Your Work Stories
Of all the work stories I'm sent I manage to get maybe half of them edited and up on this page. I choose according to how complete they are, how much I enjoy them and of course I'm pickier when I'm recieving more of them.
I'm think a good way to submit stories is to post them here, in the comment section of this post. I'll grab some of these and give them their own page, but this way your story is up and can be read without depending on me. So, comment a way.
Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE
My Cousin's brutal tale of being a beat cop in NYC is HERE
Swimming with dolphins in Gay Hawaii is HERE.
Being Will Ferrell is HERE.
And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!
and my home page is HERE.
I'm think a good way to submit stories is to post them here, in the comment section of this post. I'll grab some of these and give them their own page, but this way your story is up and can be read without depending on me. So, comment a way.
Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE
My Cousin's brutal tale of being a beat cop in NYC is HERE
Swimming with dolphins in Gay Hawaii is HERE.
Being Will Ferrell is HERE.
And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!
and my home page is HERE.
1 Comments:
At 10:09 PM, Adellamorio said…
When I was 25 and still in college, I was working as a puppeteer. This job was great because I never worked more than a couple hours a day, and I was getting paid to play with dolls. Unfortunately, from Thanksgiving until the local elementary schools came back from their winter break, it was slim pickings and not unusual to work only a couple days over that time.
It was my seasonal lack of work, along with the fact that my second job as a stagehand for the Sacramento stagehands union had come to an abrupt end (this had something to do with the fact that I always got in shouting matches with my crew foreman) that led me down the path of manual labor.
I was at my wife’s family’s Christmas party and word got around that I was out of a job. I was told by many people in the family that I should ask my wife’s cousin for a job, because he was always hiring. He was the president of a big time trucking, wrecking, salvage, and railroad repair company called Jim Dobbas Inc. I really didn’t want to ask for a job for fear of overstepping family boundaries, and for the fear that he might actually give me one.
The negotiations turned out to be relatively simple; I asked for a job and he gave me one. And oddly enough, it turned out to be the last time I would take a job from family and the last time he would offer one.
I was instructed to report to the Antelope Rail Yard at 5:30 in the morning. The whole idea of anything that starts at 5:30 in the morning should have clued me in to the fact that this was going to be a disaster. So, I got up Thursday morning, left my house at five A.M., and drove onto the Dobbas yard cluelessly under a blanket of clouds and drizzle.
The first hour of work consisted of my new employee orientation, which was without a doubt the best first hour of a job in my employment history. The lady in charge started off by talking about how not to get hit by a train. It was at this point when I started to wonder just what it was that I was going to be doing. That curiosity faded with the introduction of the single greatest safety video created by man.
It was put out by Southern Pacific and was made up of a gang of sixty second spots. The theme of it was about how the choices you make in the next thirty seconds could effect you for the next thirty years. They all started with two guys talking, one of them wanting to take a shortcut on the job and the other one trying to talk him out of it. Every time someone did something wrong there was bloodshed. Once a guy walked between two freight cars and got smashed between the couplings. Another guy got hit by a train and went flying, and in my favorite vignette this guy reached down under this machine that sets and drives railroad spikes and got his hand torn off. The special effects were gory and great, and there were a couple times where I had to bite the side of my hand to keep from laughing.
After the videos we were quizzed and given hard hats, gloves, and vests and sent out into the yard. It was 6:30 and freezing cold. As I was led over to where I’d be working, people were looking at me and smiling. Not like, “Hey new guy, welcome aboard!” but more like it was really funny to see a guy this far out of his element, and if we keep watching he just might get his hand torn off and that will be funny. As it turned out, the smiles were due to the fact that my employment history had quickly fallen into the realm of general knowledge and the idea of a puppeteer working on the railroad was pretty funny. The only thing funnier was the fact that I was making less than half of what I was getting as a union permit worker, I was working outdoors in the winter, and that my new job was sorting scrap metal by hand.
Me and two other guys were taking a big pile of railroad detritus and sorting it into three smaller piles of: railroad spikes, spike plates, and these J shaped pieces of metal that are used to keep the track attached to the tie, called creepers.
I took a deep, “has it really come to this” breath and tore into the six foot tall pile of rusty metal in front of me. After a few minutes my two coworkers stopped me and told me to slow down because there was nothing to do once we finished this, so we had to make it last all day. I wanted to slow down, but there was no way I was going to be throwing metal around all day long. My hope was that maybe we would finish and I’d be asked to drive something somewhere, or maybe something needed cleaning, preferably with hot water.
We finished the pile in about five hours. At that point we were given a new assignment. Upon first hearing the details, I tried to convince myself that it might actually be fun. It consisted of knocking creepers off of old track with a sledge hammer. Honestly, it was kind of fun for the first ten minutes. Hitting a piece of metal that’s rusted or twisted in place and watching it shoot out the other end wasn’t so bad. It’s the kind of thing one might do with a friend for fun on the weekend. The reality was that when one is being paid eight dollars an hour to do it in forty degree, 98% humidity weather, it’s a fucking nightmare.
When I came back to work the next morning, it was a whole day of the same thing. Then came Friday night, the end of my first work week, and coincidentally the end of my job at the railroad. Unfortunately I wasn’t fired so I had to call the boss man at home and tell him that there was no way in hell I was going to work for him any more. He agreed that it was a good idea for me to quit.
I don’t think he really wanted to give me the job in the first place, and I know I didn’t want to take it. I guess it was just one of those things you do for family.
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