Work Stories

Tales from the office

Posted by

5

I know you have all been dying to hear more about what’s going on with my co-workers.  You are probably especially interested in the small man that is cold all the time, so I will indulge you and share a few more tales.  Well, my impression of the little library mouse has changed.  I now see him as more of a little gopher.  I had to put some thought into that.  Well, I guess I didn’t put a ton of thought into it.  I admit I went to google to find the right term.  I googled “semi-intelligent ground digging animal” and “gopher” was the best match for how I see my freezing office-mate.  Gophers aren’t horrible, but they aren’t great, either.  Those of you that don’t work in software might not be aware of how demanding the industry is.  I’m sure plenty of other jobs have their demands, too, but when you write software for other people, it’s expected to be perfect all the time, and when it’s not, you have to do whatever it takes to make it perfect, day or night, no matter how much time it takes.  As the project manager of software projects, it is compounded somewhat by the fact that you have to do whatever it takes to get others to do whatever it takes – and my office gopher is very good at finding a little hole to dive into whenever it seems we might need him to do what it takes.

Last week, we needed some work done on a Sunday.  The guy that would normally do the work was not available because he had to leave Saturday to travel around the world to be with his ailing father.  Gopher-man wasn’t amenable to working on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and as I thought about it, I decided that was reasonable, so I changed the deployment schedule for our system, which affected tons of other people, in order not to interrupt his Sunday.  On Wednesday, the three of us talked numerous times about this schedule and my decision to move our deployment to Monday.  This would give gopher-man all day Monday to do what we needed him to do in time for me to have the people in China finish the process.  On his way out of the office Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, he stopped by and said, “So, we’re on for Monday.” I said, “Yep.  Have a good weekend.  See you Monday.”  He took a few steps towards the exit, then dramatically remembered he had jury duty on Monday.  I wanted to shoot myself in the head.  I had to run into a meeting, though, and a few minutes into the meeting I saw him sneaking towards the exit.  Good thing we have glass walls to our conference room.  I almost tackled him on his way out.  In the end, though, I really could do nothing, so I let him leave.

When he first mentioned jury duty, I asked him if he knew he had to report on Monday.  He said, “Yes.  I’ve rescheduled it two times already.”  [Insert image of small balding man with large glasses that should come with a sign for his forehead that reads, ‘Objects behind glasses are smaller than they appear.’]   “They wooon’t let me oooout of-it.  It’s really upsetting because I-won’t-get paid, but they said I still had-to-go.”  [Splice in a rather whiny voice for a fifty-something guy that articulates his t’s as though they are ice-picks while also running words together randomly.]  It still seemed odd to me that he knew he had to actually report to jury duty that early.  Normally you call in the night before and listen for your group number, fingers crossed that your group doesn’t have to report.  After he was gone, I brainstormed with his boss about some other solutions to our resource problem, and we came up with only mediocre solutions that none of us thought would work well.  After I got home that night, it occurred to me that maybe gopher-guy didn’t realize he had to call in to check if he had to report for jury duty.  He is not of American origin, so perhaps he didn’t get how the system worked.  So, I called him.

When I got him on the phone, I explained to him that he might not actually have to go to jury duty on Monday.  He insisted over and over that he did.  I patiently asked him to get his jury summons and just look it over a little more closely.  He reluctantly agreed, then lightened up a bit, and I asked him to read it to me.  He mumbled in his accent that I can’t really place, and as he read, his diction became clearer, he read with more emotion, and by the time he got to the part that said, “Call in or check http://www.countycourt.com after 4:30 p.m. the night before your summons date to see if you have to report for duty,” you could even say he was passionate about what he was learning.  With utter surprise and gratitude in his voice, he said, “Oh, so maybe I don’t have to go after all!”

