My First Fake Job

Okay, so the gravy train —the one composed of the delusions of succeeding on which I rode in here— ran out. And I got a little more serious about getting one of those more modest jobs in "food service" or "labor." To tackle the job world in "the city indifferent" I began employing the tactics I had used in my futile attempts at finding other, more serious jobs: I followed up. And it worked! I am now a full-time deli clerk at a food cooperative where my extensive knowledge of postmodern theory can finally pay off. Sort of like post irony without the sincerity part.

Forget four years of college; today I received a lifetime's worth of knowledge packaged into one succinct, eight-hour gem of an orientation. While not-so-discreetly checking to see if we were literate by occasionally calling on us (especially the more foreign looking of us) to read aloud, the orientation speakers managed to drag us through everything we'd ever need to know about the food business. So I opened the floodgates and was immersed with some wonderfully new-fangled knowledge.

In a rousing round of role play I posed the following situation from a deck of situations, "The phone rings five times, what do you do?." This was not a trick because at a co-op people are straightforward and honest farmers (not millionaires with annoying food hangups). After realizing that there was no treachery in the question, my coworker responded correctly, "answer it," for which he was lauded.

From a generic work harassment video I was dismayed to learn that my time-honored mantra "look but don't touch" apparently doesn't fly in the food service world or any other world where one works with people. From now on I'll have to re-direct this axiom to the expensive food on the shelves so as not to throw off my entire world.

I learned that a co-op is not a place where the members divvy up the work among themselves, but instead a place where better people (the gainfully employed or, more often, unemployed trust-fund artists) pay a small fee to have underlings like me work for them. There is really a sort of divine order to this.

I even learned what 401 K is and how in a million years my measly savings will mean something. In layman's terms 401 K means that sacrificing one beer now means like five beers when I'm 50. This was very troubling knowledge because it means that I shouldn't be spending the remains of my measly paycheck on drowning my feelings of inadequacy in booze.

Marginally more perplexing was when the orientation directer made a well-meaning point about equality in co-ops and how that preceded formal rights for women such as voting. The director, however, confused the inception of women's suffrage with the date the stock market crashed and I am still unsure about the significance of such a mistake.

All in all it was a good day. I got paid to learn things I didn't need to learn, nor ever cared to learn and I got a free lunch! I really like free lunch.