Work, Work, Work

I won an award at my company's holiday party last weekend(don't ask), and like the immortal(though the public record says otherwise) George C. Scott, I was no where to be found.

Unlike the Roman-nosed Scott, who decried awards that made his art-form into a competition, I didn't refuse the award. I simply forgot the unfortunately named "Winter Gala" was even taking place. So, I gladly made my way down to our sub-basement floors to pick up my plaque. Can you picture Scott sheepishly receiving his golden statuette from a clerk in the bowels of the Academy on a Monday morning? Surely not.

Anyway, this isn't the first award for work I've received. I won "Employee Of The Month", a dubious award, at my first job at a Loews Theater. I stuffed the ballot by sleeping with one of my supervisors. Well not really, I just wanted to; she bore a startling resemblance to Katie Holmes, but with bigger breasts. My version of events, though, makes for much better talk around a retirement home card table sometime down the road. So I'd better start getting my fictional facts straight now to spot any holes that need filling. So to speak.

After that scandal - though I deserved the award anyway - I quit my first job. Actually, that's a lie. The first part, not the quitting part.

My real first job was at a produce stand. There were no ladies who could body double on Dawson's Creek, but it was a satisfying job. For a sixteen year-old boy, it had everything: weekly paycheck, proximity to not only McDonalds but the then exotic Checkers, and the daily chore of hoisting huge bags of top-soil and fertilizer onto trucks. The last part is probably specific to me. It's hard to find someone who would enjoy having dirt-filled plastic bags, pot-marked with holes, spilling their dark and pungent contents all over you. To me coming home smelling(and looking) like the damp, dark place under the porch where the dogs shit meant you were working. At sixteen, I wanted to feel grown-up.

When college life beckoned, that feeling went away. If you are in college, that automatically means you are a grown-up(if you don't believe me, ask a college student). So I took the theater job the summer after freshman year for it's flexible schedule(after briefly working as a janitor at UMCP, the less said of that..).

A few weeks into the next fall semester, I realized I could make money with my brain. I took a job as the webmaster for one of the many pseudo-honors programs, and bid the world of manual labor goodbye at the age of 19. Or so I thought.

Three years later, I was so closely tied to the fortunes of the "Dot Coms" that when everything finally hit bottom, the resounding thud left my ears bleeding and my prospects scattered. With no IT work to be found, I started working as a glorified construction worker, fitting conduit, pipes, and running wires.

I still went to work in IT geek-standard T-shirts and jeans, just like at the floundered start-up, but now the ensemble was topped off by a bright-yellow hard hat, accessorized with a tanned-hide tool belt, and finished with a matching pair of old work boots. Dressing up every morning in the image of one of America's lesser mythic figures(if the American Cowboy is a top-tier mythic figure, the Construction Worker must be at least tier three) was thrilling for a week. It recessed and became part of the dull backdrop of every day life after that, until one day when a snobbish lady brought it back into vogue.

I was running wires for a security system at a new apartment complex near Embassy Row in DC. On a hilltop, the site was always obscured by clouds of dust, skeletal metal beams, and a blockade of various vehicles: vans and construction vehicles innermost, trailers for the management in the middle, and their SUVs and heavy-duty trucks parked along the outer ring. Occasionally, a meal-truck would penetrate close to the building to sell the workers bottles of water and Coke, candy and chips. If you were lucky, there were sub-sandwiches(made that morning) saran-wrapped and stored in a cooler next to the drinks.

Anyway, being on the lowest rung of the ladder, I couldn't park on site. Luckily, all of the well-to-do people who lived in the tidy little houses behind the site had usually left for work well before I arrived at ten in the morning. I parked in front of the same tiny, but impeccably manicured dwelling every day. A tiny, friendly dog lived there; he would merrily bark at me every morning.

One day, I crossed the two-way street next to the site through stopped traffic. Embassy Row congestion is a lot like what you would find in Georgetown: a sea of luxury sedans and SUVs dotted with the occasional out of place Geo or Civic. Peering at oncoming cars from behind one such anomaly, I instinctively snapped my head back to unnecessarily check the other direction, having never outgrown the habit since Kindergarten(look both ways or you could die had a strong impact on my little mind). Glancing back, I met a hateful pair of blue eyes floating over thin lips that were curled back in disgust, all framed by conservatively cut silver-blonde hair. A woman, behind the wheel of her gray BMW, eying me like a mutt planning to take a dump on her roses.

Too close for her well-heeled comfort, I suppose. I hate her. Not hated, because I still hate her to this day. To quote Ice Cube, I don't want a "blond-haired pale-skinned buttermilk-complexion-grafted recessive depressive ironing-board-backside straight-up-but-straight-down no-frills-no-thrills Miss six-o'clock-subject-to-have-the-itch mutaniod Caucasoid white cave bitch." And she must have had an ironing-board backside; the way she was leaning forward with her hands perched at one and eleven-o'-clock, something large was sticking up her ass.

Fuck her, fuck her sky-blue pantsuit, her BMW, her house, her small dog(s), her husband, her kids, her newly-remodeled kitchen with it's $25,000 counter tops, and the Prada boots she picked up during a two-hour two-hundred dollar lunch. Fuck her job, her boss, her friends, the vacations to the Disneyland, the Bahamas, Virginia Beach, and any other place she may have been forced to mingle a few minutes with the normals, oh you bet those are fucked. And sure as shit, fuck her roses, if she has any.

After a year, I found an IT job. I've been through a string of them since, good and bad. I've never been as proud of what I do, though, since that day. No job, award, or any amount of money will ever elevate me above anyone.

Anyway, the plaque is nice.