I should try to explain here how gopher-guy talks.  It’s difficult to characterize.  His accent is different than the typical accents I hear.  It’s not Indian, it’s not Asian, it’s not Hispanic – I really have no idea.  But, he cannot pronounce ‘in’ if it is part of a name or other word.  Someone named Dustin would be called Dus-teeeeen by gopher-man.  Heavy emphasis on the second syllable.  He speaks at a slow pace, not because he’s translating as he’s speaking – he speaks English quite well – he is just very deliberate about everything – nothing can make him rush, and he likes to talk a lot.  Sometimes it is all I can do to sit still long enough for him to get the point I knew he was trying to make five minutes earlier.  Anyway, back to the story.

Again, I began to explain this part of the American legal system – getting a jury summons doesn’t mean you actually have to do anything – and he just kept repeating that he had no idea, he’d never done this before, and it was good I made him read it or he would have just showed up on Monday.  At that point, I took a little leap of faith and said, “You know.  I bet the courts are closed for Thanksgiving and the day after.  And I bet that means that they’ve already posted which groups have to report on Monday.”

“Reeee-ally,” he said.  “Hmm….  I wonder if you’re right.” (Spoken with the wonder of a child realizing Santa is coming tonight)

“Why don’t you check,” I said. (Spoken patiently, matter-of-factly, only slightly encouragingly)

“Well, if you really want to wait, I guess I can check now.”

“Sure, I’ll wait.  It’s no problem at all.”

I waited for quite some time as he checked the website, read silently to himself, started reading bits of it aloud, mumbling.  “Just give me a minute….  I want to make sure I’m reading this right….”  More silence.  More mumbling.  More pausing and restarting.  “Group 116.  No, that’s not my group…  Oh, here.  Group 117!  No, that’s not my group, either…”  And so on, until, “There it is!  There’s my group number!  And I don’t have to go in on Monday!  Oh my God, I don’t believe it!  Wait, let me read it again to be sure.  Wow!  This is so wonderful!  I really don’t have to go!”

“Yes, it’s really great, isn’t it?  OK, well, I’ll see you Monday then.  Have a good weekend.”  With that, I finally got off the phone, failing to tell him he might just have to go Tuesday, and settled in to watch some TV and relax.

And that is the end of this gopher-man update.

Kudos from my co-workers

Posted by

1

It is uncharacteristic of me to share something like this because I tend not to want to toot my own horn, but I have to share this email that was sent to my boss because I’ve been posting some about the challenges of communicating with my offshore co-workers.  It’s probably completely un-PC for me to say this, but this I thought this email was adorable – and speaking of vocabulary, ‘adorable’ is not a word that would generally come out of my mouth.  Not even when looking at kittens.  Anyway, read on…  I will use [M] to represent [My name].

Hi [My boss that takes his shoes off all the time],

As I talked to QA leaders these days, some feedback from them for [M] are that she’s a very responsible PM who’s always ready to step out answering/resolving project related questions/problems, she doesn’t hesitate to ask around to help if she doesn’t know the answers, she always tries to make project plan better and detailed including bugs and risks.

Although [M] is a new PM for [our main software system], she represents us that she’s willing to make this project better, which encourages us a lot to work towards the same goal with her.

I want to say Thank You here to [M] and report these to you as [M’s] good behaviors.

Needless to say, I’m grateful for the feedback.  Perhaps even more so because of the not-so-perfect English.  It sure is nice when people make an effort to share positive feedback about the people they work with.  We should probably all try it a little more…

Random strangers

Posted by

4

There are two random strangers that I see practically every day.  They are part of my life, though they remain random strangers.  Even if I exchange a word or two with them, their stranger status doesn’t change.  It’s just that I see them so often I am obliged to say, “Hey,” every now and then, lest the alternative, acting like they are invisible when really I’m trying to pretend I’m invisible, offends them.  Frankly, I doubt they’d care one way or the other, but that’s besides the point.  These two strangers strike me as unusual.  More odd than most strangers I notice, and my wallflower nature gives me lots of opportunities to notice.

