To be this cog, I needed a graduate degree, fluency in French, and a willingness to swear allegiance to the Queen.[4]
I had a job as the front desk receptionist at a law firm with a 14 syllable, quadruple hyphened name. This was before voicemail or automated phone systems. I had to answer each call, place the call on hold, look up and patch to the extensions, re-answer the bounced calls, take the messages, all while simultaneously giving out written message slips to the lawyers’ secretaries and greeting in-person clients. I often had to juggle multiple calls at once, so that all I did all day was basically say "[insert 14 syllable name], please hold”, "[insert 14 syllable name], please hold”, "[insert 14 syllable name], please hold”. I burnt out of that role within days. I got moved to a back-office job where I stuffed pay cheques into envelopes and got tongue paper cuts and chemical induced migraines from licking the envelop glue strips.
I had the requisite server job, where I was hired with no experience based purely on the shortness of my skirt. I only waited tables for a day before getting moved to behind the bar after I dumped an entire beer into the groin of some corporate suit. At lunchtime. A light grey suit. My bar tending role was primarily to ply two alcoholics (Tony the hairdresser and Paul the accountant) who came in every night and drained an entire bottle of peach schnapps between them.
My favourite job was up in Algonquin park where I was a short order cook at the outfitting centre & restaurant. I was 18, had no cooking experience, no job experience and my resume consisted of nothing but my phone number. I can only assume that everyone who applied got a job. We lived in staff housing and between room, food and booze expenses, we pocketed about 25% of our minimum (which at the time was minimal) wage earnings. I only received a couple of days training before the restaurant opened.
Things I learned: the cup of my hand is exactly equal to half pound of ground beef, the required size for the burgers on the menu - useful happenstance as it meant I didn’t need to weigh each patty individually. I learned that baked goods batter comes in ten gallons drums, and a “muffin” is in no way a nutritious option. Or “food". I learned that salad dressing is made with “oil” that could power a car. What I didn’t learn until working the grill entirely on my own on my first day were the approximately 100 different ways people might order eggs. Or that in a pinch, one could deep fry bacon. I electrocuted myself twice, cut the ends off my fingers off the first dozen of times (of many more to come). My hands were covered in oven, skillet and grease burns. The PTSD of backed up order chits during rush hour makes it impossible for me to watch “The Bear”.
I loved it.
I would have gone back for multiple years.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned in How I Met Your Father, M got me fired.[5]
M would be quick to say that HE didn’t get me fired.
He just drove the getaway car.
Said accomplice’s car was a 1981 AMC Eagle* - the OG 4x4 crossover vehicle, that was basically a Gremlin* on steroids. M and a carload of friends decided to come visit my friend T (who worked in the canoe trip outfitting department) and I. At that time, there was no way to reach us short of sending a postcard* in the mail. Which means that, as only a bunch of teenagers can rationalize, they drove 3 hours, out of the blue, to a place in the middle of nowhere, to see friends who didn't know they were coming. 6 hours of driving for one night of partying? They were IN! They roll into our staff parking lot ready to PAR-TAY! The Eagle had landed.[6]
Our guests were quickly persona non grata in the dorm, which housed dozens of people who had shifts starting at 6am the next morning. So, we decamped to the parking lot to try to bum a ride to nearest bar (a further 20 minutes of driving). Now, parents of teenaged boys (past/present), parents who were once teenaged boys, and parents who are still “boys at heart”, will know that boys can find trouble in any circumstances. Even an empty parking lot. In this case the target of their “I wish I could find a woolly mammoth to chase” lizard-brains was the Bell phone booth*.[7] They were all over that thing. Dancing on top, tearing pages from the phone book, doing who knows what. This didn’t phase me in the least. I was used to it. These are the same boys who would skateboard down the slide ride and drive around town buckled into their snow board on top ofthe roof rack.[8] I was, however, mildly annoyed when during the car ride into town, one of them sing-songed “Ring! Ring!”, then handed me the phone receiver*, torn off the booth’s cord. “It’s for you!”
