Take This Job and Shove It

In anticipation of Labor Day, I am reflecting on hard work and my aversion to it from the pinnacle of retirement.

Remember that persistent and irritating part of the job description that says, “performs other duties as required?” During job interviews, they always say that with a wink, and you both know it is a joke. They could never make me. When it came time to move tables and chairs and lug stuff around, I always went on strike.

This world is comprised of slackers and grinders. My husband’s a grinder. I respect his work ethic, even if it drives me bonkers. I myself was once known to take naps in a storage closet when fatigue overcame me. 

I come by my work likes and dislikes honestly, having toiled in a string of gigs for which I was remarkably ill-suited. 

In addition to my ill-fated, 3-day stint as a window factory worker, here's a partial list.

Chronologically: 

• As a high school tennis court attendant, I used my key to the building to go inside and swim in the indoor pool when I should have been minding the courts. 

• As a data entry worker, the Yale Alumni Office higher-ups did not find it amusing that I routinely showed up an hour or two after the start time and then went to lunch. But that job was interfering with my identity. I saw myself as an executive, but they saw me as fired. 

• As a busboy later that summer, I considered it my prerogative to finish off customers’ desserts when they returned to the kitchen uneaten. 

• As a bookstore clerk, I smoked cigarettes while unpacking inventory. The customers started complaining that their new Stephen Kings smelled like cigarette smoke. I made some crack about smell-o-rama that the bosses didn’t find amusing. Matches, fire, and dangling ashes are probably best kept separate from flammable reading material. 

• As a barista, I learned to make a mean latté but got stressed out from drinking all that coffee while the customer line grew and grew. I soon got the hell out of those caffeinated confines.

• As a front desk associate, I thought I could smile a lot while doing heavy online shopping at Saks and Gucci dot com. “I’ll be with you in a minute, I just have to put in my shipping address,” I told the waiting customers. This stint was for my husband’s boutique fitness studio, and the other employees begged him to fire me. 

For all that, I managed to piece together a fairly decent career as a cultural marketing director. By the time that path beckoned, I had learned that there were jobs for slackers and jobs for grinders. Whatever longevity I enjoyed came from knowing the difference and sticking with the former.

My goldbricking may be blog gold today, but my managers had their hands full.