Stranger One:  A very old Asian man lives in my neighborhood.  I don’t know exactly where, but I suspect he lives somewhere on my square block – not on my street, but nearby.  He walks around the block over and over and over and over and over.  I wouldn’t be able to type ‘over and over’ enough times to capture how often he slowly makes his way around the block.  It is as though he is compelled to move constantly, albeit at his age-inhibited pace.  He walks, rain or shine.  He wears an old-fashioned brown hat with a brim and has heavy dark-framed glasses.  He carries a string of beads.  I imagine they are Tibetan prayer beads, but the could just as easily be Catholic rosary beads.  I’m not sure he speaks English.  He seems to say “Hi,” now and then, but the sound comes out more as a grunt than a word, so it’s hard to say.  I’m not the best judge of age, but if I had to guess, I’d put him around 90.  It amazes me that he walks so constantly, and I wonder whether he lives alone or has family that watches over him – people that tell him not to leave the block, but let him walk for hours because he can’t help himself.  I wonder what goes through his mind on his endless journey around the block.  Whatever it is, there is something oddly comforting in seeing him pass by the house dozens of times a week.

Stranger Two:  A tall-ish woman with long-ish dishwater, light brown, hair, generally tied messily up at the back of her neck, works in an office in the same office building that I work in.  She drives a small maroon Toyota pick-up truck.  She has removed the leading ‘to,’ and trailing ‘ta,’ so the back of the truck loudly says, ‘YO.’  She wears jeans that are too big, and sag down on her hips, not quite so far as the ridiculous kids that wear their jeans half way down their asses, but approaching that level.  Her black t-shirts are in the multiple ‘XL’ range, which probably helps hide just how far her jeans are sliding down.  When she’s walking up to the building, she always cuts through the ‘garden,’ inste
ad of walking up the sidewalk, and when I’m outside she feels the need to say she’s working on taking the appropriate route instead of walking through the plants.  Now for the exciting part, though.  This woman has a large parrot that is always with her, sometimes perched on its owners hand, other times on her shoulder.  When the bird sits on her shoulder, it bobs its head up and down dramatically with each step the woman takes.

So far, I’m not a fiction writer, but if I someday decide to give it a shot, I imagine my observations of random strangers like this will help me when it comes to character-building.

Vocabulary Lessons

Posted by

3

Recently at work, I’ve been privy to a number of conversations or emails that are really amusing vocabulary lessons in disguise.  Or, at least I like to think of them that way.  It’s my automatic defense to the ridiculous level of intelligence I am surrounded by every day.  If I look at it as entertaining, I won’t think so much about how much my vocabulary just plain sucks in comparison.  Most of the work I and my immediate coworkers do involves making changes to a prodigious software system.  Each project gets named with a phrase that is meant to explain what the work is about.  Fix such-and-such file, or modify file processor to accept .xyz file type.  These names are not very exciting, and sometimes they border on obscene in their length or phrasing.  Like this one:  Reports for ABC jobs should indicate they are reports for ABC jobs.

In a meeting where upcoming projects were being discussed, my boss that doesn’t like to wear shoes took issue with the name of a new initiative.  It is called, “ABC Process Tuning.”  Tuning, to him, and probably to lots of other people, means tightening, optimizing – somehow making something run better.  But, apparently that is not what this project is really about.  It’s more like a housecleaning project.  Get rid of extra junk that’s not needed.  That project name would work for me, but my boss’ argument was this:

“That title is a misnomer.  It’s misleading.  I mean, you’re not really tuning anything, are you?  You are simply removing detritus!”

Now, I had heard that word before.  I could immediately spell it in my head.  And, it was fairly easy to determine the meaning based on context, but I didn’t really know what it meant.  Last night, lying in bed, thinking I was telling a rather funny story to my other half, I recounted this situation in some detail, and as soon as I got to the detritus punch-line, she sleepily said, “Oh, I know what that means.  It’s used all the time with regard to plant biology.”  Come on!  Am I the only person surprised to hear this term used in everyday speech?

