"Shopping urban in mom's suburban" and other adventures in summer employment

Before I begin this post in earnest, I feel the need to say this: I don't hate people. Per say. Really. I don't. Uh-uh. 'Kay?

Now, I'll say this: I have become an academic because I hate the "real world" (ie, corporate America and middle-class public life). And yes, often "people" are implicated in this hatred. However, in academia, people are secondary to ideas. Yes, people have created these ideas, but we can encounter them (the ideas and the people who created them) through written language. And honestly, that's how I feel most comfortable encountering others, particularly the scary but predictable monolith known as the general public.

But, because I'm still a student and my stipend ends in May, every summer I must leave the (relative) shelter of the academy and immerse myself in what I have come to know as the cesspool of public life: low-paying service jobs. Generally, these jobs are effective in that they send me running back to the university with open arms willing to be filled with books, papers, whiny students, and an even lower paycheck.

Here's a list of the crap jobs I've been forced to take over summer vacations since I was eighteen, ordered from least to most painful:

7. Office Assistant, DU English Dept.

Not a bad job, overall. I sat in a sterile, florescent office all day, but with people I could at least tolerate. The worst part of the job was photocopying ENTIRE 400-page books for a prof who needed to send the originals back to the library before she could read them. Yes, it was tedious, but at least I was working with books.


6. Library Student Assistant, McCartney Library

This was also a highly tolerable summer job. I had to put up with Dr. Moran, the hair-brained, high-tempered, and bird-like head librarian, and I had to "shelf read" pretty much the entire day, but again, at least I was constantly surrounded by books, which soothed me.


5. Temp, Office Team

I thought temping would be ok; after all, a lot of friends had done it with modest success. I should have known this would not be true for me. I was first sent to an Audi dealership in Monroeville, where I was expected to do three jobs rolled into one. This included answering the phone, which rang constantly; filing a never-ending pile of service invoices, which were organized poorly and placed in a separate room; and cashing out disgruntled service customers, which I technically wasn't supposed to do according to Office Team policy. Oh, I also had to screen calls for the business manager, taking the name of everyone who called for him and paging him to find out if this person was important enough to speak to. This happened about every five minutes. At the end of the two hellish weeks they offered me a full-time gig, but I ran far, far away. After a subsequent week-long stint at a poorly organized company where I had to ring a DOORBELL to get in every day, I quit the agency.


4. Ice Cream Scooper, Bruester's

This job seems painless enough, and you're probably thinking, as I was when I took the job, how difficult can scooping ice cream really be? Well, let me tell you: it's pretty damn difficult when you're 20 and working with 15-yr-old drama queens; when you've got shit for muscles and the ice cream is frozen hard; when the cash register tells you the total, not the amount of change you're supposed to give back, and you're bad at math; and when the corporate office is located across the street and calls to complain every time the line grows to more than five people long (which is ALL the time on summer evenings). My favorite incident was when one of the corporate bitches made me throw out an entire sundae because I had put it in the wrong kind of cup and used a little too much ice cream. I wanted to quit on the spot and walk out eating the sundae myself, but I needed the money, so I stayed for another month.


3. Freelance Editor

Why is this job worse than those listed above, you ask, when it seems like the perfect job for me? Well, because I had to work with Jaime, an insurance salesman who thought he was a genius but couldn't write to save his life. I had to read, like, the hundreth draft of his terrible manuscript and then ever so gently tell him how he should rework it (ie, rewrite it coherently). He did not take this so well, and sent me and the secretary for his publishing company about a million angry emails in which he criticized MY ability as an editor and basically acted like a condescending prick. And as you may know, it doesn't get much worse than a painfully mediocre person acting like a condescending prick. Then, I had to meet with him in person and spend three hours listening to his boring and inadequate explanations for why the manuscript sucked. I think I'll stick with teaching, where students HAVE to accept my criticism or else get a bad grade.


2. Housekeeper, Blossom View Nursing Home

Two words: Shit and piss. Everywhere. This is all you need to be told about this job and why it ranks second-to-last on the list.


