I'm a little too wasted to remember what job I
said the newest guide to shitjobs would be, and far
too lazy to look it up in last months, so I'm just
going to chose one at random. Lets pick The microchip
factory.By Steve Levandoski
Let's face it. If you are a musician you will probably never make enough money to pay the rent on that 2-bedroom apartment you share with 8 other people. IF you are lucky enough to get signed, the little money the record company doesn't screw you out of will be squandered on MC Hammer-type mansions (he's doing credit card commercials now), or tied up in some lawsuit. You will need to get a shitjob. I've enjoyed the privilege of having a losing about thirty different jobs in the four years since I dropped out of college. This is my guide for al you young bloods out there. Each issue will feature a different job I once had in chronological order,and how to take advantage of it while it takes advantage of you.
Here are the past issues, in case you missed them or need to review:
August 2001
November 2001
January 2002
February 2002
March 2002
April 2002
I'm a little too wasted to remember what job I
said the newest guide to shitjobs would be, and far
too lazy to look it up in last months, so I'm just
going to chose one at random. Lets pick The microchip
factory.
Addecco called and gave me the directions to some place I can't recall. I'm sure it was a bunch of letters that stand for some thing. For example, PGA standing for Philadelphia Gas Works. As a basic rule of thumb* (see bottom), never work for a company that's name has bunch of letters in it that stand for something. It always sucks. The good people at Addecco always seem to forget what letters stand for, too.
"What is the job.", I asked the bitchy bitch at the
Addecco command center.
"To assist", she snarled.
"To assist what?"
"To assist a company", replied Bitchy Bitch.
"To assist a company doing what?"
"To assist a company by doing work. Now hurry up. They
need you to be the site in half an hour, and the place
is twenty five minutes away"
I follow the directions "to the tee"**, and wound up becoming totally lost as usual. I was only fifteen minutes late, though. I ran in and found the anal bitch that Bitchy-bitch told me to contact. She yelled at me in the requisite condescending, anal bitch manner, and sat me at desk.
"What exactly do you want me to do?", I politely asked.
" Well, I dunno. How about assemble microchips?",
Anal-Bitch replied with a heaping hint of sarcasm.
"Ya know, this IS a microchip factory, after all".
"Oh", I say.
"Maybe someone should come to work more prepared"
"Oh"
Whenever someone who has authority over you says starts to lecture you for sole purpose of bitching, its best to just say "Oh" over and over again. "Oh" doesn't really mean anything, and will never get you in trouble, plus it stagnates the conversation. The person bitching at you will eventually become bored and will tire out sooner. Good for any unpleasant and/or pointless business or social situation where you have to talk to assholes.
Back to the job. The Anal bitch showed me how to assemble the chip. You screw four screws into a chip, and then put the chip in a box. If chimps had opposable thumbs, it would take Anal-Bitch less than five minutes to train them to do my job. The kicker was that I had to wear a demagnetizing wristband so I wouldn't fuck up the chips with my natural body magnetism. The wristbands had a cord that connected it to the desk. The tiny little room had me and about twenty other workers in crowded rows with all of us literally chained to our desks. We could only unchain ourselves during lunch. The only thing missing was the orange suits and some cops with shotguns.
I had made about fifty of those fucking chips when Anal-Bitch told me that I had a phone call. She showed me to the phone and stood right beside me.
"Hi Steve! This is Bitchy-Bitch from Addecco. Anal-Bitch asked me to ask you something," said Bitchy-Bitch on the other line.
"Oh" I said.
"Yeah, Anal-Bitch asked me to tell you that you need to pick up the pace a little bit."
"Oh"
"Yeah, it seems that you aren't making the chips fast enough"
"Oh"
"So it seems that you will need to go faster, Ok, Steve? By the way, you know John, one of the other people working their from Addecco? Please ask him to come to the phone. I need to ask him something, too"
And so, one by one all the Addecco employee's where told by Bitchy-Bitch that Anal-Bitch needed them to go faster. Bitchy-Bitch called back at the end of the day to tell us one by one that Anal-Bitch told her to tell us that we should not come back tomorrow. Thank god.
*I found out that the expression "Rule of thumb" comes from a late seventeenth-century American law. The law stated that it was illegal for a man to beat his wife with anything thicker than the width of his thumb, for the obvious safety reasons. Fascinating.
**I'm not sure where this expression comes from. Golf Maybe?
Don't miss Steve's other regular column: Steve's Not Having It