According to dictionary.com, the meaning is:

de·tri·tus

[dih-trahy-tuhs]

noun

1.  rock in small particles or other material worn or broken away from a mass, as by the action of water or glacial ice.
2.  any disintegrated material; debris.
I guess between those two, I like the first description best, because I can imagine our massive software system being slowly ground away by an ancient glacier.  The only way to survive being a software project manager is to find humor and entertainment wherever you can, no matter how cheap or weak it is….

The micro-climate of my office

Posted by

5

Not long after I started my new job, I wrote a post on a few other new guys that started soon after I did.  The techie-from-a-cave guy works from another city, so I haven’t seen him since that first week.  The small guy with strong glasses, though, works in my office and I see him every day – well, almost every day.  Sometimes it’s hard to find him because he moves around a lot.  It seems that every cubicle he’s tried has some climate issue associated with it. He gets cold very easily.  None of the rest of us has this problem.  It’s not to say we don’t notice the temperature fluctuations.  We do.  In fact, my office seems to be a tiny indoor representation of the Bay Area climate.  You need to dress in layers because it goes from warm to cool to too warm to a little too cool.  Layers don’t work for the small new guy with the strong, large glasses, though.  In addition to moving his location frequently, trying to find just the right cubicle that doesn’t come with a draft, he’s taken to climbing up onto desks and taping papers and manila folders over the air ducts in the ceiling near whichever cubicle he is trying out.  One day last week I realized he wasn’t in the office – not because I didn’t hear him or see him in a meeting, but because I never saw him climbing around taping things onto the ceiling.  I see him as a little library mouse gopher-man now.  He’s small, and he scurries around climbing on furniture, wearing his strong glasses that make his eyes look larger than they should.  One day I suggested he bring an extra sweatshirt or sweater to work to help when it gets a little chilly, and he continued past me, muttering under his breath that another shirt wouldn’t help because it’s his bald head that’s the problem – he loses all his heat from there.  I thought about suggesting a hat, but thought I might be crossing a line, so I just watched him wander away looking for the perfect place to sit.

More on language and cultural difference

Posted by

0

Last week I shared a sentence that I’d read in an email at work from one of our Chinese team members.  The sentence was : “Sorry about my misunderstand cause this idea so delay.”   A group of us in the US were discussing the idea referred to in the previous sentence.  One of our US architects had been attempting to explain a new approach to calculating whether changes had been made to some objects in a database to the Chinese DBA.  Our goal was to improve performance of the system – if the calculations can be done faster, the user doesn’t have to wait so long staring at a web page with a little gadget that says, “Processing…” that they want to shoot themselves.  In our lunchtime discussion, the US architect explained how difficult it was to get his point across to the Chinese DBA. He said, “Until it make sense to his head, three days he argued on this!”

This stuff just fascinates me.  We’re all trying to use English to communicate, which is clearly harder on some than others, but we’re so far apart sometimes.  I can’t imagine being in the shoes of some of our Chinese team members that know little to no English.  My personal counterpart speaks English well, for the most part, so we have few challenges directly related to language.  The challenges I experience are more around my learning about the cultural norms that matter to them in communication.  A new person that joined our team in the US, though, was describing a recent technical conference call he had with the US Architect and some of the China team.  The goal of the call was for the Chinese team to do a code walk-through with our US Architect and our new DBA.  On the call, the US Architect was the one that was largely explaining what the code did, which really confused the new DBA.  He stopped at one point, and asked the US Architect – “Shouldn’t the guy in China be telling us what the code does?  Why are you doing it?  I thought we needed this call because you didn’t know the code that well.”  What was happening was our US Architect was speaking to the Chinese team – one of them could understand spoken English fairly well, and he was translating for the rest of the group, then responding back to our Architect, who probably had to do some translation of his own before he could regurgitate it for the new US DBA.