1. Assembly Line Worker, American Thermoplastic Company

I don't even know how to START describing why this was the WORST summer job ever. Ok, how about here: I had to work on an assembly line with two frat boys and a strung-out Vietnam vet named Mickey, and we had to box binders with college names printed on them as fast as we could in order to receive a good "score" for the day. I made $7/hr listening to Mickey talk about his ex-wife and her name, Dina, which he claimed was tattooed on his penis. Oh, and I had to cover for him, working twice as fast, while he stared off into space. After Mickey was fired (he failed a urine test), I had to work with a kid who lied constantly, telling me to do this or that and then laughing hysterically when I believed him. Meanwhile, I was constantly hit on by big burly dudes who were intrigued by the fact that I was in grad school ("So I hear you're one a them smart chicks, huh?"). HELLLLLLL. I was actually relieved when I was diagnosed with mono after a month of work and had to quit.

You can understand, then, my angst at having to go out into the real world, once again, and find a summer job. Having ruled out doing most of the above ever again, I decided that I would venture into an area untouched by my experience as of yet: retail. Also, I wanted a job I could walk to. Luckily, I live two blocks from several retail chains. So I tried to make myself look cool and disaffected and started asking for applications.

Three days later, I found myself in the midst of a "group interview" at Urban Outfitters, where most employees clearly think they are both cool and disaffected. There were about eight of us in the group, including two managers, and I immediately guessed that all of them were younger than me. Luckily, I look like I'm 18, so I didn't discredit myself right away.

I shouldn't have worried about that, because it soon became clear that just about everyone in the group was a complete idiot. (If this sounds mean, I'd like you to refer again to the opening sentence of this post. It's still true! Really!) There was a glam-punk kid who let everyone know that he fancied himself a writer; a girl who supplied too much personal information every time she spoke, as if she were writing in a diary; another girl who spoke far too loudly, making me wince; a girl who claimed to be a dj and told everyone she was "a lover, not a hater"; and finally, an awkward girl who told us that she didn't feel "cool enough" to work at the store.

Here are some questions that the managers asked us during this interview:

If you could take only two items to a secluded island, what would they be?

If someone gave you $100 right now, what would you do with it?

What CDs have you bought recently?

Name your two greatest strengths and weaknesses.

What's one thing that really upsets you?

All I could think was: Seriously??? You're going to hire me based on my answers to these questions? Sweet.

But there was a catch. Everyone else had to answer too, and as they were all complete idiots, you can imagine what kind of opportunity these questions afforded them to be completely idiotic. I got through it by mentally stabbing myself in the eyeballs about a thousand times.

The next day, I got hired. Unfortunately, so did a few of the idiots, which made me feel very insecure.

Then, I went to training, where all of us new hires and two managers went over a few booklets that outline company policies. On the back of each booklet this phrase is printed: "Shopping urban in mom's suburban." Maybe I'm thinking about it too hard, but I still find the phrase baffling. My favorite policy, located in the customer service pamphlet, is an all-important acronym, VIBE: Values and Interaction to Build our Environment. Every employee on the sales floor is expected to put VIBE into action, to make it a verb, not just a noun. Shit.

During my first shift, I worked with a guy named Nick, who, while showing me how to run the fitting room, also embodied what VIBE really means. He started telling me that the company wasn't doing as well this year, because "who wants to pay fifty fuckin' dollars for a t-shirt?" Then, he brought it home: "I really don't give a shit about this company." I laughed, relieved to have immediately found someone as apathetic as myself about corporate success. We were totally vibin'.

The job is easy, and I found myself liking it, in an apathetic sort of way. Basically, I fold and straighten clothes for five hours, which appeals to my not-so-hidden compulsiveness about clothing.

However, it soon became evident that I would need to get ANOTHER job, since the store seems to think "part-time" is about six hours a week. So, through a circuit of connections, I found myself employed at a failing tie shop that has literally six customers a day. The manager was about to quit because the corporate office wouldn't specify if/when the store is going to close, and she needed a few employees to basically hold down the fort until this happens. It's the perfect summer job, in a lot of ways: I'm alone with books, the internet, and satellite radio for most of the day, and the company has already written off the store, so there's very little pressure to actually sell anything. In short, a good foil to the VIBE philosophy.

So far, I'm pleased with my summer foray into retail, because I get to work with other people who hate people. I mean, who seriously dislike people sometimes. Yeah.

But, only time will tell where these jobs will fall on the crab job list. I'll keep you posted.

Heat

"...And, like that, I'm back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can't hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you somehow tastes of mortality."

