TIME PASSING

Oh man. Alex has just alerted me to the fact that it has now been TEN YEARS since I posted my fabled journal, kept while “in training” at a cell phone call center in 2004. And actually the journal was from a couple of years earlier, before I had this blog! I saved it in analog form until this blog was born and Kevin asked me to post it. I was 25 years old, maybe 24, I can’t remember what year I actually had the job but it was before I met my old man, which happened when I was 25. I was living with my boyfriend and his 19 year old one-eyed cat, and we were in an early laptop band together in which we did things like sing Michael Jackson covers into children’s musical toys, or dress up as an octopus (that one was mostly me). We lived in a pretty nice 2 bedroom apartment on the top floor of a classy old building in the fancy part of Portland, and it cost, in my memory $626, which, how do you like them apples, Mr. Inflation and Mrs. Gentrification? I got the job because Mike worked there and he put in a good word for me, although realistically, I am pretty sure they would have hired anyone who could sign their name (or at least make an X on the appropriate line).

It is really, really great to revisit this. I have not thought about it in years.

My reactions:

– I can’t believe how little my relationship to bringing lunch to work has changed
– I loved when Jake delivered pizzas. He had so many great stories. He had a work friend who called hamburgers “sandwiches” which blew my mind, and one time he delivered a pizza to a stripper at a strip club WHILE SHE WAS DANCING
– my impression of this type of bullshit work has remained remarkably consistent. And I hadn’t even read Marx back then! Nor have I now
– I remember saying things like “I am morbidly unhappy”
– I really like this: “this must motivate me to force my way into grad school, or into the life of the traveling bohemian like that guy in The Sun Also Rises who got his genitals shot off in the war.”
– remember when I literally worked for a dot com that went bust?? When it failed I went around town and picked up all the returned DVDs from all their drop boxes, in a sort of misguided attempt to recoup what I considered to be my losses (although, who was I kidding? It was a dot com in I think the year 1999, which meant they paid me an absurd amount of money plus benefits plus paid time off to almost literally do nothing) but when I got all the DVDs home I realized that almost every one of them was just a copy of the Legend of Bagger Vance, plus one porno, all of which I sold somewhere. Where would that have even been? Which place bought 7 copies of the Legend of Bagger Vance plus one porno?
– There was an article recently about bullshit jobs and how they are destroying society. so many people make a living doing bullshit that nobody cares about and that isn’t useful and that doesn’t benefit anyone and that they themselves aren’t interested in. I spent years doing these jobs, before I went back to school. It makes me sick to think that for so many people these are the ONLY jobs. If they’re lucky! There are even worse jobs! If you keep an animal in a cage without anything interesting to do, it will go crazy and gnaw off its own foot.
– that is pretty sweet, that someone put “Turd Ferguson” as a fake name in the training system
– I love that I only made it 3 days at that job

As I recall, after I quit (it was at lunchtime) I got a burrito and went home, where my boyfriend was doing something on the computer. At that time, I didn’t yet have a computer of my own and I remember I made a lot of rude jokes about how he loved computers so much. Now he makes a living doing computers in various ways, and is still in a laptop band! Time flies I do declare. And I moved to Los Angeles and started a whole new life, and had to read Hegel, and married some weird tall dude, and now I spend my days writing emails to students who I catch plagiarizing. And soon I’ll be dead, basically. But it’s okay! Get it while it’s hot, that’s what I always say

speaking of, the aforementioned weird man I married left me stew cooking in the slow-cooker and it’s ready now so PEACE BE UNTO YOU

VIVA LA REVOLUCION

Thank you to Alex for this very useful walk down memory lane.

TEN YEARS! In ten more years I’ll be 47 and god only knows what will be going on. I hope good stuff but you never can tell, and that’s a fact.

God bless the people of America