Tag: job

Get a Real Job

Recently EM2 asked me if there were any chores around the house that she could do to earn some money. I told her there were plenty of chores to do inside the house and out in the yard and I would be happy to make up a list for her.

She asked how much I would pay her, and I said I’ll pay you the same rate I got when I was a kid. I’ll let you live in my house rent free and let you eat my food.

She didn’t like my answer very much.

I know better than to let my kids do any work for me. I learned my lesson a long time ago with EM1. Most of the time, when she “helped,” it ended up making more work for me than if I had just told her to sit on the couch and not move.

I recall one instance where I told EM1 to take my car to the gas station and fill the tank. I gave her $10 for her time and told her to use my credit card to pay for the gas. She drove away and didn’t come back for two hours. Apparently, she had a few errands to run and figured that was a perfect time to do it. She even used my credit card to buy herself lunch, get some “cute shorts,” and pick up coffee for herself and EM2.

The car had less gas in the tank than when she left, my credit card had three extra charges on it (not including the gas), and EM1 still had the original $10 I gave her sitting in her wallet. I felt like I had just fallen for some sort of Nigerian Prince scam.

My wife thinks I’m being cheap, and I should pick out a few tasks for EM2 to do and give her some money. Of course, this is the same woman that will give me a “honey-do” list a mile long and when I ask why, she says, “because you love me.”

Seems a bit of a double standard.

Anyway, I caved, as I usually do, and I told EM2 she could help me do some work in the yard and I would pay her for her inexperienced, mostly useless, assistance. Yes, I used those words. She pulled out her phone, glanced at the weather reports to check the temperatures for the next few days, then said, “No thanks. How about something in the house? Maybe I can vacuum the carpets?”

I didn’t realize there were stipulations to her participation. I wonder how well this is going to work for her when she is out in the real world, working for an employer that doesn’t find her as cute and charming as I do, and she tries to tell them, “It’s too hot, so I’m going to stay home, today. But don’t worry, I’ll vacuum my carpets to make up for it.”

I never got handouts from my dad when I was growing up. If I asked for money, he always gave me the same speech. “Go out and get a real job and earn your money like I do.”

Okay, this isn’t totally true. I do remember one time my dad actually offered to pay me for some yardwork. He told me to go out in the front yard and pull weeds out of the lawn. He told me he would pay me 5 cents for every dandelion I pulled. I grabbed a paper bag, gloves, and this weird, weed-pulling tool that looked like an overbuilt screwdriver with pitchfork points at the end, then I went to work.

I recall pulling a few dozen dandelions and, as I went, I would take the weeds that had already blossomed into white, fluffy dandelion heads, and blow the seeds all over the lawn. My theory was that if I was only going to make 5 cents for every weed, then I would need to make sure there was always a steady supply of new weeds growing to guarantee future money.

It was pure genius.

At least I thought it was until my dad came storming outside and screamed, “What the hell are you doing?” That was the end of that particular workday. It was also the first time I ever got fired from a job, and it wasn’t even a “real job.”

I don’t think I got paid for the weeds I had already pulled, either. Very disappointing.

Now that I’m the adult, I have a better understanding of my dad’s mindset. Why should I pay EM2 to do a job I can do myself without costing me any money? Or perhaps, more to the point, why pay her to do something that I was going to ignore, anyway?

Sure, I could offer to pay her to pull cobwebs down from the ceiling, or arrange the pantry in alphabetical order, but what’s the point? I don’t care about either one of those things, and it wouldn’t bother me if neither one of them ever happens.

Maybe I should just cut out the middle man and give her ten bucks to sit on the couch and watch television.

It would be cheaper than sending her sister out to gas up the car.

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The Job from Hell

Everyone has bad days at work. Sometimes a bad day can stretch into two or three, or maybe even a bad week. But, have you ever gone into work knowing deep down in your guts that this is the day you’re going to get fired? When I got my first job as a police officer with the Hillsborough Police Department back in 1991, that is how I felt every day that I went in to work.

For four weeks.

When I put on my blue uniform and started field training for the first time, I was assigned a training officer that seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure from torturing me from the moment I showed up at work until the second I left. I imagine when he went home, he must have had a few puppies in the house that he could kick just to get him through the off hours until he could start tormenting me again the next day.

Let’s call the guy, “Dave,” because his name was Dave and I have no interest in trying to come up with a fake name to protect his reputation.

I don’t know how he managed to become a training officer in the first place. Perhaps Lucifer himself promoted him to the position. The devil doesn’t have time to torture everyone personally, so he probably decided Dave would be a good substitute in his absence.

Dave never missed an opportunity to berate me or make me feel stupid. Every day I went to work, I was convinced that I would be fired before the day was over. I had a knot in my stomach that didn’t go away for a month.

I remember on a traffic stop, while I was talking to a driver who had failed to stop at a stop sign, Dave stood behind me and told me that my officer safety was lousy because I had parked my car too close to the car in front of me and I had forgotten to turn the front end of my car out into traffic to protect myself from traffic in the roadway.

Legitimate points, perhaps, but nothing that couldn’t wait until after I had completed my contact with the driver. Dave didn’t see things that way. Yelling at me was a high point in his day and he wasn’t going to wait if he saw an opportunity to do it. The driver of the car did not fail to notice what was happening either. As he signed the traffic ticket I had written, he shook his head and mouthed the words, “I feel sorry for you.”

Okay, maybe I imagined that last part.

