Odd Jobs Stories II

Odd Jobs Stories II

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2021
Images from the Internet

Due to the success of my previous work-related stories, I thought I would continue with other work experiences that are either unsettling or joyous.

* * *

1.
For a two-week period during 1983, I worked as a messenger out of the Lincoln Building, which is on 42nd Street, across from Grand Central Train Station. I was between work as a typesetter, and I took it what is now known as a “survival job.”

It was pretty standard work, either picking up packages or dropping them off after getting a signature. I found it kind of mundane, though three of my friends were also messengers around that time, and two of them liked it because it gave them the freedom to be out and about, one did not.

For one of my deliveries, I had to go to the Associated Press office around the corner from the “30 Rock,” the NBC building, right near Rockefeller Plaza’s skating rink. I brought the package, and the person I was delivering it to in a crowded room full of desks (an early “open office” concept, I guess), commented that he could not find his pen. It was right next to him on his desk, and without saying a word, I pointed to it, to help him out.

With extreme condescension (I honestly believe he did not realize the level of it as I remembered it), he said, “Oh, aren’t you a smart one. Maybe we should hire you?” It was solid white male privilege.

All 115 pounds of me leaned into him and said in a clear sotto voce that others could hear (honestly, I was not doing that intentionally, I was just fed up), “Listen, I am doing this job because I have no choice right now. I have a Bachelor’s Degree and cannot find work, so don’t you dare talk to me or anyone else in my position like that, unless you know the person and their story.”

With that, I took the signed package out of his hand, turned around, and walked out without looking back. As I left the building, I was sure that would be my last day because this guy would go full “Karen” and complain to my boss. Honestly, I did not care if that happened, I believed it was worth it to stand up for myself.

Much to the guy’s credit, I did not hear anything from my boss about it, so I am assuming he did not call. Perhaps he learned a lesson, one would hope.

I left the job four days later to work as a temp at PBS Thirteen, where I typed out the proposal for the infamous Aba Eban documentary, “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews.” (1984). I also worked there for two weeks when something permanent came out.

* * *

2.
I learned not to assume about anyone else’s position early on, having had jobs that dealt with the public such as scooping ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins, or an usher and ticket ripper at a local movie palace.

While I was a proofreader, we had a young African-American man who delivered the mail. Whenever he dropped mail on my desk, I said hello, and asked his name. He just glared at me and walked on. But I am persistent.

Going forward, every single time he dropped off mail, I would always say hello and ask his name. Finally, after a while, he got mad, and said, “Why do you want to know?!”

My response was, “I see you every single day, and just like any of my other co-workers, I want to be friendly. I do not just say it to you, I say it to everyone. Also, I used to be a mail clerk at my first office job at 99 Church Street (next to the Woolworth Building), so I understand.” With that he walked off.

The next time he came around, before I could even say anything, he said, “My name is Leroy.” I stood up and shook his hand, and said, “Hello Leroy. Since we have to work together, I hope we can be at least civil.”

I found his reply kind of shocking. He said, “I have worked here for two years, and in that time, not one person has acknowledged me other than to give me something to mail. No one has ever asked my name or said thank you.”

My response, in a quiet voice – and this was not something that would fly today – was “Fuck them. That is their issue. If they are going to be so obnoxious, they don’t deserve to have you say hello. For me, I’m glad to know you.”

From that point on, whenever he came by, he had a big smile on his face (as did I), and we’d briefly chat (he could not stay long because he needed to finish his rounds).

When his birthday came around, I bought a card and had everyone in my Department sign it, other than my boss who thought it was a waste of time. I left there before Leroy’s next birthday, but I hope things went well for him.

* * *

3.
During the Bicentennial, I worked at a Baskin-Robbins that was on Seventh Avenue South, a block away from the infamous Stonewall (post-riot). My pal Dennis, who worked there, got me the interview. That store does not exist anymore. It was there I met infamous tightrope walker Phillippe Petite (story HERE). Other famous people I served included Barbara Walters, Mark Lenard (who played Spock’s father in the original “Star Trek” series; d. 1996), and the infamous porn actor Marc Stevens (“Mr. 10-1/2”; d. 1989), who lived nearby.

While I was there, it was Fleet Week, and sailors from all over the world stopped by, which was pretty exciting. I mentioned it to one of my customers, as I made his cone, and he suggested I greet the Greek sailors with “nafas skata,” which he said was hello.

There are two expressions I can speak in Greek, both of which are profanities. What he suggested I say is translated as “eat shit.” This really pissed me off. I replied, “Why would you do that?! I know what that means!” With his cone in my hand, I took a bite out of it, and told him to get out of the store and never come back (not that I had the power to do that, really). He seemed shocked that I knew it, and walked out embarrassed, but not as much as I would have been if I had listened to him.

At another point, the boss hired two teenyboppers who were the spoiled daughters of the Liquor Store next door. They were incredibly obnoxious and “mean girls.” They kept threatening to get us fired if we did not do their work for them.

