Slave Labor

Dear Tales from the Ditches,

This happened to me yesterday and I thought I'd share it with you.

I went in for a job interview yesterday for [redacted] apartments in [redacted], Kansas.

My story up to that point is pretty typical, I guess. College grad, no bites for work, except insurance companies that want me to sling for them in exchange for commissions and nothing else. Resume doctors looked at it, but couldn't fix anything. If there's work out there, no of it was for me.

I applied at this apartment complex that's opening up near a college campus, and the my utter delight, they called me to schedule an interview within two hours. It was magical. My resume must have impressed the hell out of them. I was a shoo-in.

10 AM rolls around. I'm at the interview. The lady introduces herself as the general manager of the complex,

And immediately begins telling me how much the cost of a single apartment in her complex is. I smile. Job's a job and she's going somewhere with this, I'm sure.

The apartment costs $800 a month to live in, and this part time job she's offering requires that I move in. I'd make minimum wage, which would go toward rent, ten hours a week, and I'd get $25 for every lease someone signed while I was at work. The offer wasn't quite slave labor.

I was stunned. Silently stunned. The part of my brain that keeps me human during job interviews is still in charge. I haven't said more than my name and a greeting in the whole ten minutes I've been there.

She says, "You look confused."

"I was under the impression that this was a paying position."

"It is. I just explained that."

A beat. And then she says, "Frankly, I don't like your attitude right now, and I wouldn't offer you the position."

I thanked her for her time, because society has perverted me like that, and then left.

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.

By the books

This is all anonymous, right?

Ok. So. I work in collections for [removed], which handles some pretty big clients. I’ll admit to, on occasion, resorting to various levels of bastardry to get someone to pay up. But only when I know they’ve got the money. I’ve got problems going after people who clearly can’t pay up, and that’s part of the reason I’ve never really gone anywhere in this company. I do my job. I do it well. I still have some residual soul, you know?

We’ve got these sheets what tell us how, exactly, to treat people. My call quality has never been rated under 95. That’s partly because I stick to the script, even to the point where I talk over the client. In doubt? Follow the goddamn sheet. Guy won’t pay? Follow the script. Guy pays? Follow the script. It gets the paperwork where it needs to go and keeps the spice flowing, or whatever the hell makes collection call centers stop themselves from falling into the goddamn hellmouth.

So this guy calls one day and says he wants to make a payment. Which is fantastic, except he’d been calling us at the end of the month, just before we send collections to go out to legal (where they blossom into lawsuits) and promising to pay for almost two years. Legally, there isn’t shit I can do. Or anyone, really. Anti-harassment laws keep this man perfectly safe from me, because I follow the script.

You know that disclaimer about our calls being monitored? They’re occasionally monitored in real time. So when this guy—let us call it Captain Bozo—went to lie to us about paying him and I started following THE SACRED AND HOLY SCRIPT, my super’s voice exploded over the line.

I’ve heard cussing. I’ve heard cussing from sailors; it doesn’t hold a candle to what garbage men come up with, and neither one matches the filth that daycare workers spew. My super topped them all. He started with Captain Bozo’s rumphole, worked his way up and down three unrelated pantheons, and then tied everything together with a metaphor involve prostitutes and trains. He did this all with four-letter words. I took notes, lest it all be lost forever. There’s cussing, and then there is art mimicking beauty. This was the latter, only on cocaine and acid.

But Captain Bozo, deep down, he’s my soul mate. He hangs up. An hour later, my super is sent home. Captain Bozo calls back. Gets me. I followed my script. He followed his. I’d be shocked witless if he’s ever paid a bill.

Why I sleep at truck stops now

There aren’t a lot of ways your day can go wrong when you’re a trucker. The truck can break down, but then you just radio for help or call a tow company. The cops can pull you over and find out you’ve been on the road too long. You can have a bed full of shit that’s illegal in 36 states. Ok, fine. There’s lots of ways a day can outright suck as a trucker. They just don’t happen so often. At least if you’re careful.

I, like many, used to sleep in my truck instead of stopping somewhere. By the time my route led me to a truck stop, the place was usually full. And frankly, those places can be dangerous for women. So I’d just pull over somewhere, go into the back, clean my gun and then go to sleep.

