The Job Pirate

by Brandon Christopher

  Bleeding Heart Publications is a South East Asia-based publishing house that specializes in English language short fiction booklets and full-length creative non-fiction. Our publications sell primarily in the United States and are available online and in stores.

  Copyright ©2013 BH Publications Pte Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group

  For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Greenleaf Book Group at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.

  Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group

  Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group and Debbie Berne

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9905732-1-0

  Ebook Edition

  Previous Works by Brandon Christopher

  Emily’s Little Pilot of Loquacious Weather

  2013 Transfusions

  BH Publications

  Nightville

  2011

  L & L Dreamspell

  Dirty Little Altar Boy

  2007

  Ghost Pants Press

  (To be re-released by BH Publications 2015)

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Intro: The Mire of My Livelihood

  1 The Hunter Becomes the Hunted

  2 The Mortuary Driver

  3 The Citadel of Toaster Ovens

  4 Meat Burrito and a Side of Beans

  5 McPlumbers

  6 Little Generals

  7 The Grilled Cheese Epiphany

  8 Moving in Place

  9 The Broken Toys of Hollywood

  10 The Electrifying Case of the Broken Windshield

  11 The Grand Disillusion

  12 Operation Hot Fudge

  13 The Thespian Loses His Coat

  14 The Rise and Tragic Fall

  15 The Blessed Do-Over

  16 That Motherfucker Carlos

  17 Most of a Day at Whispering Meadows

  18 The Porn Is Mightier than the Sword

  19 Wax Is Thicker than Pride

  20 A Staring Contest with 40

  Afterword

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Job Pirate isn’t just a collection of true stories about all my poor career choices; it’s also a chronicle of the last two decades of my life—the good times, the bad times, the hungry times, but always the real times. So there are a lot of people that are owed a big thank you … and perhaps even an explanation. First and foremost, I would like to thank my folks, Fred and Peggi, for always being understanding of their middle kid with a keen gift for finding trouble. I owe an enormous deal of gratitude to Cali, Kyle, and Gordon at Bleeding Heart Publications for believing in me and giving me the softcover soapbox on which to stand and rant about all my crazy jobs. I’d also like to thank Colin, Sean, Scott, Lisa, Bryan, and Laura for always being there for me, sometimes being the fodder for my stories, and for keeping me on the path. I should probably thank all the coworkers I’ve written about, with a special shout-out to Sherry, Natalie, Joel, Carlos, and Tony (you’ll see why). Three or four of the eighty-one bosses I’ve had probably deserve a “thanks,” or at least a proper “I quit,” but I must have had a good reason for leaving in the first place, so we’ll just call that one a draw. And since we’re coming clean, I probably owe David Byrne about $90 in royalties for the amount of times I listened to “Road to Nowhere” while driving home after getting fired.

  THE MIRE OF MY LIVELIHOOD

  To see me in your office is surely cause for speculation. I look like you, I work like you, but I am not like you, and some part of you knows this. Some elemental part of you, deep down inside, knows that I am an imposter in your workplace. But your—actually, our—employer doesn’t know this yet; he doesn’t realize the person he just gave a unique login and password to is a professional at what he does for a living. But this particular profession isn’t what he does for a living—at least it wasn’t three days before the interview.

  That new employee that you see hanging his vintage blazer onto the backrest of his swivel chair is me. My cubicle is right next to yours. I don’t say much, I dine alone, I drink a lot of coffee, and I know my legal right to two cigarette breaks in an eight-hour workday. And yes, you were right, I’m not really the Marketing Strategist I told the boss I was. But I’m sitting here in this cubicle, and the resume that got me this job is in my attaché case right beside me. It clearly states that I have more than enough experience to run this company’s entire advertising department. So, fuck you, lady in the cubicle next to mine. And fuck your perceptive eyes that caught me checking my Scottrade account this morning. I’ll be here between three weeks and a year, so you better get used to the idea of it.

  There are careers, there are professions, there are jobs, there are contract jobs, and there are gigs. Both connecting and separating these occupational categories, like a river drifting alongside five ports, is what I like to call the gray area of employment—the mire of my livelihood. Two decades worth of brief occupations, short-lived careers, and both rightful and wrongful terminations, all sewn together like the patched quilt that shields the child from the monsters of adult life. I am a job pirate—a professional pretender for a decent paycheck and health insurance.

  I’ve never subscribed to that old-fashioned American Dream of having just one career for 35 years, followed by a cane-bound trance of heart medications, hip problems, and Law & Order. Nothing scares me more, to be honest, even as I near dangerously close to middle age myself. Instead, I prefer to taste life. I prefer to taste many lives, actually. Eighty-one different lives, at last count. Some lasted a few days, some a few years. Some were so bad that I quit, while others were so good that I was fired. The “greatest recession since the Great Depression” played a part in a good portion of my most recent departures, but the vast majority were just due to my general lack of satisfaction and contentment.