One day, I was listening to a live tape of the Ramones I had made when the store was slow. One of the girls (I think they were around 16 years old), without asking, turned my tape, threw it on the counter, and put on a cassette of the Bay City Rollers. I said something like, “Hey, I was listening to that!” She said, “Too bad, now we’re listening to this.”

I had enough of them. I picked up the huge flat knife that was used to cut cakes, and slammed it down on the counter, cutting the wire to the cassette player. “Now we’re listening to nothing.”

I really thought I was going to be fired, but instead, I spliced the wires together so the cassette player worked again, and never heard about it any more. But the two kids never messed with me again.

I left the store later that year when the owner lost the business to his wife in a divorce settlement, and she let everyone go and started the staff from scratch. Not much longer after that, she sold the store and it became a trendy restaurant.

* * *

4.
At a media company, for quite a while I shared a room with three other people that faced 53rd Street, where I could look out the window and see DC Comics who had all this cool merch in their windows, and could also see the David Letterman Theater. I saw him a number of times, and the Eagles of Death Metal played right below us. I took pictures and sent them to the band, and they were snarky about it, accusing me of being a possible sniper. Assholes. Their band is not that great, anyway.

Eventually the management moved us to the Broadway side, into an open office room. We would go in on Thanksgiving and watch the parade go by from the second storey window. That was amazing. And yes, I took pictures.

During the work days when they moved me there, I sat across from one of the sales people, that I really did not like. He thought it was because he was gay and I was homophobic. Nope, the reason was because he would constantly be using the speaker phone, which made it really hard to concentrate on my job. So annoying and rude. I asked him to stop, but he said, “I bring in the money, so suck it up,” essentially.

After my whining enough, they moved me to the other side of the floor facing 7th Avenue, and my view was of Lindy’s Restaurant (since closed; I worked in an office in that building for a few years) and the Sheraton New York Times Square. Eventually, they moved me back into that room that held the three of us, when I left to move out of the city.

* * *

5.
While I worked at a multinational corporation doing PowerPoint slides for presentations in the 1990 to early 2000s, I was the fastest of the bunch. My work may not have been the prettiest, but if there was an intense deadline, I was the one who they came to; I made myself valuable. In a time when most people could do about fifteen slides a day, I could do twenty-five. Remember, this is old school PowerPoint, which was not as simple as it is now. There was one co-worker who was quite slow, and could only do about seven slides a day. Whenever I teamed with her, I did the majority of the work, which was frustrating.

My boss left to be a “preacher’s wife,” which was taking up a lot of her time and of course, his work – which was less pay – came first because he was head of the household. To replace her, they picked the person who was extremely slow, which I did not understand. It made no sense to me.

A few days after she was installed, she called me into her office and read me the riot act over something really miniscule. Honestly, I don’t think I heard much of what she said. My mind was in overdrive, thinking, “Oh, I get it, she’s trying to establish authority. We were co-workers and now she’s a supervisor, so she needs to make it clear she is in charge.” When she finished, rather than getting defensive and angry, I said, “Okay, I won’t do that again.”

After that, we were okay. Other co-workers were put off by it, because I was not the only one she did that with, and I said, “Give her time,” and explained about the whole “new boss” thing.

Within a short time, she became the best boss I had at that job. She stood up for most of us and defended us when consultants were not happy.

She did have one major flaw, though: she absolutely hated gay women. There were a lot of gay men in our group, and she had no problem with them, but she was convinced that the lesbian workers were going to hit on her 50s, overweight self. I felt bad for one of my co-workers, who we bonded over her being a writer and musician, and we are still good friends to this day. The boss did not treat her well, and she did not stay long.

One of the people I helped get a job there was my Academic Advisor for my Master’s program at New York University, Janet Sternberg. She needed the job to pay for her final push towards her doctorate, and this helped her enormously. It was great working with her. She was from Brazil originally, and when she was an undergrad there, she was approached by NASA to be the voice of Portuguese on the “Golden Record” in 1977 for the spaceship Voyager, which was sent into space.

One day we were hanging out at her desk, and she mentioned that she was going to check her voice messages at home. She turned red and became all excited, stating, “There was a message from NASA to let me know that my voice had just passed Pluto!”

You can see Janet and hear her message HERE. 

* * *

6.
One of the problems of working for a Fortune 500 company, and I have been employed at a few, is there is a deep divide between the “grunt” workers (office clerks, administrative assistants, mail clerks, etc.) and the consultants (Ivy Leaguers who could have earned their degree or had their parents “help” them), even with those who claim the corporation to be non-hierarchical. I was an office worker, and the lowest level of consultant was making more than three times a year more than me. One actually had the nerve to tell me that hour by hour, they made less than me. Excuse me, but I never made your starting $140,000 salary, with all my overtime. Not even close. They were not only clueless, but oft times they were oblivious to how privileged they were.

So many times I have held the door to an elevator, or in a hallway because they were behind me, and they would just walk through, like I was the doorman, with no acknowledgement or even a glance. At those points, I would say to their backs, in a loud and minor tone voice, “You’re welcome!” Sometimes they would turn around and apologize, but usually they kept on going.

I understand they worked long hours, but so did I. I was once on a project and was heading home at 10 PM, and got on an elevator with someone I didn’t know. He smiled and said, “Half day?” I thought this was hysterical and told him so, and he said that most times people would get offended.

