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Part II of Shitty Jobs I've Had:
2005-04-27 - 8:31 a.m. Part II of Shitty Jobs I've Had: I'm still not done with that damn coroner. Y'all probably wonder how in the hell I could've worked for him for 14 months. I know I do. But at the time, I had been receiving welfare, which in LA means a grand total of $123.00 a month and is its own kind of death. It's a slow death of hope and opportunity, and I would have done just about anything to avoid going back to that. So I figured stick it out for about a year and use it as a springboard to something else, somthing saner and better that I could actually list on a resume with something resembling pride. Which I eventually did. But anyway, what determined that I was flying the coop was when the legislative auditor's office personnel burst into his office one afternoon and corraled him in his exam room and peppered him with questions while others interrogated me in the front office. He had been billing the parish for false sanity evaluations that he was not actually performing. He ran the VD clinic and the birth control clinic at the local health unit and had access to all of these people's data. So, he used the data to fill out these sanity evaluation forms that he billed $50 a pop for. And he billed a three quarters of a million dollars worth of these suckers during his tenure as coroner. Of course he got caught. As one of the auditors said to me, "You've either gotten more nuts per capita than any parish in this state and somebody needs to check y'all's water supply, or somebody's cooking the books." Of course it was the latter. Before it was all over, he threatened to kill me for cooperating with them, I called the cops, the DEA, the DEQ, Waste Management, the Board of Medical Examiners, and I forget who all else, related to his practices and his storage and disposal of medical waste with the office garbage, the newspaper picked it up and did several front page stories, and he was convicted on an obscene number of counts and stripped (for life) of his license to practice medicine. The man hates me now. Fuck him. Then there was my stint at the plasma lab. I was a phlebotomist / donor processor at a lab in BR when the FDA came in like gangbusters and shut us down in the middle of a shift one day. Some improprieties were being committed in the plasmapheresis process, and no, I wasn't at fault. I swear. So that ended that career move. Then I worked as an editorial coordinator for this woman who had a printing / publishing business. We would work all night sometime getting books out, getting high from the chemicals used on the press and hardly able to breathe. My office manager (a woman) had a crush on me and was always trying to get me to fool around with her. You have no idea how hard it is to do paste up when somebody is always trying to cop a feel of your double-D titties. One night, half goofy from the fumes, I decided to see how much my titties weigh after she dared me. I put one of 'em on a postal scale, and I forget the exact weight, but it would have cost a king's ransom to send 'em both first class to Brazil, which is where we decided that they belonged. Then the woman who owned the business dropped dead from a stroke, and that was that career, dead in the water. I've also been the only white bartender in a black bar. The only white person, period. It was an okay job. They sure had some damn good blues on their jukebox. A lot of guys tried to pick me up, but I was living with the Indian at the time. He used to come in and drink with me sometimes. He's drunk at every bar I've ever worked, and there's a lot of bars in this little southern town. And I've sold shrimp on the side of the road. You know how in Forrest Gump he goes on and on and on about all the different ways to prepare shrimp? Well, I felt like Forrest that summer. We had shrimp omelettes for breakfast, shrimp poboys for lunch, shrimp salad for dinner, you get the picture. At the end of my tenure with that job, I never wanted to go eye-to-eye with a shrimp again. Fortunately, that passed with time. And now I work for Odetta, who may actually pay me some money today. The evolution of a working woman. I've come a long way, baby, but it's still fucked way the hell up. �
still here - 2009-12-18
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