  And yet, there’s a lot more to it than simply being stubborn, or hard to please, or needing a dental plan. When you start a new job, you invade a little bubble of life that existed long before you ever got there, and will continue to exist long after you have gone—a separate reality running parallel to your own, like string theory in physics. You step through those glass front doors into an entirely new dimension—one that you would have never known supported life had it not been for your hiring. You make new friends, you date new coworkers, you fall into new loves, and you create new enemies. You slowly develop contained little relationships with these new people around you. Relationships with dozens, if not hundreds, of people over the years, whom you never would have met in your entire life had you not taken that job as a floral arranger for seven months, or the door-to-door tie salesman for one day, or the erotic writer of a porn magazine for close to a year.

  But this fickle, wayfaring life is not as easy and carefree as it may sound. Claiming eighty-one different job titles means that I have “bent the truth a little” on eighty-one different job applications. So, researching a new occupational role beforehand is mandatory. Character exploration is vital to authentic employee development. But a simple Internet search of topics like “job duties of plumber assistant” or “what is an accountant, really?” before your first day will reap rich rewards. And adapting to a new role at all times is the key to success. Learn to not only dress the part but actually live the part of each new job you take. When you’re a chauffeur, go out and buy those ridiculous mirrored, police-style sunglasses, and wear them a lot. If you pull a corporate office stint,
learn to love wearing Dockers and calmly striped shirts and adapt to expressing your creative side by only decorating your gray cubicle wall with black-and-white printouts of scenes from David Lynch movies. Learn to eat by yourself, and read the newspaper by yourself, especially during that first month at any job. If the job goes over a month you’ll make a few friends, maybe go out for a beer after work with the “cool” crowd (who are basically only interested in seeing if you’re gay, married, or weird). If the job goes over three months, there are phone numbers exchanged, a few holiday party invites begotten, some of the aforementioned crushes have started to develop, and some flirtations have been established. You’ll eventually become part of “the gang,” most likely with the two or three other people who stand and smoke cigarettes where the concrete meets the grass. And when layoffs and Januaries come around, you’ll be in the bottom tier of employees and one of the first three to be called into the manager’s office for the “Sit down, we need to talk” talk.

  Like anything in life, there are some highs and lows involved in being a job pirate. And you’ll have to ride them both out in order to sustain yourself. Sometimes you’re flat broke and drinking Folgers without sugar, and other times you’re making $1,400 per week and tipping on every Starbucks latte you order. Sometimes you’re surviving on $775 per month, trying to validate your lifestyle choice to yourself over the fourth grilled-cheese-sandwich-and-tap-water dinner in a row, and other times you’re buying a pre-owned Lexus after four months at a job that was scored as a result of the Dubious Resume #7. Just don’t be alarmed when you’re selling that fucking Lexus back to CarMax a few months later—at a $2,600 loss—because you got fired and decided to move to Seattle. Because you’re a job pirate, and that’s the life. You trade in those career perks for a life of sovereignty, free will, and independence. If you don’t like your job, you quit. You’ll find another. If a boss yells at you, you yell right back at him. Or better yet, you take a dump on the windshield of his new Mercedes-Benz.

  But one of the best benefits of jumping from one profession to another is learning all sorts of new skills and abilities that you never would have acquired had you stayed with just one career. But now you wield these new talents, just in case some future predicament requires you to properly buckle a corpse onto a gurney, twist an arm without breaking it, or come up with seventeen different euphemisms for the word “testicles.” Your life becomes rich with extraordinary new abilities and delightful conversation starters. You are the protagonist in your own living novel, with each new job serving as a chapter or plot twist.

  When you’re a corporate ghost lurking temporarily inside the cubicle kingdoms of America—milling about all those melancholic coworkers with their fixed lives, fat families, and 401(k)s—you’ll probably find yourself smiling a little too often during conversations. You’ll smile partly to mask the envy, and partly to celebrate the relief. You know you won’t ever have the same type of life security that Dottie in Human Resources will have, but you will have something just as valuable: your autonomy. Sure, most months become little wars of attrition—deciding which bills to pay and deducing how many possible dinners a pack of four chicken breasts will actually make—but all those little fights keep your mind off all the big fights out there. The struggle helps you stay focused on the immediate: that precious yolk of time between yesterday and tomorrow.

  Some might think it silly to burn through so many jobs during an economic period where so many have found it impossible to find work. I don’t consider it silly at all; I consider it good experience for the disappearing job market ahead. It’s not my fault that most major American corporations moved their production facilities to China or India because labor is cheaper there; it’s not my fault American car companies went belly-up because of their fat union pensions and piss-poor products; and I had nothing to do with L.A.’s slow death at the hands of outrageous film budgets reduced by millions overnight because production is cheaper in Canada. I was dealt the same cards as everybody else, and I’m surviving just fine. I will admit that for every job I deceivingly take, someone rightfully qualified may stay unemployed as a result. But the flipside is, for every job that I get fired from (or quit), a fresh new job opens up for someone else. It’s the cosmic balance of things. An employee like me makes employers cherish employees like Dottie.