Bill Buford, Heat

Last week Mike and I took a long-awaited beach vacation, and it went exactly as planned: we dutifully took the elevator from our seventh-floor condo to the beach, where we sat in reserved beach chairs and read books all day. (OK, I also did a lot of staring, mostly in grandma mode: from behind my sunglasses, I disapproved of every skimpy bikini, every instance of bad parenting, and every tipsy kite-flyer within my line of vision.)

So, as you can imagine, my reading list was of utmost importance. I began obsessing about it two weeks before vacation and walked out of Carnegie Library Main with a ridiculously large stack of books. I could barely see over them as I walked to the car. If you'd run into me that day, scattering the books across the sidewalk, you would have noticed a few typical beach reads in the pile: novels from a bestselling author published in the last year or two. You also would have found a non-fiction work by Bill Buford, former fiction editor at the New Yorker, called Heat (An amateur's adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany). This meandering but engrossing account of Buford's time spent in the New York restaurant industry and at the mercy of Mario Batali, an acclaimed chef, is actually about the central role food plays in our lives--for some, to the point of obsession. Because of this, Heat was my favorite vacation read.

To explain why, I need to provide some background info. As I've already mentioned in a previous post or two, I come from a family obsessed with food. My dad's family, Sicilian immigrants from a small coastal village called Real Monte (you can see the African coast while standing on the beach on a clear day), quite literally regarded food as THE essential element of spiritual and social life. My Nono made his living at a meat factory, then came home and cultivated his extensive and meticulously planned garden. My Nona spent her days turning the vegetables he grew into delicious recipes that she had inherited from generations of women in her family. Neither of them (or anyone they knew) EVER had an important conversation without food present; similarly, food (its quality and portion size) was the main way they decided whom to befriend: if a paisan fixed a lackluster meal, or failed to offer a suitable abundance of sweets during a quick visit, they were blacklisted. Period.

So, it's no surprise that I related to my dad's parents mainly through the medium of food. We could never understand each other very well (they spoke very little English; I spoke very little Italian), but food and its preparation became an alternate language. Nono walked me through his garden, pointing with pride to young cucumber that I was allowed to pick early and eat whole. Nona let me help stuff ravioli with cheese, beef, and peas, and flip veal cutlets sizzling in olive oil while she supervised. I was allowed to taste the pasta to determine if it should be cooked longer (she never used a timer).

It was a family tragedy that I refused to eat red sauce for the first twelve years of my life. Nona and Nono both averted their eyes, seemingly in pain, when I covered my spaghetti with butter and cheese, but at other times they would study me covertly, as if trying to figure out the mystery of a blood relation who willfully rejected the family tomato sauce. "Americana," Nono would murmur, shrugging and seeking comfort in the garden.

My palate, at that age, had been formed by my mom's side of the family, English, Irish, and Dutch in nationality. At DeWitt family meals I could eat American comfort food at its finest: buttery mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, cheeseburgers. With my grandmother, a former home-ec teacher, I made snickerdoodle cookies and apple pie; I fried crumbled hamburger for mild chili; I learned how to use somewhat uncommon kitchen tools such as a flour sifter, and I was instructed in the details of competent cooking: always crack your eggs into a separate bowl before frying them! Always use a knife to level off a cup measure of flour! (I complied while she was watching, but when she left the room the details were totally lost on me.)

My parents, while from these very different backgrounds, met and fell in love because of food. My dad took my mom on a date to a steakhouse with a buffet salad bar, and she (a 115-lb model at the time) ate him under the table. He fell in love with her appetite; she fell in love with him because he was willing to satisfy it. To this very day, nothing makes my mom happier than an all-you-can eat menu.

All of this to say, an (unhealthy?) obsession with food is embedded in my DNA. Reading Heat, particularly the passage quoted above, helped me to understand the role that food has played--and continues to play--in my life. Even when I couldn't talk to my dad about anything important (which was most of the time), we could still talk about his sauce, and how he'd adapted it from his mother's recipe (he added onions). When I don't want to tell my mom about my bad day, I can describe--in great detail--the meal I made last night, and she is enthralled.

In this way, food does become a sort of alternate language, one that gives a new perspective to memory, one that reveals unspoken truths about identity. Food can be like memoir.