One night, I woke up because the concrete outside my cab was crunching, and a few moments later, someone was shining a flashlight into the cab. I assumed it was a curious cop—maybe some greenhorn who hadn’t seen many truckers before. But there weren’t any cherries and berries, and I’d never seen a cop pull over behind a car without switching on his lights.

This, and because I’d fallen asleep reading a horror novel, made me bring my gun when I went into to cab.

I’d still half-expected to see a cop. What I got instead was a guy in a hunting cap, crowbar in one hand, flashlight in the other. And he was getting ready to bash open a window.

One look at my .38 and he was gone; just a puff of smoke and darkness where he’d been standing before. Technically, I couldn’t drive again for another six or seven hours. I’m pretty strict when it comes to my logbook; I drive as much as I’m legally allowed and no more. It puts a damper on income, but I never risk losing my license or my rig that way.

I made an exception that night, and if a cop had a problem with it, he could cram it down his ear.

I went down my route a while longer, made sure no one was following me, and then pulled off.  My eyes were trying to close and I needed to sleep. I’m not sure if I got to sleep or not, though; I just remember seeing a goddamn flashlight beam snooping through my cab window again.

I yelled, “What the hell do you want?”

At which point a crow-bar bashes against my window and cracks it.  

I was between a rock and a cliff wall; I had a gun, but letting him break in would put me us together in melee. I didn’t want to risk that because, should the gun leave my hand for whatever reason, I’m your average untrained woman, against someone easily half-again my size wielding a metal club. But my only other option was, well, what I did.

I threw myself into the driver’s seat and started the truck. The window broke all over my lap, and then the guy was practically in my face, trying to hit me with the crowbar. Which must have happened, because I ended up with a massive bruise on my chest—but I sure as hell don’t remember it happening. All I remember is the truck lurching forward, and him jumping backward into the darkness when I started firing.

I phoned the police. Warned other drivers. As far as I know, nothing ever came from it, and I’ve never seen the guy again.

But you bet your ass I try my luck at a truck stop every time I can.

Cleaned out

I used to run my own cleaning business, and my policy was that I’d give anyone a chance at honest employment. This included felons, and for a while, it specifically included an ex-cat burglar.

He was damned handy to have around, too. As the name of his old profession implies, he was agile, and easily on par with 11-year-old Chinese gymnasts.

One of the office buildings on our cleaning schedule had left some pretty strict instructions—we had to clean office 311D no matter what; empty and burn the trash. This was in direct contradiction to the standing instructions; “never ever clean 311D, ever, period.” I called to verify that they wanted us to clean it, and the man who hired me very curtly told me that if he said it, he wanted it done.

But they’d locked the office from the inside, and I didn’t have a copy of that particular key. We had the rest of the building clean, and if the ex-cat burglar hadn’t been there, we’d have just left and I would have dealt with the aftermath of the conflicting instructions later. But the ex-cat burglar was there, and he assured us that we didn’t need a key.

He went up into the ceiling panels like a wisp of devil-smoke, over the door, and let us in. We cleaned, and as requested, disposed of the trash in a very permanent way. Actually, the ex-cat burglar did this.

The police collected me the next day; I had been accused of breaking and entering. They didn’t keep me very long; cops are fairly understanding when they know you’re working for a deranged idiot. I didn’t tell them about the cat burglar on my staff, though. I just said the door hadn’t been locked.

The company hired a different cleaning service, thank effing God. And about a month later, the guy who’d hired me went to prison for embezzling.

The ex-cat burglar quit soon after this; he’d gotten a big pile of reward money for whistle-blowing. Apparently, he hadn’t actually burned that trash. Bastard didn’t even share.

At least I didn't have to adopt it

I’m a teller at a bank whose name you know, and our branch gets heavy foot traffic. A couple came in one time, fighting full on about their bills. And I mean fighting; they got so loud and hateful at one another that our security guy had to go ask them to keep it under fifty decibels. They came up to me, withdrew a large chunk of money—a dollar shy of emptying their account— and then left. There were people behind them, and I didn’t notice until that line thinned out that they’d left their baby carrier, complete with a sleeping child, on the counter where we served coffee.

I, the security guy, and the manager all concluded that the baby belonged to the couple that had been fighting, but we were at a complete loss about what to do. The security guy wanted to call social services, but the manager didn’t want to lose the parents’ business. When the number on their account turned out to be dead, she said we should give the parents time to realize they’d made a mistake.

I was all for that, and genuinely impressed that my usually harsh-around-the-edges manager had something resembling a soft spot. Until I mentioned that the couple had taken out most of their money, leaving a token dollar in it so that they didn’t have to deal with closing it.

The police and social services showed up about ten minutes later. I never saw the parents again.

She deserved it

At the burger hole I worked at during my undergrad years, there was a period where I was the only bilingual worker. This is the period I like to call “Fuck,” because there was an entire staff of Latinos who only spoke Spanish, management who only spoke English, and mixed customer base. If the management needed to communicate anything to the other employees, or vice versa, it had to go through me.

I regret with all of my heart that I did not abuse this power for the sake of hijinks.

Context: I’m a very, very white third generation Russian. I had no business speaking Spanish. The language just sort of happened to me. (Read: I met a cute guy.)

The computers went down after a storm one day, and the sweetest little old lady came in to buy a hamburger. She was the kind of granny that makes you think there’s a card-carrying division of the elderly certified to bake cookies.

She gave me her order, but since the computers were down, I had to shout it back at the guy on grill. Naturally, I shouted in Spanish.

The sweet little granny leans over the counter with a look of deep concern on her face and whispers to me, “You should be making them speak English!”

I must have looked confused (or, more likely, upset) because she decided she needed to start clarifying for several minutes. The racist shit flowing out of her mouth and into my face made my pulse pick up.

Finally, the guy on the grill (it was the closest position to the cash register) asks (in Spanish) if she’s complaining about the food or something, or if she’s just placing a huge order.

At which point I turn to him, put a finger up to stop the bigoted shit from flowing out of the customer’s mouth, and—well—told him exactly what she was saying, albeit in summary. I don’t feel sorry for what happened. Own what you say, right? And if you say something mean-spirited, well, as they say on TV, thems fightin’ words.

Bottom line; I saw what the guy on grill did to her food, and I saw her eat it.

How to get paint off of your hands and live to tell about it

The gas station I worked for back in the seventies needed a new coat of paint and the guy who owned it figured he'd save a little scratch by telling his register monkeys that it was their job.

I'd known for a while that one of the guys who worked with me was a little slow. He got stressed out real bad when he had to run the cash register, and the drawer would always be off later, so when he and I worked together, we almost always had me running the cash register and him doing the full service stuff.

I really wish he'd given me some sort of hint about how stupid he actually was.

We came in special to paint one day; me, him, and the owner, and when we were washing the paint off of our hands, the aforementioned co-worker asks, while he's watching this, "Hey, man, how do you get paint off of your hands?"

I, not realizing that he was, in fact, slow as a stalactite in mid-formation, said, "You just pour gasoline on your hands and light it. Paint comes right off."

To which he replies, "Oh," with a tone suggesting that nothing should have been more obvious.

A few moments later, we hear him screaming, go outside, and find him running in goddamn circles with his hands putting off miniature infernos. We extinguished him, and his hands were mostly okay, which shocked the hell out of me. But not nearly as much as when the idiot looked me in the eye, held up his hands, and said, "Gee, thanks Rick, it worked!"

Fired for what now?

One time, at a summer job I had for a fast food joint that, if you live in the U.S., I promise you've been to (or at least driven past), I was the cash register jockey -- handing walkins their food, taking their money, and cleaning up after people when they were finished eating.

A girl comes in, orders an astounding number of chicken nuggets and then goes for her purse to pay me. Except she's not wearing a purse. She's just kind of groping at her side for a while, and she finally tells me she'll be back in a minute; she's got to go outside and get her purse from the car. She had kind of a glazed look on her face, so I figured she was on drugs or something, but I wasn't expecting what came next.

The guys in the back dropped all her chicken nuggets--nine or ten orders--and she came back in with a brown paper sack, which she pours onto the counter. It's a mess of loose change.

But as she dumped it, she fell over herself. Just collapsed like a human rag doll. I freaked out and the manager called an ambulance.

Because I was in school to be a nurse, I had CPR trainining, and my head had time to clear, so I checked her pulse and her breathing--pulse, check. Breathing, nope.

And I start doing the thing where you cover the person's nose and breath into her mouth.

What they don't fucking tell you in CPR training is that if you get someone started breathing again, they can cough and vomit right into your goddamn mouth.

The ambulance guys told me I probably saved her life, and the highly recommended that I go get all kinds of fun testing to make sure that, in reward for getting her lungs working again, I hadn't picked up some kind of nightmarish hell-plague.

Oh, and I got fired the next day, both for "making a scene" in the lobby and for product waste. See, I sent the chicken nuggets with her in the ambulance ride (she regained conciousness and all, but was clearly sick.) but I'd never bothered counting the change she'd dumped onto the counter, which as it turns out, wasn't nearly enough to cover all the chicken nuggets she'd bought.

Moral of the story? If you work in fast food, never do anything nice, ever. People will puke down your throat and then fire you.

The Day I Walked Into Hell

Back in 2006, I worked as a nursing assistant in Kansas for an agency that would send me to places that needed extra staff. For the most part, this was a good job. I'd heard horror stories about agency staff, and horror stories about nursing homes, but for four months nothing bad ever happened.

Then I was sent to a state-run nursing home in [redacted]. If you're not a nurse or a nursing assistant, you need some context before you can understand how disgusting what I encountered was, both viscerally and emotionally. Nursing assistants on a day shift, back when I worked, would have 12 patients at a time, which was usually divided additionally among 3 or 4 nurses. Once you got used to it, it was more than a reasonable load. For each of these patients, the nursing assistant is responsible for helping them use the toilet (or preventing / cleaning up messes), bathing them, feeding them, getting their vital signs, helping them move from one place to another, helping them get dressed or undressed, and helping them get up and down out of bed and (usually) into a wheelchair. It's hard work, but most of the nurses and other CNAs I've met, even when we didn't get along, were really good about putting the patients first.

More than 12 patients on a dayshift gets really bad, really fast. Days when I got somewhere to find that I had (for whatever reason) 15 or 16 patients instead were hellish, because it usually meant that there were fewer people to help out. On a night shift, a nursing assistant will usually have more, but since the patients are usually asleep, the work is less intense. The responsibilities beyond keeping the patients clean are usually custodial--keeping the supply room stocked, keeping the linen racks stocked, making sure the laundry is done--each facility is different, and agency aids have to be willing to change job descriptions on a dime.

When I got to the state-run nursing home for my night shift, I had 36 patients. The hallways I was responsible for reeked of feces and urine. No one gave me report--whoever had worked before had left before I'd gotten there, meaning that for God-only-knows how long, 36 patients in a nursing home had had no one helping them.

There was one nurse. She spent the evening watching television and doing paperwork. I spent a 12-hour shift cleaning feces and urine off of immobile human beings non-stop, and when I explained to the nurse that I needed help, she accused me of being "just another lazy agency aide." In other words, I was on my own.

Cleaning shit off of a person is physically and emotionally taxing. The person is usually humiliated, even if they're somewhat used to it, and nine times out of ten, if they can't get out of bed to avoid going all over themselves, they can't move around too well. CNAs usually work in pairs to clean heavier patients; one CNA lifts, the other cleans. I was alone. I was forced to precariously balance the patients against my 120-pound frame and clean both patient and bed one-handed from an awkward position.

About half-way through my shift, tired from lifting people twice my weight and then scrubbing, I went to find the nurse--still "doing paperwork" in front of the television, and tore into her. She tore right back, with this alien conviction that the patient charts she were writing in were somehow more important than the patients themselves.

I don't know or care why she was writing in those charts without actually having gone into the patients' rooms.

I've never been to a nursing home that bad before or since.

When I finished the shift, the secretary at my agency told me I'd been DNR'd--meaning that no matter how bad that nursing home's staff problems got, they'd never use me again.

Thank God.