  A week, a month, a year, it doesn’t really matter how long you were there, or how it ended. Because there’s a whole world in between that first and last day, just begging you to dig your teeth into it. The key is to celebrate the finite. Like realizing you’re in a dream, once you accept the fact that you’re only there temporarily—that you won’t be calling those people “coworkers” in three years, let alone three months—a calm clarity takes over; a soothing, bulletproof understanding that your short-term destiny is all up to you.

  It’s a tricky world out there these days, and you’ve got to be just as tricky to survive it. The workers of today must be willing to venture into unknown territories and adapt to new lifestyles or forever be left in the wake of retail serfdom. Employers care about their business surviving, not your survival. The sooner you realize this the better off you are. It’s a changed world. Pensions are nearly obsolete, 401(k)s are like family dogs without leashes that may or may not come home with you, and the gentleman’s handshake is now followed by a squirt of Purell sanitizer. Acclimate, or it’s adios time.

  THE HUNTER BECOMES THE HUNTED

  JOB #15

  “Please, have a seat anywhere,” the 20-something supervisor motioned across the large windowless room, which was sectioned into two rectangles by Formica folding tables and chairs.

  I was the third in line to get in, right behind a heavyset woman with a cane and a girl right out of college. You could tell she was right out of college because she was the only one who was still holding out a resume. The rest of us knew something was a little off with this interview, but we stayed around to see if maybe we were wrong. I eyed the supervisor as I walked by him, taking note of his oversized shirt that billowed out when he raised his arms—must have been on sale. His tie was atrocious and hung too low below the belt. His hair was as manicured as the thin strip of black fuzz that traced his missing jaw line. Ten feet through the door and I already didn’t like where this operation was headed, but I took a seat at one of the back tables nonetheless. The room filled up quickly; I hadn’t realized there were that many people in line behind me. I glanced around at all my fellow salespeople and assessed their clothing, their shoes, their attentiveness to the surroundings and the situation. We were from all walks of life and couldn’t have been more different, yet there we were together all dressed in our very best pieced-together outfits that one wears when trying to get a job. We just weren’t expecting there to be twenty of us.

  The supervisor walked to the front of the room and raised his arms; the shirt ballooned out again. “Hello there, everyone. My name’s Gary, and I hope you’re all as excited as I am to be here today. But first I have some good news and some bad news that I need to share with you,” he said with a wink and a sly grin to the woman sitting at the table nearest him. “The good news is, you all got the job! The bad news is … there is no bad news! You’re all going to make lots of money!”

  A few people laughed, some out of courtesy and some out of honest excitement. But I knew what he really meant. I knew that if this company was going to hire all twenty of us for sales positions then there would be no salary, only commission on what we sold. One glance around the room made that clear. Sitting next to me were two old Vietnamese ladies who spoke no English. One was doing Sudoku while the other rested her chin on her cane like Yoda.

  Up front, Gary fiddled with a projector as a giant stockphoto of a glass of water went in and out of focus on the white wall behind him. He finally got it clear enough so we could see the crisp droplets trickling down the glass, and he turned back to us.

  “I want to thank you all for coming down here today, and for being part of a c
ompany I know you’ll love as much as I do. I know the ad that brought you here was kind of vague, and you’re all probably sitting there wondering what this job is, right? Will I be stuck in some crummy store all day, right? Answering phones, right? Wrong! I wasn’t lying when I said that you could make up to $10,000 a month and be outdoors all day and be your own boss … set your own hours, work when you want to, be with your family. Interested?”

  He cupped his hand behind his ear and arched forward as if waiting to hear all of us cheering for “More, more, more!” But the only answer he got was from the old Vietnamese lady next to me, who raised her hand and replied very matter-of-factly, “Yes, I am interested.” I guess she did speak English. Then a couple of other people nodded their heads. Then so did I, but only because I was sitting right beside the lady who spoke first. It definitely wasn’t the punchy reply he was expecting, but the supervisor handled it gracefully. He jumped back into his pitch before any more momentum could be lost.

  “Great! Now, I bet you’re all asking yourselves how you can achieve all this, right? Lots of money, setting your own hours, working outdoors … That sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong!” He violently pressed his thumb down onto the remote control, and the glass of water behind him turned into a faucet pouring water into a sink, then a pie chart full of percentages and numbers. “Almost 90 percent of Los Angeles residents drink tap water without any filtration. If you look here … see all the bacteria and cancer-causing agents found in just one glass of tap water? Same with a shower. Just because you don’t drink it doesn’t mean it’s not entering your pores, your skin, your … But look at how these numbers change when using an AquaTastic water purifier! Just look at that. AquaTastic actually prevents almost 99 percent of contaminants from getting through, making you sick, killing you. We’ve done the numbers, folks, and AquaTastic filtration systems will sell themselves. Seriously.”