Yes, I Did Those Jobs
By: Remington Write
Tags: Life, Jobs, Action, Work Life Balance, Work

What was your first job? You know, the one that paid you actual money. Mine was cleaning Persian show cats’ cages for a woman who lived outside of town. $1 an hour. I was over the moon!

My fee for babysitting was only 50 cents an hour; I was going to clean up.

And I did

I cleaned up cat shit and cat litter and cat vomit and balls of cat fur. The lady’s husband had built a cinder block building out back when their basement got to be too full of cat cages. There were probably about a hundred cats or so it seemed to me. The lady herself spent hours every day bathing the cats. Those cats were the least cat-like cats I’ve ever been around.

They didn’t groom themselves. They didn’t evince any curiosity about anything around them. They just laid there in those cages, often in the litter boxes, with a dull, dumb expression on their pushed-in little faces. I lasted two weeks, I think. I wasn’t fast enough (a theme we will revisit throughout my work life).

Then I got my first “real” job with a W4 and everything!

I ran the concession stand at the local movie house in the little town I grew up in, Lodi, Ohio. The Idol Theater (get it? Lodi spelled backward, huh?) sat maybe 75 paying customers and was the only option for watching movies short of driving up to Medina where there was a two-screen multiplex. I think I earned $2.50 an hour, making the popcorn and cotton candy and selling it to customers. There was no cash register just a box. I had to figure out the customers’ change in my head.

That part was hell.

But I got to take as much popcorn as I wanted at the end of the night and making cotton candy was a blast. The first weekend I worked was when “Blazing Saddles” made its big Lodi premiere. I heard that movie so many times before I saw it that I could lip-sync the entire movie and did. Friends weren’t nearly as impressed as I thought they should be.

As I’ve written about Daddy and his legendary work ethic before, so let’s just say I was programmed to work and work hard.

Pen and ink on illustration board by the author — 1985

But I knew this work stuff, it was temporary. I’d show up and do what was expected of me, but it was really only a matter of time before I made a name for myself as an Artist.

So I worked crappy jobs to earn money and drew my weird pictures and got ready for my Big Break.

A particularly tough job was with a sign company. I suspect that technology has transformed sign painting but it was pretty primitive in 1976. In order to trace the letters onto giant pieces of plywood for the really big signs, the lettering was done on paper and then the paper was attached by magnets to a massive steel surface. My job was to use “the stippler”, an electrified stylus that zapped tiny holes in the paper which was then taped into place on the sign and dusted with either chalk or charcoal to give the sign painter his letters (see? Primitive). My boss told me to be careful but that the stippler would bite me. Once.

He was right. On the second day, I let my guard down, allowing the tip of the stylus to make contact with the steel surface and just about got knocked on my ass.

That was bad. There was worse.

I think I got rotated off the stippler because my lines were too wobbly (and I wasn’t fast enough). Instead, I operated the automatic silk screen press. I had a pile of large sheets of paper to my right and a rack to my left. The trick was to pull the sheet of paper into the press, position it perfectly before the top part of the press lowered and the squeegee with the ink got pulled across and then to yank it out, get it onto the rack without messing up the wet ink and make sure the next sheet was in place before the screen came back down again. There was a foot brake to slow things down, but slowing things down was not in the job description.

I don’t think I lasted very long there but within less than a week my hands were covered in paper cuts and cleaning the ink off at the end of my shift using lacquer-thinner was every bit as painful as you’re thinking right now.

Detail from “Puzzle it Out”, pen and ink on illustration board by the author (yes, she was high)

All this time I was drawing and painting and believing in myself.

I was an Artist. I wasn't going to waste time learning marketable skills. I wasn’t going to be a Secretary or a Shoe Salesperson or a Medical Assistant. The one skill set that could reliably earn me money was cleaning (thanks, Mom!). I spent years cleaning in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, cheap motels and flophouses, chain hotels, and even one really fancy four-star joint in downtown Cleveland.

Somewhere in there, I managed a day and a half at the Kirby Vacuum Cleaner factory where I got pulled from one line after another for being — wait for it — too slow. In case you’ve never had the pleasure, working on a factory line is every bit as soul-sucking, miserable, and tedious as you’re thinking. Maybe worse. Factories are loud, dirty, dangerous places and the fact that people were lined up to get jobs there tells you all you need to know about the economy in Cleveland in the 1980s.

When that fell apart, I got hired to work the deli counter at Grossman’s Deli not far where Cleveland used to be really industrial. I’d arrive at 5 am and put a massive pot of water on to boil with all four burners turned on under it. Then I’d heave three or four enormous briskets of corned beef into the pot, five on Fridays, and go cut and wrap about thirty thousand kosher dill pickles in wax paper.

The lunch rush was brutal but there were three of us behind the counter and we had our system. By 2 pm when the rush was over, there wasn’t an inch behind that counter that wasn’t slathered in grease including the phone.