We really had to step carefully because, as I said, even though the company considered itself non-hierarchical, we generally had to walk on egg shells. An Administrative Assistant I knew quit in frustration because the person she was working for had left an envelope on her chair with a yellow stickie that said, “Please sent to…” and the full address. The mail pickup box was literally in front of her desk. He could have just written the address on it himself, but felt it was below his station. She said to me, “I am his Assistant, not his servant.” She went on to become a nurse.

One time I was working with a young Harvard graduate who was somewhat new to the company. He would walk down the halls singing at the top of his lungs, like no one else mattered. At the time, I was given the information to input on sheets of paper. Sometimes they would do the swirling delete, or “kill” proofreading symbol and put the page at the back to indicate it was not to be used anymore. Well, in this situation, the page had a the “kill” mark but was in the middle of the stack, so I was not sure if it was to be included or not (perhaps someone changed their mind). I said, “Hey, Mark, what’s with this page?”

In an incredibly condescending tone, like he was talking to a 10-year-old, this 25-year-old said to my 40s self, “Oh, that’s a kill symbol. It means take it out.” What went through my mind was, “Y’know, I was editor of my college newspaper before you were swimming in your father’s balls, and you want to tell me what a “kill” symbol is?!” What I said, though, was “thank you, Mark.” And then continued working.

In another project, I was helping out a co-worker. I had agreed to work two hours past my shift until 10 PM to help them out. I was working away, and at about 8 PM, the team leader ordered supper for everyone else on the team – except for me – and he did it on my phone, less than a foot from me.

At 10 PM, I was hungry with all the empty containers around my desk, and I said, “Well, it’s time. Bye.” The team leader said, “But we’re not done.”

“Perhaps, but I am. Bye.” Yes, I was punishing them for their inconsiderate nature. If they would have bought me supper, I would have stayed all night to help them (yeah, I’m a food whore), but I was hungry and they needed a lesson.

The next day, my boss called me into the office to ask why I had left. I said, I had not eaten since lunch and was really hungry, and when they ordered food for themselves and just did not think to included me, like I’m a robot rather than a Robert, I left.” My boss shook his head, called them assholes, and I left his office, never hearing about it again.

* * *

7.
This is more of a lemonade out of lemons story: at this same Fortune 500 company, I was – at some point – a newbie. I had just gone through training, and was assigned to my first project. The consultant gave me a stack of papers, and sat down at a desk next to me, continuing to work while I put together his meeting slides.

At one point, I said to him, “This bullet point starts with “e.g., “and ends with “for example.” That’s redundant. Which one do you want?”

Rather than saying one or the other, he started to scream at me, in the middle of this large room with 50 of my new co-workers that I did not really know yet. “Who are you,” he fumed, “to tell me how to write! You work for me, so you do what I say without question!” At this point he started snapping his fingers in front of my face. “I am your superior. I am more educated than you, so you do what I say! If I put in on the paper, you type it in!” He went on for about five minutes like that, with everyone in the room looking.

When he finished, I put up a finger as if to say, “Hold on.” I called the head of his team, and put it on speaker phone. In a calm voice, without even mentioning this person was there, I said, “Hey, Jack, I have a bullet point here with both an “e.g.,” and “for example.” I stopped there.

His voice came booming out of the speaker phone that everyone in the room could hear, “What idiot wrote that? Don’t they educate anyone anymore?” Remember, this guy had proclaimed that he was more educated than me. Jack continued, “If you know enough to catch it, I’ll trust you to know what to do about it. I’ll talk to my team about it later.”

I hung up the phone, and turned to the yeller and said, calmly, “So, do you want the “etc.” or the “for example”? He stormed out of the room and never spoke to me again during the three weeks I worked with his team. I got a quiet applause from my co-workers, and I was “in” at that point.

On my way home that night, I was thinking about it. “Hmm, he said he was more educated than me. I have a Bachelors. He has an MBA, which is a Masters. This company will pay for my Masters once I’m done with my probation.”

Six months later when my probation ended, I went down to New York University and signed up for a Masters program in Media Ecology, which I achieved, and all I paid was the fees and for the books. My Masters cost me about $2,000. I have that entitled guy to thank for that.

* * *

8.
I have told this story before in a blog about photography:

I worked with someone who stopped talking to me at one point, and I was disturbed, trying to figure out what I had done to offend her. A couple of months later, I inquired with another co-worker with whom we were both friendly: seems the icy treatment was because she thought my taking candid photos (people talking, grabbing food, etc.) at a company Halloween costume function was "creepy." 

The photos we took were put up on the company intranet, and I saw that nearly all the ones she had personally taken were of people standing still with big toothy grins across their faces turned directly to the camera. I find those kinds of shots can be boring and unrealistic: reportage rather than reporting. To me, my photos felt like they had more life and were natural, with no forced smiles. Most people loved them, but not her. 

When I found out the reason for the silent treatment, I felt better, because it was not something I had actually done to her, but rather her interpretation of my actions. I have no power over that, and I just let it go.