As I stood there this morning watching the Keurig do its thing I couldn’t help but feel the anticipation of a fresh brewed cup of “Breakfast Blend” crossing my lips and filling my body full of the caffeinated motivation I so needed to get the day started. Then it happened, the Keurig malfunctioned and I only got ½ cup of the above mentioned, much needed motivation educing caffeine. Damn it, why can’t things work the way they are supposed to work?
As those thoughts ran through my head I couldn’t help but chuckle, “I bet I have one, maybe six, ex-bosses that at one time or another said the exact same thing about me”. We all like to think we are the best employee a company has ever had and I am sure more than one of us has looked at a fellow co-worker and thought “I do the job so much better than them”. All of this may or may not be true, but that doesn’t really matter to us. It’s what WE believe to be true that counts, right? Sure, until evaluation time comes around. Then we are told what we lack and what we need to “work” on to better ourselves, some companies call this “opportunity”. It’s them saying “You suck at time management but you have the opportunity to make it better”. Sure I do, but I also have the opportunity to keep screwing off and getting paid … now which opportunity sounds more enticing? Am I wrong? How many of you are reading this right now at your desk? See, screwing off is so much easier!
My first job right out of High school was making picture frames in a plastic factory. OK, I didn’t actually “make” them; I just sat there and counted them as they came off the machine that actually made them. Not the best job for a hyper-active kid with undiagnosed A.D.D. and an attention span of about 3.5 seconds. I was getting paid to pay attention to the machine yet I spent most of my time not paying attention to the machine. I would wander off and talk to co-workers, shop at the wall of vending machines or try to learn Vietnamese from the guys who were responsible for putting the finished product into shipping boxes. I’d like to take this time and say if you ever had a picture fall off your wall or a frame completely fall apart on you … sorry, good chance it came off of MY production line. As the Vietnamese packagers would say; không phải vấn đề của tôi (not my problem).
I should also mention that this job was a 3rd shift position, so there was always a good portion of my shift spent sleeping at my picture frame producing machine. One night I was fast asleep and the picture frame making machine decided not to work the way it was suppose to work. This is a bad thing when both the machine and I decide not to work the way we were supposed to be working at the same time. As I was dreaming of Debbie Gibson (hey, it was the 80’s … leave me alone) the picture frame making machine was spewing plastic carnage all over the floor. I was rudely awakened by my boss, who we called “Z”, screaming at me and trying to get to the emergency shut-off button (which was completely sheltered by pieces of plastic that resembled anything BUT a picture frame). That was my last night as a plastic-picture-frame counter. I actually asked “Z” why he was firing me and he said “Because you were sleeping” and I said “I wasn’t sleeping, I was praying!” … he didn’t buy it!
Sleeping on the job seemed to become a trend for me, which I think is understandable on any 3rd shift job but hard to defend when you are working 1st shift. Although I did learn something from that night at the picture frame factory … I don’t ever want to be woken up by someone yelling at me ever again. Now that doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to sleep, it just meant I had to find a way to get the message to whatever boss I had that yelling was not the answer, no not the answer at all!
During my days as an E.M.T. I slept A LOT on my shifts. Look, you give me a bed in the back of my ambulance … and I’m the asshole for using it? I just considered it "using the tools that were provided for me to do my job", and the only proper way to use a bed (with your clothes on) is sleeping! But I was smart, even pro-active one might say. I actually would pin a sign to my chest that read “Attention Supervisor: ONLY wake me if you are sending me home for sleeping …If you are going to write me up for sleeping please let me sleep and just leave the form. I will sign it when I wake up. Thank you”.
Believe it or not I was an E.M.T. for just over 5 years and anyone of my former partners can tell you at least one story of me sleeping through a call, falling asleep in the hospital waiting room or responding to a “call” that was actually only a dream I had. It was becoming clear to me that I needed to find a job that didn’t afford me the opportunity to sleep, a job that had me always moving and interacting with people, something that would constantly stimulate my mind. So I became a radio Disc Jockey! My first on-air job was at an oldies station. I left the medical field and became a full-time D.J. playing the hits of the 50’s and 60’s. Yup, I went from playing with dead people as an EMT to PLAYING dead people as a DJ. And I also found that I seemed to like jobs that had initials, which was convenient because I suck at spelling.
Something I also came to realize is any job that has “initials” usually doesn’t have a great pay scale, unless of course the initials are PHD or CPA, but those jobs required way too much attention to detail for me to even consider. If you actually took the three hours it would take you to read my complete resume you would see that I have had a wide array of jobs. Some may think that this means I can’t keep a job, I disagree. I think it shows that I am versatile and able to easily adapt to any situation. Hey, if management can spin my short comings as “opportunities” than I think I should be able to spin shit too! Don’t get me wrong, I love to work and I am a hard worker … it’s just sometimes I don’t work the way I was meant to work. So, much like one, or maybe 6, of my past bosses have done with me … I’ll give the Keurig another “opportunity” to get it right!
