Shipped to China

The company I worked for made cell phone casings and, during the Bush Jr. era, decided to ship the job overseas to China. I was almost fired off with the rest of the workers until my boss found out that I'm fluent in Mandarin. My mother's insistence on teaching me had finally paid off.

I was to go with one of the chief executives as a translator. On one of the connecting flights, though, he found out that hiring a translator in the country once he got there was actually cheaper than bringing me with him, a fact that had evaded his attention because of an error in calculating the difference from yuan to dollar, I suspect.

He fired me after he got the hotel in Beijing, because there was no point in him to pay my hotel fees. I was alone with very few resources in a foreign country. I may have spoke the language, but the culture was almost completely alien. I couldn't afford a ticket home (the executive had been holding the tickets, and had instructed the hotel staff to keep me away from him) and the American embassy was going to take several months to review my case. Meanwhile, I was living as an illegal.

Fortunately, while at an internet cafe, I met a local factory owner who needed workers because of a new contract he'd picked up. He took pity on my situation and offered to let me work until the embassy had sorted my problem.

When I showed up, the factory seemed strangely familiar. And then I realized what the factory owner was making.

Cell phone casings. He'd hired me for my old job.

A Fast Food Horror Story

I worked for a well-known fast food chain in the United States for a few years, and the store I worked at was wonderful. It was a straining store, and as such, it got a lot of attention from corporate. When I got promoted to assistant manager, I found out that all of the stores did not receive the same amount of love.

I got called in a few weeks after my promotion--it's no secret that, upon taking any sort of managerial position you cease to be human, and instead become a food production automaton. Pay raises, but the per-hour level drops substantially, and anything resembling the word "no" that comes from your mouth results in quick termination. I knew the risks when I took the promotion.

I didn't know that corporate could literally send you to hell.

See, they didn't call me in to work at the training store. They called me in to work on the other side of town. It was short-staffed; that's what they told me. In retrospect, I see that this turn of phrase matched up with the situation about as well as calling the Civil War "a disagreement."

When I walked in the front doors, an employee shouted, "No, fuck you!" at the top of his lungs (with customers in the lobby) and then stormed out.

I asked what was going on. One of the teenage employees told me that the guy had just been accused of stealing money from the front register, at which point the manager of the store PUNCHED her, threw his apron in the fry grease, and then also left.

The store was down to one employee, who asked me if she could go home. What was I going to tell her? She'd just been punched! I advised her to go home, press charges. I then proceeded to close the lock down the lobby. I had no employee list, so I couldn't call anyone but the general manager, and he wasn't picking up his phone. My only option was to either close the store or try to run the drive-through by myself. I wanted to keep my job (because I hadn't really thought about it yet) so I opted to try to run the ship solo.

That's about when I saw the cockroaches. They weren't afraid of me, or of light, or of motion. They had developed sentience, and were concerned that they were eating too much. They were establishing governments.

I closed the store.

And got fired.

I will never work in fast food again.

Gas Station Abduction and Release

I worked night shift at a gas station for six years, and despite it being in “that part of town,” I was never robbed. That said, I was held at gunpoint, once.

There was this regular—a forty-something year old woman—who came in at about 3 AM every night and bought a carton’s worth of cigarettes (the night shift couldn’t get into the storage room where those were kept, because we were clearly shifty, shifty people.) and occasionally stayed to talk politics. My response to other people talking politics has always been to nod politely and grunt in a way that conveys absolutely nothing resembling opinion.

One night, she missed her 3 AM mark. I didn’t think anything of it, because despite popular belief, there’s plenty of work for a night shift grunt to do at a gas station. I was mopping when a masked figure ran in and leveled a gun at me.

The person, clearly female, was screaming at me to come with her, and I was, in the calmest voice I could manage, saying that I’d be more than happy to empty whatever was in the register for her.

At which point, she says she doesn’t want any goddamn money, that I need to come with her right now.

Outside, away from the cameras and the panic button that I very sorely missed, she takes off her mask and shows herself as my 3 AM regular. I was such a good listener, she said, that she wanted to reward me, and that in order to whisk me away to her chamber of deviancy, she needed to kidnap me… otherwise I wouldn’t have an excuse to go with her. Right. Goddamn sack of crazy.

The gun turned out to be a prop, so I gave her a few of my pointier thoughts, and then went back inside to finish mopping. If she’d have asked me out, maybe I’d have gone with her to get coffee or something. Ladies, please note: abducting your crush, even with a fake gun, is a terrible idea.

I’m a changed man, though. Now whenever anyone talks politics at me, I become the loudest jerk you’ve ever met.