I’ve been lucky. I
have never been unemployed for too long, and for that I’m
very grateful. There were many years
where I had part-time side jobs just to help make ends meet. I loved some of those part-time jobs, and
others were just grim. A couple lasted
years and others lasted for days. In one
case, I couldn’t even make it through the entire shift.
When I was in university, I was racking up credit card debt
like a madman. When you arrived at
university in the eighties, you got handed a form with all the credit cards
listed, and all you had to do was put a tick in a box beside each of the ones
you wanted, sign your name, and wait.
Within 6-8 weeks, your mailbox was full of new plastic. I had a Petro Canada card and an Esso card,
but no car. I had cards from the Bay,
Sears and Eaton’s. I had a MasterCard, two
Visas, and an American Express card. I
needed an extra wallet to carry around all my plastic.
I was living the high life, but as with all good things, it
came to a crashing end. Those creditors
wanted to be paid. When I had maxed out
all the cards, and had already been using my MasterCard to pay my Visa, and
vice versa, and I could no longer eat at the Eaton’s restaurant because my card
was declined, it was time to get another job.
Enter BiWay. For those who don’t
know, BiWay was like the dollar store, before there was such a thing. Except the stuff wasn’t a dollar.
My first shift was on inventory day. If you ever were in a BiWay, you will recall
that there were tons of big bins, all filled with little things, like
individual Bic pens, and lighters. We
had to count every one of those individual things. OMG. I
was forced to count a barrel of Bic pens, separating the red from the blue from
the black about four times before I got a number that my manager thought was
acceptable.
 | |||
| Approximately 4000 individual Bic pens fit in a huge oil drum sized bin at the BiWay |
The most bizarre thing about the BiWay was that it had one
of the most formal structures I’ve ever worked in. I had to call my supervisor, and my manager,
both of whom were younger than me (remember, I was only in my early twenties at
the time), Mr. and Miss. Who does
that? I’ve worked in law firms and
multi-national organizations where senior partners and CEOs didn’t want to be
addressed so formally. I didn’t last
long at the BiWay.
 |
| At BiWay, the bosses expected to be called Mister. |
After my stint in discount retail, and in the midst of a
recession, I had a day job at a law firm that I really liked, but that wasn’t
paying the bills. I was engaged and
saving for my new life as a married dude, so I decided to go ahead and get a
part time job to supplement the savings, or to pay off some bills or
something. I had already done my time in
fast food, and decided that my new job should not involve asking the age-old
question, ‘Do you want fries with that?’
I also was not that into the idea of telemarketing, but I
was looking for something that would fit into my work schedule, so when I saw
an ad for a job doing fund raising for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, I figured
it couldn’t be that bad. I called up, and they hired me without an
interview. That should have been my
first red flag.
 |
| The National Arts Centre. Could they survive without me? Yes. |
My job was to call a pre-screened list of people that had
previously supported the NAC, and from whom it should have been easy to squeeze
some fund raising dollars. It turns out
that we were not simply asking for donations, but rather asking for specific
levels of ‘patronship’. Being a patron
means you’ve donated much more than a sponsor or a regular donor. The cost of becoming an arts patron was
between 1500.00 and 5000.00. In a
recession. Good freakin’ luck.
They handed me the list, pointed at the phone, gave me a
script and wished me good luck. I
settled in, and dialed. After one call,
it became evident that shaking down arts lovers for cash in the midst of a
recession was not for me. I spent the
next two hours fake dialing and talking to a dial tone. I clearly did not get any donations, and
after what felt like a year, my 15 minute break arrived. I stepped outside, and ran like hell. They never even called to see what
happened. I’m sure it must have been a
fairly regular occurrence for them. On the positive side, the National Arts Centre
remains a vibrant thriving enterprise, even without my help.
 |
| The telemarketing job from hell |
In 2011, if you watch A&E on Wednesday nights, Dave, Jarrod,
Brandi, Barry and Darrell make self storage look pretty cool. However, in 1995, it was not cool. Not one bit cool. In
another desperate bid to generate some cash, I took a part-time job as the
Sunday guy at a self storage facility. I
don’t know how I thought I could possibly handle sitting in a remote office, at
the side of a highway, seeing absolutely nobody for an entire day. But I did sit there Sunday after Sunday,
occasionally renting out a storage locker, but never meeting a co-worker and
rarely talking to a customer. I could
feel my soul getting sucked out.
I read a lot of books.
I dreamed a lot of daydreams. I
watched the clock tick by, minute by minute, every tock felt like another nail
in my heart. There was no internet, no
ipods, not a TV, it was horrible. One
day, I discovered that the phone system had an intercom. I’m not sure why Canadiana Self Storage
needed an intercom, as the office was a one room shack at the side of a
highway, but an intercom we had. I
passed the rest of my days at the self storage empire singing karaoke to myself
through the intercom. After a few more
karaoke Sundays, I had to quit.
 |
| A regular Sunday afternoon in the Storage office |
There were times when I tried on my entrepreneur’s
hat. I figured that working for myself
would allow me to make some extra money, on my own terms, and on my own
schedule. Still in the nineties, I
decided that, while living in a small Alberta town, I could make lots of loot
by, you guessed it, cleaning other people’s houses. My lovely wife was working as a
desk-top-publisher, so I told her my idea, and before you knew it, I had
business cards, and A Man and His Mop was born.
My first client was a guy who hadn’t cleaned his house since
forever. It was the most disgusting thing
I ever saw. The moment I walked into his
house was the moment I decided that A Man and His Mop was over. I agreed to clean the sty, so I cleaned
it. I couldn’t get the whole house
finished in one day, so I was supposed to finish it the next. I got up the next day and couldn’t face the
thought of going back, so I didn’t. I
didn’t get paid, and I spent the next year sneaking around the small town,
trying to avoid this guy. I can’t
imagine cleaning people’s houses for a living, but I have a boat-load of
respect for people who do.
I don’t even want to tell you about my next entrepreneurial
experience, Pooper Scooping. I don’t
know why I thought cleaning up after dogs would be better than cleaning up
after people, because it isn’t. I got
one gig, actually got the cash, and shut down the business. It never occurred to me that once I cleaned
up the dog crap, that I would have to take it somewhere to get rid of it. Toting around bags of dog crap in the back of
my car was nasty gross.
I know that none of these are even close to being the worst
jobs in the world. But, I've learned that I can’t work alone,
and I have to believe in what I’m doing.
To top it all off, I have what my brother-in-law calls ‘computer hands’,
so not so surprisingly, cleaning houses, heavy or dirty work, or picking up dog crap turned out to
not be for me.
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