Crappy jobs I had in my 20s, part 1

I am still unemployed, stressed and crabby. I need another Swedish massage and a few thousand dollars to pay for my BAR/BRI course.

Sometimes I look at my younger classmates and think about the crappy jobs I was doing at their age. I could write a whole series about crappy jobs I had in my twenties.

For awhile I had a student worker job in the library’s media department. Mostly this job wasn’t so bad. I mostly remember sitting around and talking, and sometimes delivering TVs and VCRs to classrooms. But for some reason the department was also in charge of processing the teacher evaluations that everyone did at the end of the semester. As the forms came in, I would sometimes spend hours alone in the attic sorting through the forms. The up side to this job was reading what students wrote about teachers. It’s interesting that students seem to have a reflex sympathy toward teachers on such evaluations. Hardly anyone ever got a really bad evaluation. But I learned how to spot the signs of a bad teacher in a purportedly good evaluation.

The job was mind-numbingly dull because I was all alone in the stale attic air. It was always too hot or too cold. And there were no distractions other than a radio that only received a.m. stations. So I listened to WDIA--”the nation’s first black radio station.” They played some music, mostly soul oldies like Marvin Gaye, Al Green. Good but overplayed songs. But they also had lots of talk shows. I had already had a job where I spent the day listening to Rush Limbaugh with a ditto-head, so I knew of the the lunacy factor in talk radio. But the high paranoia expressed by so many callers was really striking. I’m not sure how representative the sample group really was, but I got the impression that most black people think that most white people are plotting complicated schemes to keep the black man down from the moment they get up in the morning till they put their scheming white heads on the pillow at night. The usual conspiracy plots got aired, for example that the CIA deliberately unleashed crack and/or AIDS on the black community. Since this was Memphis, there were still some theories were still being discussed about the King assassination. I think the CIA was in on that, too.

Their paranoia made me paranoid, that all the black people I saw thought I was out to get them so they were out to get me back.