All right. This one was probably the worst job I ever had, but since it springs to mind most strongly, I'll just pretend it's the fourth worst job I ever had and write about it now. Enjoy!
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In the summer of '95, I worked for a Baltimore-based food broker called Brown DelGrosso Morrison. A food broker's job is to represent a variety of products by, among other things, making sure they have optimal shelf position, are kept up-to-date, and are adorned with the appropriate coupons. My role with this company was as merchandiser, which basically meant that I tagged along with the reps and provided an extra set of hands and someone to talk to as they drove around their respective regions.
Every morning, bright and early, I'd drive out to either a grocery store or designated meeting spot, hook up with the person with whom I was to work that day, and do what was told of me. It was usually very slow work for me; my regular duties were checking the date codes on Kudos, Combos, and mini M&M's baking bits and destroying any that were past their optimal sell-by date, as well as putting peel-off coupon stickers on the giant bags of Pedigree dog food and on various Uncle Ben's Rice products. Beyond that, I mostly just stood around awaiting orders. About a half hour into my first day, I realized that I'd do just as well showing up high everyday, so I took to doing just that.
Apart from a few times working with this one middle-aged dimwit named Donna and a couple times with two younger reps, one named Rob, the other a woman whose name I forget, I mostly worked with two people: in Baltimore, I worked with a woman named Joy, in Virginia I worked with a guy named Jim. Jim was a Rush Limbaugh fan who'd mutter weird, racist things, notably, "What's a halfway decent looking white woman doing with a fat, dumpy nigger like that?" and my personal favorite, in response to hearing two women speaking Spanish in a Shoppers Food Warehouse somewhere in the Manassas area, "By God, we gotta take this country back!" I enjoyed working with Jim, partly because he was always up for a good (well, maybe not good) political debate, but mostly because he hated working for BDM as much as I did. Jim was very good about doing the minimal work necessary, going home early, and fudging timesheets. And even though he had all the trappings of the modern-day fascist, I always got the impression that his heart wasn't really in it.
I hated working with Joy. If Joy was not retarded, she was at least dangerously close. Her version of conversation included such gems as, "My doctor tells me I should drink a lot of water, but when I drink a lot of water, it makes me pee," and the immortal, "I haven't taken the bus in a while." Joy did four things over and over again that drove me nuts. The first and most minor was her insistance on calling the pricing gun, "the pricing dealie." Next was her frequent use of the phrase, "half dozen of the other" without once including the "six of one" part. Third were her glaring and pathetic efforts to touch my hand everytime one of us passed something to the other. Worst of all was her story-telling. Joy's stories always featured at least a couple names that meant nothing to me, such as, "Larry has a pricing dealie just like that." "I don't know who Larry is," I'd mutter through clenched teeth. "Oh, Larry's Michelle's cousin." After a few months of that, it took enormous self-restraint to keep from punching her in her stupid mouth.
Another really bad thing about Joy was that she was shockingly inefficient. For example, one day she decided to move an entire shelf of canned Pedigree dog food one row to the right. So, instead of taking my advice and simply pulling down the left-most row and putting it back up to the right of the right-most row, she insisted on taking down every fucking can--two shopping cart's worth--and then putting them all back up again two inches to the right. This took hours.
The other especially laborious part of the job came every two or three weeks in the form of something called a reset, in which a store would decide to move, say, paper goods from aisle 3 to aisle 8, pet supplies from aisle 2 to aisle 6, baking goods from aisle 6 to aisle 4, and so on and so on. Obviously, this could not be done during reular store hours, so on these particular gigs, reps from every broker whose products would be effected by the shift would show up at store closing (usually 10 pm) and lug shit around until six or seven. I guess the worst thing about doing resets (beyond the hours and the lack of increased pay) was being trapped in a supermarket (and we were trapped--the stores all had alarms that prevented any from coming or going between, like 11 and 6) with a bunch of sales reps and grocery store managers. Some of them were all right, and I never had any specific problem with any of them, but they were generally a distasteful, rednecky bunch. My most vivid reccolection of one of these comes from a night in which some of us inexplicably finished several hours early and so sat around the employee lounge and smoked cigarettes and listened to two of the older reps explain how they sympathized with OJ, having come close to doing the same things themselves. One of them, I remember, said that he'd gone so far as to purchase a knife.
Anyway, a couple weeks before I'd planned to stop working, I stayed out late drinking one night and called in sick in the morning. A few hours later, my mother awakened me with her typical infernal shrieking, telling me that I had a phone call. It was the supervisor, this obese lesbian named Gayle who, as far as I could tell, spent her work days at home, watching television. She immediately accused me of having called in sick because I'd been drinking all night. I denied it, but she fired me anyway. I yelled at her about firing me with no warning, etc., etc., but it did no good. The next day, Jim called me to offer his sympathy. I heard from him again a few months later, but that was as far as my association with Brown DelGrosso Morrison was to ever go.