Turns out that unbeknownst to us, my boss was hiding in a bush watching our dumb-ass antics. Not stopping us, like a normal adult authority figure. Just spying on us. And then ratting us out to the to the OPP. Which we discovered the next morning when we arrived for our work shifts, and were greeted by a team (I repeat, a team) of cops. Friend T and I are immediately separated into two offices, where we were individually interrogated in full good cop/bad cop fashion. First one cop asking the same questions - all of which are basically “who ripped the receiver off the phone?” - then the other, switching between their wily suspects to see if our stories jived. Given that our answers to their questions were legitimately “I dunno”, this tactic was a completely futile.
Meanwhile, a re-enactment of Blues Brothers was occurring down the road. M and his crew were on their 3-hour return journey when their getaway car was pulled over and penned in by multiple cop cars. The gang of hooligans were given the full hands behind your back, head duck into the back of the cop car treatment. Exception being M who had to drive the AMC Eagle (flanked by cop cars) back to the nearest police station – which was on the far side of the park, a 45-minute drive in the wrong direction.
Once they reach the local penitentiary - a single story circa 1960s bungalow only identifiable as a cop shop by its glow up yellow OPP sign.[9] The five delinquents were shepherded into actual cells where they were left to ruminate on their moral failings, and presumably either crack under pressure or await finger pointing from the rat-finks (T & I) currently being grilled by the “away” team. This plan was deeply flawed for a few reasons. First, T & I truly had no idea who had ripped the handle off the phone, so we were useless as informants. Secondly, the Eaglets were finding their incarceration thoroughly entertaining. M and our friend A, once discovered to be under 18, were moved to the front waiting room because minors aren’t legally allowed to be “locked up” with adults - even when those adults are their dumb ass buddies. Back in the cells, our one friend removed his shoe and dragged it repeatedly along the bars while singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”. This could have gone on indefinitely, except that the clock was ticking, and M needed to get the Eagle back to the home nest. Finally, the culprit, who shall remain incognito, but we will call GLEN for no particular reason, finally came clean. (Months later he had to drive 4 hours (8 total) to go to court on the vandalism charge, only to be fined a few hundred dollars - a fraction of the entire days’ worth of time and resources expended on “apprehending” him.)
Back at the ranch, I probably would have been fired on the spot, except that I was needed behind the grill. But, not surprisingly, I was not “asked back” for the next summer. T, on the other hand, was. Our boss assumed that such a band of troublemakers could only have been friends of mine. Perhaps based on my free wheeling chefing style and refusal to properly weigh the burger patties?
Either way, it was a fair assessment given that I later married one of them.
The main take away is that while phone booths, fax machines, non-Google search engines, sexist restaurant bosses, microfiches and human phone operators may be obsolete - Dumb Boy Hijinks are eternal. And apparently endearing to some.
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[1] Ironic that Future Shop is a thing of the Past.
[2] This job experience should make me much better at helping our senior parents with basic technology concerns, like how to turn on their cell phone. It does not.
[3] Allan King - in case you were trying to guess.
[4] This would have put a bee in my Elizabethan bonnet if it wasn’t sworn on a bible – which, with my upbringing was about as morally binding to me as the yellow pages. *
[5] M & I recently told this story at the first meeting of one of the girls’ boyfriends - evidence of our willingness to sacrifice self-respect on the altar of a good story.
[6] Who’s kidding who? This was teenagers on a road trip between small towns in the 1980s…they had been partying the whole way there.
[7] Above is a picture of the ACTUAL phone booth in question. Found on Shutterfly and labeled “Canoe Lake Phone Booth, 2013".
[8] To all those parents worrying about the antics of their teenaged kids, it is worth pointing out that every one of these individuals grew into remarkable, high achieving adults. There is hope.
[9] Bonus image, the actual Police Station:
