First things first, lemme just say that I made it through the entire shift, got dinner and returned home before making this thread. Good? Good. Second off, am I being an asshole for doing this? I went through a temp agency, got a job on a maintenance staff for a mental health facility that will both go unnamed and laid on my ass for a week until my scheduled first day. Now, I'm no handyman, hell I told this to my coordinator when she offered it but she assured me that no experience was required. I thought, "What the hell, I did well at my last two jobs despite having no clue what they entailed before I walked through the door," plus it was paying $10 an hour and it was on first shift. Now, that's the highest I would've ever been paid because career prospects for a college dropout with few practical skills are dismal in this part of the country and it being from 8 to 5, I could finally start taking martial arts again! Not to mention, my new posting was to be in Johnson City, which while not really noteworthy for anything might as well be New York compared to dead-end town I've been living in since middle school.
Last night, I couldn't sleep. This happens to me every time something major's scheduled the next day, like an out-of-state road-trip or somesuch. So I decide to actually look up where in town this facility is, because I spaced on doing that earlier in the week. Can you blame me, I was too busy reading John Scalzi novels and shoving pizza into my maw. That's when a sense of dread began to creep over me. See, the handout giving me the address is telling me it's in Johnson City, but Google is telling me it's in Gray, which while only about five minutes away is still the same kinda ass-backwards, bumfuck-nowhere town I'm trying to escape from.
FUCK ME. Well, whatever. The job still pays better than all of my past ones and if nothing else, then at least I'd have BJJ classes to look forward to after work, right? So I throw some Little Big Town on the radio and head in anyway, might as well give it the ol' college try. Walk into the lobby, get sat down next to some dude in his 60s and wait for my supervisor. This conservatively-dressed guy in his mid-40s comes up to us, his nametag matching the one on my handout. He shakes our hands and introduces us to the person who will be actually supervising us, another 60-year old guy who has history with the first. Then they said something about a van and about how the company has, like, a hundred facilities all over. This was not in the handout I was given. In my naivety, I assumed that I'd just be in one building all day, doing all kinds of things with a toolbox that my dad tried and failed to drill into my head. Nope, our assignment today is to go to this one office in the middle of goddamn nowhere and paint the walls of everything beyond the reception desk during business hours. And we gotta wait half an hour because the fourth guy in our crew hit the snooze button on his alarm.
Once Sleeping Beauty arrives, it takes us a full hour to get to the place and I'm about ready to hurl. The anxiety from the previous night already has me off-tilt and I'm riding in a twenty-year old Caravan driven by a typical Tennessee motorist, by which I mean he doesn't know what turn signals are and will slam on the brakes at a yellow because he's paranoid about cameras. Our geriatric supervisor gets out the tools we need and asks me and Sleeping Beauty if we have any experience painting at all. We don't and my supervisor gives us a thousand-yard stare. Apparently, nobody told him about the newly relaxed requirements for new hires. So he briefly shows us how to trim (because he didn't bother to bring along tape) and tosses us in separate bathrooms to see how well we fare. We don't do that well, neither of us have the dexterity to keep the paint off the doorframes and ceiling tiles. It takes us a while to get our tasks done as we get wrapped up in wiping off errant brush strokes and it this point, you're guessing that the supervisor flipped his shit. Thing is, he didn't. Sure, he pointed out multiple times throughout the shift about how we needed to clean those off, but all in all he was pretty chill about it. So was the office staff, they were completely cool with all of us working around each other, some snide sexist remarks from my supervisor aside. The job were absolutely mundane, no real stress aside from getting paint where I shouldn't be, but for a couple of complete amateurs, we managed to get 60% of the entire job done in one day to the satisfaction of the staff. We even get an "atta-boy" from our supervisor.
That being said, I'm still uneasy. It's still an hour ride back to my car in Gray and I don't know quite know where we're supposed to be when our shift ends at 5p, at the office we're renovating or at the main building? Because if it's the latter, then I won't be able to make those BJJ classes, should I stick with this job. There's also word of a potential weekend shift, which my handout says I shouldn't be subject to, but its track record hasn't been doing well thus far. In any case, at 4:15, we pile back into the minivan and head back to Gray. Unfortunately, Sleeping Beauty brings up the subject of taxes and the shoe I've been waiting for the entire day drops. What follows is a rapid-fire MAGA screed from the two old bastards in front about socialism, how it was the Democrats who actually denied aid to Ukraine and how the economy's the best it's ever been, the Democrats just wanna see us fail, after all this trade deal with China's gonna be GREAT! Sleeping Beauty, for his part, claims he's not into politics but says his dad thinks Trump's great. I can't erase the look of mortification on my face, so I dig into my coat pocket for my iPod so I can drown out their nonsense. Like, I knew it was coming, but still. This is the exact reason I left my last job, because I was tired of entering an all-white environment and be subjected to this unsolicited bullshit every day. Fuck the 10 bucks, fuck being on first shift, I called up my staffing coordinator and asked for a new assignment while I was still in the van. I gave my supervisor some bullshit platitude about how the job was fine, it just wasn't what I was expecting (which was true) and that I'd be willing to work the week, which remains to be seen depending on how my meeting with my coordinator goes in the morning. I have to stop by the agency anyway because she forgot to mention to us that we were all supposed to get screened for TB before we ever went on shift, which would make it three TB tests in as many fucking months.
All of a sudden, I'm contemplating moving in with my mother and seeing how the job market is out there. Then I remember she's deep in snowbird country and my rep would be Matt fucking Gaetz. Like goddamn, it should not be this hard to find a job where I'm not the only non-white or non-straight person in the room. And also, I got oil paint on my favorite pair of jeans. I liked these jeans, I wouldn't have worn them had I known I'd be doing this all day.
Last night, I couldn't sleep. This happens to me every time something major's scheduled the next day, like an out-of-state road-trip or somesuch. So I decide to actually look up where in town this facility is, because I spaced on doing that earlier in the week. Can you blame me, I was too busy reading John Scalzi novels and shoving pizza into my maw. That's when a sense of dread began to creep over me. See, the handout giving me the address is telling me it's in Johnson City, but Google is telling me it's in Gray, which while only about five minutes away is still the same kinda ass-backwards, bumfuck-nowhere town I'm trying to escape from.
FUCK ME. Well, whatever. The job still pays better than all of my past ones and if nothing else, then at least I'd have BJJ classes to look forward to after work, right? So I throw some Little Big Town on the radio and head in anyway, might as well give it the ol' college try. Walk into the lobby, get sat down next to some dude in his 60s and wait for my supervisor. This conservatively-dressed guy in his mid-40s comes up to us, his nametag matching the one on my handout. He shakes our hands and introduces us to the person who will be actually supervising us, another 60-year old guy who has history with the first. Then they said something about a van and about how the company has, like, a hundred facilities all over. This was not in the handout I was given. In my naivety, I assumed that I'd just be in one building all day, doing all kinds of things with a toolbox that my dad tried and failed to drill into my head. Nope, our assignment today is to go to this one office in the middle of goddamn nowhere and paint the walls of everything beyond the reception desk during business hours. And we gotta wait half an hour because the fourth guy in our crew hit the snooze button on his alarm.
Once Sleeping Beauty arrives, it takes us a full hour to get to the place and I'm about ready to hurl. The anxiety from the previous night already has me off-tilt and I'm riding in a twenty-year old Caravan driven by a typical Tennessee motorist, by which I mean he doesn't know what turn signals are and will slam on the brakes at a yellow because he's paranoid about cameras. Our geriatric supervisor gets out the tools we need and asks me and Sleeping Beauty if we have any experience painting at all. We don't and my supervisor gives us a thousand-yard stare. Apparently, nobody told him about the newly relaxed requirements for new hires. So he briefly shows us how to trim (because he didn't bother to bring along tape) and tosses us in separate bathrooms to see how well we fare. We don't do that well, neither of us have the dexterity to keep the paint off the doorframes and ceiling tiles. It takes us a while to get our tasks done as we get wrapped up in wiping off errant brush strokes and it this point, you're guessing that the supervisor flipped his shit. Thing is, he didn't. Sure, he pointed out multiple times throughout the shift about how we needed to clean those off, but all in all he was pretty chill about it. So was the office staff, they were completely cool with all of us working around each other, some snide sexist remarks from my supervisor aside. The job were absolutely mundane, no real stress aside from getting paint where I shouldn't be, but for a couple of complete amateurs, we managed to get 60% of the entire job done in one day to the satisfaction of the staff. We even get an "atta-boy" from our supervisor.
That being said, I'm still uneasy. It's still an hour ride back to my car in Gray and I don't know quite know where we're supposed to be when our shift ends at 5p, at the office we're renovating or at the main building? Because if it's the latter, then I won't be able to make those BJJ classes, should I stick with this job. There's also word of a potential weekend shift, which my handout says I shouldn't be subject to, but its track record hasn't been doing well thus far. In any case, at 4:15, we pile back into the minivan and head back to Gray. Unfortunately, Sleeping Beauty brings up the subject of taxes and the shoe I've been waiting for the entire day drops. What follows is a rapid-fire MAGA screed from the two old bastards in front about socialism, how it was the Democrats who actually denied aid to Ukraine and how the economy's the best it's ever been, the Democrats just wanna see us fail, after all this trade deal with China's gonna be GREAT! Sleeping Beauty, for his part, claims he's not into politics but says his dad thinks Trump's great. I can't erase the look of mortification on my face, so I dig into my coat pocket for my iPod so I can drown out their nonsense. Like, I knew it was coming, but still. This is the exact reason I left my last job, because I was tired of entering an all-white environment and be subjected to this unsolicited bullshit every day. Fuck the 10 bucks, fuck being on first shift, I called up my staffing coordinator and asked for a new assignment while I was still in the van. I gave my supervisor some bullshit platitude about how the job was fine, it just wasn't what I was expecting (which was true) and that I'd be willing to work the week, which remains to be seen depending on how my meeting with my coordinator goes in the morning. I have to stop by the agency anyway because she forgot to mention to us that we were all supposed to get screened for TB before we ever went on shift, which would make it three TB tests in as many fucking months.
All of a sudden, I'm contemplating moving in with my mother and seeing how the job market is out there. Then I remember she's deep in snowbird country and my rep would be Matt fucking Gaetz. Like goddamn, it should not be this hard to find a job where I'm not the only non-white or non-straight person in the room. And also, I got oil paint on my favorite pair of jeans. I liked these jeans, I wouldn't have worn them had I known I'd be doing this all day.
