Writing Prompt - Awful Jobs?
There's a very low level dumb celeb who fancies himself deep that sometimes does these writing prompts. It's funny because his spelling isn't great and his usage of the language isn't either. But sometimes I do his challenges because, well, when you're stuck, like I am right now on the tines of the bad asthma and the second season "Happy Shiny People" I am kind of wrecked. It's killed my writing mojo to the point where I've been just using my computer to organize my recipes.
One of my three beloved children was involved with Teen Mania and Global Expeditions to my lasting regret. Will have guilt over this one forever. I trusted my daughter and her fragile health to a bunch of.. yeah, I better not go there! Right now I am reading the blogs of adults who had done the same as my kids and walked away from faith.
I've been thinking about those times in our lives, individually and corporately, and realizing that I had to set the stage with that toxic ministry during a very bad time in my life. The years I was living in Evangelical-town. The sort of place that sets you up for things like Teen Mania and their poisonous theology. During those years one of the recurring themes was church would teach you were never to work outside the home if you were a woman. Strict traditional gender roles. But every now and then my husband would moan out that we needed to bring in more money and I'd have to return to work. I'd begrudging done just that in those years. This was when my health took a turn before I was diagnosed with the immunio illness. I would work until my illness prevented it. Meaning my work history in those years was spotty as hell, with more holes in it than a 50 pound wheel of smoked Swiss cheese.
Very coincidentally the two worst jobs of my life occurred back to back in a nearby Virginia rural town at that very time, when my daughter was involved with Teen Mania. It was a place with a downtown paved out with red brick and federalist buildings. The first of the hell jobs didn't occur in these red bricked charmingly antique environs, but in a huge glass and aluminum building on the edge of town - a new car dealership. I'd applied to work processing license plate requests and the like, strictly part time and clerical. Somehow I ended up on the sales floor working full time for six months.
Every. Single. Day on that freaking job some angry man reminded me that as an official vagina-possessor they believed I should not be working the sales floor. I'd come into my office after showing a customer a car and find my leather coat balled up and squashed into a tiny space beneath my desk drawer, sometimes my purse dumped out, sometimes it was the drawer holding my extra panty hose and tampax. Every. Single. Day.
Every single morning I'd pray for the strength not to cut a damn fool, until the day happened when I just couldn't any longer. I was highly paid and successful in my short run doing this. The money was nice, but everything else was a clusterfuck.
Shortly afterward I'd interviewed at a local employment agency. I was sent out pretty quickly because I had mad computer skills, had some experience working with certain programs and fixing equipment. The place was in the same nearby rural city, right in the beautiful red brick center, at an insurance agency owned by a lady I sometimes still mentally call 'The Bridezillla.' She was on husband number six and did a yearly vow renewal in Vegas, had a passion for golf and martinis at the nearest country club. She drank in the office, she drank while driving, she drank while golfing. I was just impressed she could still stand up and wack the little ball after all those martoonis.
My biggest problem there was that I was the biggest problem, well, maybe I wasn't the biggest problem. Bridezilla was, Bridezilla. But I could have been much kinder than I was. Early on in my time there in a clerical role I rebuffed her many attempts to lunch at the club and drink with her. I rebuffed drinks in the office. Said no to evening drinks at a restaurant. Looking back I can see I was sitting there cool as a cucumber, looking at her with a smug sense of Evangelical superiority dressed in my little business suit. I'd already been warned about her at church because she was known to be a worldly sinner. Her habits of gossiping about everyone she knew and her propensity to listen rapt to the police scanner further cemented her reputation in my eyes.
I only worked part time for this woman and the primary objective at work was making all the different computer interfaces work together, the insurance companies software, our billing program and others. I also troubleshot all the computers at work, connectivity at her other offices. Every single time she wanted me to do some social thing with her and I denied that, explaining I needed to do a software update, or there was an issue with the client database I am sure I angered her. Someone had to work.
Things eventually came to a head when Bridezilla viewed the movie "Calendar Girls". She had a DVD player and television in her office next to the police scanner. She came out of her office right after the movie and declared she was going to pose nude, along with her friends, in a calendar they could sell at the country club. To raise money to upgrade the women's locker room at the club.
If you've not seen "Calendar Girls" if I recall right it's a sweet movie about a group of women in the UK who have been touched by ongoing cancer in their families. So they hit upon the scheme of selling a nude calendar of their sixty year old selves. The money they raised was donated to the local hospital. It's a huge smash, selling out many printings.
But Bridezilla and I were in rural bumfuck redneck middle of Virginia, not in the UK. I spent weeks trying to talk her out of doing this mad thing, pointing out that I just knew within a half hour of this thing being published some smart ass would have a copy and be photocopying off nude images and circulating them. That's if they didn't scan them in and post the images online. I pointed out again and again that I believed her teenage sons would likely be teased in school. That I could not imagine any way that her friends group of fifty year old ladies who lunched would agree to pose nude on the golf course.
That was the other part of her plan, have everyone in the buff posing on the impossibly green velvet grounds of the golf course of course!
It happened, just like I suspected it might. Ladies resistant to posing. Her teenagers were grossed out. But the worst thing was some local rural recondite made copies of the photos, passed them around, posted them on the light poles in town. Then they ended up online.
For the several years I worked there part time I'd managed to stay frostily removed from her shenanigans. I'd argued so much with her over this mad scheme that it created a watershed moment between us. She turned on me. The funniest moment of her distaste for me was the day she confronted me for looking at porn on my computer in the back office. Protip never pull nonsense like this on someone with logical thinking, a background in computers, and a big old nasty pile of self-righteousness. She had a printed page of all the days and times someone had been accessing nasty things like WreckMyFatPussycat dot com. I looked at the list and busted out laughing. It was all the times her husband worked in the office, days I wasn't even in the building. I laughed and laughed, and she kept getting angrier. I can still see her face, looking for all the world like a grumpy fucking toad.
Shortly thereafter I came into the office and quit. I would almost have rather have those hideous jackasses at the dealership and their behavior than this woman. Grumpy toad face again. Thankfully I've pulled the self righteous stick out of my ass eventually and left my old church, leaving behind the judgemental ism and self righteous disdain.
Told the husband if I ever start acting like Bridezilla he has my permission to put my head in the paint shaking machine down at Sherwin Williams and flip the switch to "high"..
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