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Shitty Jobs I've Had, Part I
2005-04-26 - 4:10 p.m. I have had some crazy jobs that I have alluded to in the past in here. Today, a few more details. I used to work for the p@rish coroner back in the '90s. I didn't work for him in his capacity as coroner (thank God), but as receptionist in his doctor's office. The man was very, very strange. He was Sicilian, and came from a huge family, almost all of whom were doctors, with the exception of a single teacher. He had a bitchy wife who was a teacher and 6 juvenile delinquent kids. These kids were bad! The whole family was extremely dysfunctional. i've been around dysfunctional people all of my life, but these folks took the dysfunction to a whole new level for me. To begin with, the doctor was a junkie. All day long he shot up Stadol, a short-acting anesthetic most commonly used on women in labor. He carried vials of the drug in his pocket and went into the back room in his office to shoot up. he had long ago lost his DEA license to prescribe scheduled drugs, but some kind of way, with one of his brother's prescription pads, he did anyway for a select group of patients. I just didn't ask any questions. The office was completely filthy. I worked for him for 14 months, and had more urinary tract infections during that period than I've had over the course of my entire life, because I couldn't force myself to ever use that bathroom. To begin with, the building had no running water. it wasn't that it was unequipped with water, or missing pipes, it was that the man was too goddamn cheap to pay a monthly water bill, so he turned it off! yes, you heard me right. The motherfucker turned off the water in his doctor's office. Not that there was ever hot water, mind you, but there could have at least been cold water. But no. Water costs money. So the toilets weren't flushable until ol' asswipe himself deigned to - briefly - turn them on in order to flush a disgusting toilet filled with all manner of human excrement and effluvia. When his youngest son was at the office one day, he had to take a crap. He did it in a box because the bathroom was so nasty. His parents knew what he was doing. They didn't care. One time this lady ws throwing up in the bathroom. She was extremely weak from nausea and almost passed out, and in doing so, managed to drop her keys into the toilet bowl. With her puke, and God knows how many other people's shit and piss. She came to me asking for help retrieving them. Wanted me to reach in and pull 'em out. Yeah buddy, I was making a grand total of $136.37 a week in that shithole, and had no intention of sticking my hand into that cesspool for that or any sum of money. I told her so, too. So she eventually did it, not knowing that she couldn't wash off her hand. She ran screaming into the exam room with shit and puke and piss dripping off of her hand and cursed him until he turned on the water so she could wash her hand. Guess who's fault that was? Mine, for not stopping her from dashing into "the room and embarassing (him) in front of patients." Uh, maybe you were embarassed because people now know you're too damn cheap to pay your water bill? Nah, that couldn't be it. But incidents like that were, unfortunately, all part of the daily grind. Then there was the day that his two oldest daughters got into a fistfight in the street outside of the office, literally stopping traffic with their hair-pulling fisticuffs. Their mother stood in the doorway, cheering on the younger of the two. Both of the parents hated the oldest daughter. She was homely and dowdy, built just like her dad, which was basically an avocado on legs. All the kids were super smart, this girl included. But she did the damnedest things. She stole, for one. When she was in the office, I couldn't turn my back on her for a minute or leave her anywhere in the vicinity of the cash on hand. Her mother told me that when I saw the girl pull up outside, I should immediately take the money from the cash drawer and file it in the filing cabinet under "M" for money. The few times I forgot, she tried to steal it. The doc would come storming out of his office, hollering, "LL's on her way up here! Hide the money!" The most disgusting part of the whole mess was the speculums (speculi?) He didn't wash them. There was no sterilization process whatsoever, no lab tests run, nothing. He tossed the dirty one into a sink, where it lay until he needed it again. My reporting him for this was the reason they finally pulled his license to practice medicine. There is much, much more to this story, but it's almost time to go home (I'm at work). Maybe I'll tell the rest tomorrow. �
still here - 2009-12-18
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