Despite his love of telling me what a terrible cop I was, Dave wasn’t exactly a pillar of the policing community himself. We worked the graveyard shift, and I recall many nights that Dave would direct me to park the patrol car in the driveway of his house. He handed me a copy of the Field Training Guide and told me to “study the book” while he went inside the house to “take care of some stuff.”

“Take care of some stuff” was code for crawl into bed and go to sleep. I would be sitting in the patrol car reading department procedures and legal texts while Dave had himself a nice nap. I sometimes wouldn’t see him for half the shift before he came back outside with his hair mussed up and pillow lines embedded in his cheek.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. The nights that Dave left me in the car by myself were the happiest nights I had when I was training with that guy.

Somehow, I survived those four weeks and moved on to my next Training Officer, Nick.

During my first shift with Nick, he climbed into the car holding a Styrofoam cup full of coffee. He told me, “Let’s go get a newspaper, and if you make me spill my coffee before we get there, you’re fired.”

I thought, Oh, hell, here we go again. Different guy, same evil shit.

When Nick saw the look on my face at his comment, he put down his coffee and ordered me to pull over the car. I pulled up to the curb and stopped. As I was preparing to hand over my gun and badge and walk home, I heard Nick mutter, “That mother f**ker. They never should have given him a new trainee.”

“Huh?” I asked with my usual incisive wit.

He asked me, “What did Dave do to you? We need to find a way to get your head unf**ked before you hurt yourself. For starters, forget everything Dave ever told you.”

I think that was the first time in over a month I was able to take a full breath. Life got much easier from that day forward. I discovered that you didn’t have to be an absolute tool to be a Training Officer, and that mistakes could be opportunities to learn something. It soon became apparent that most of the other officers at the department didn’t have too much love for Dave, either.

Things got even better about three years later when Dave got fired for violating department policy and then lying about it during the Internal Affairs investigation.

I’ll be honest with you, I threw a little party for myself that day.

Karma can truly be a magnificent bitch.

So, the next time you think you are having a bad day, even if it is absolutely the worst day at work you have ever experienced, just remember it could be worse.

You could work with Dave.

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Summer Job

When my daughters came home from college this year, I suggested that they might want to find some summer jobs to keep busy and earn a little money before school starts up again in the fall. They both agreed that sounded like a good idea.

I offered to pay them to do some yard work around our house, but apparently that did not sound at all appealing. Either I was not offering to pay enough or, more likely, they did not consider anything around the house or yard worth doing. After all, I haven’t been able to get them to clean their rooms in twenty-two years, I don’t know what made me think I could get one of them to mow the lawn.

For the past month or so, both girls have been taking on jobs housesitting, babysitting, watering plants and caring for animals. All these little side jobs give them something to do each day instead of just sitting on the couch reminding me why I was so willing to pay a lot of money to send them away to school. They are also earning some decent wages. People will pay quite a bit more than I expected to know that their animals and yard are being taken care of while they are away on vacation.

And surprisingly, the girls are doing really well. Given my history with them, I fully expected the people that hired them to come home to brown, wilted plants in the house and brown, wilted animals in the back yard. But everything so far – fingers crossed – has gone smoothly.

The only glitch I have noticed is that when I suggested to the girls that they should get summer jobs, I didn’t realize that I, too would end up being saddled with a variety of summer jobs. Unpaid, summer jobs. Internships, I suppose you could call them.

After spending a morning in my own yard, weeding, gardening, and harvesting fruit off our trees, I hadn’t planned on spending my summer afternoons taking care of someone else’s property. However, it is becoming unpleasantly predictable that somewhere around one or two o’clock in the afternoon, I will hear one child or another tell me, “I forgot to water the plants at Mrs. ———‘s house. Can you drive me there?” Or, “I was supposed to take in the garbage cans and get the newspaper at Mr. ———‘s. Dad, can you go over there and do it? I don’t have time right now.”

Or my personal favorite: at eight o’clock at night, while EM1 was house sitting for some friends who live a half hour away, she called me to say, “There isn’t any food in this house, can you go pick me up something to eat and bring it to me? Oh, and while you’re out, can you stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things? I would really appreciate it.”

I think the most surprising part of this conversation is that she got what she wanted, and that was totally my fault. I should have reminded her of all the times I asked her to help me with chores and she refused, then hung up the phone, laughing maniacally. But there’s something about a child asking you to bring them food. Baby bird syndrome, I’ll call it. It makes me want to spit chewed up worms in her mouth.

Unpack that statement however you like.

Anyway, this whole ordeal makes me wonder what my life will be like when the girls go out and get real jobs. You know, the actual 8 to 5 routine. Long hours, short lunches, and angry bosses. Am I still going to get phone calls asking for help? “Dad, I was the last one at the store and I forgot to lock up. Can you go close out the register and lock the doors for me?” Or, “I’m in surgery right now, but I forgot my lunch. Can you pick me up something and bring it to the hospital?”

Okay, that last one was just wishful thinking, but who doesn’t want a doctor in the family?

All I know for certain right now is that I seem to get sucked into helping the kids with whatever tasks they agree to do for our neighbors and friends, and I’m not making a penny doing it. This seems very wrong, especially when EM2 tells me that she just got paid $100 to go pet someone’s cat for five minutes. A cat that I probably fed, bathed, and cleaned their litter box.

From now on, if EM1 or EM2 take on a new job, I’m not going to lift a finger to help. They are the ones getting paid for it, so they can do all the work. If either one of them suddenly find themselves in trouble and they need my assistance because they forgot to do something, or need my help at the last second…

Yeah, who am I kidding?

I’ll probably do it.

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Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Follow me on Facebook so you don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

And you can follow me on Twitter @gallenwilbanks.