I don’t necessarily have a point in recounting all this – but the subject itself is getting interesting enough that I almost feel like starting a separate blog that just talks about these issues.  I really like the juxtaposition of practical challenges and humor that comes with this stuff!

The China team is coming online right now, as this is their Monday morning.  I had sent a bunch of emails on Friday, and I’m starting to get responses to them now.  My counterpart over there just replied to an email I sent him telling him that something we wanted them to do today was cancelled.  He replied, “Roger.”  I wonder where he picked up that term.

Dish washing rules from a gay man in a Mexican restaurant

Posted by

2

In the summer of 1994, I got a job at a Mexican restaurant in the mall in Sheboygan.  It was interesting, in that every employee had to learn each of the three primary jobs – cook, bartender, and waiting tables.  That way, when someone called in sick, there was a larger pool of qualified people to convince to come in on their day off.  The first day I went in to work, I was a mess because the night before was the last night I’d see my girlfriend for the rest of the summer – she was going to Europe for a couple of months.  It wasn’t something I could talk about, because I was still petrified of people knowing I was gay back then.  I wasn’t out to many people – just my closest friends, my sister, and my uncle. Then, when I walked in for that first day of training, I recognized one of the guys that worked there from the local gay bar.  I could tell he recognized me, too, but we acted as though we had never met.  We didn’t speak a word of where we’d seen each other before, not even between the two of us when no one else was around.  That moment solidified for me the feeling of leading a double life in a way I’d never experienced before.

It was one thing not to be out to everyone around me, but generally that just meant I didn’t talk about certain things, or I stayed vague about the nature of a relationship.  It was another thing to look someone in the eye that under any other circumstances I’d have said, “Hey, how are you?” and gone on to have a normal friendly conversation with, and instead pretend I had no idea he existed before that moment.  In the end, I didn’t dwell on it for long, but the first few days were awkward.  I didn’t know the guy well – don’t even remember his name, even after working with him.  He was someone we saw at the bar, but didn’t talk to, for some reason.

He ended up training me on exactly how to wash the dishes when I worked in the kitchen.  There was a real science to it.  Three huge compartments in a metal sink came into play.  The first was filled with water so hot it almost burned your hands, but not quite.  It left them a screaming red, and I had to pull my hands out after every couple of dishes to tolerate the heat.  The second was filled with warm water that had some rinsing agent in it.  After scrubbing in the scalding water, I’d dunk the dishes in the chemically treated rinsing water, then dunk them into the third sink, which was full of plain old cold water.  It was the final rinse station.  As this guy trained me, he stressed just how important it was to dunk in the cold sink.  He explained with the utmost seriousness that the cold water broke down any last soap bubbles left on the dishes faster than warmer water would.  I thought that was crazy, but did as I was told.  I mean, come on, I was washing dishes either way – who really cared what steps I had to take?  Well, my secret gay acquaintance really cared.  He went on and on about it.  His relentless lecturing about cold water breaking down soap bubbles seemed so weird to me – why would anyone talk about it soooo much?

After I’d worked there a couple weeks, I finally felt comfortable enough with another employee to ask about the water thing, and found out that the secret gay guy felt so strongly about it because he thought he discovered this little known scientific fact on his own.  His endless praise of cold water for rinsing was actually his pride in his attention to detail being verbalized – his intellectual ability to look at a common situation that would seem as though it had no room for improvement, and find some way to make it better.  I was never convinced that it made any difference, but I had to give the guy credit for finding some warped sense of meaning in such a crummy job.

As I was finishing this post, I thought I better check to see if cold water does in fact rinse dishes better than hot water – I went to Google and began to type, “does cold water…” and auto-complete suggested that I might be searching for the answer to this question instead – “does cold water boil faster than hot water?”  Seriously?  That’s the most commonly searched for question about cold water?  I give up.

Copycat communication

Posted by

0

I grew up in Wisconsin, where accents are thick and colloquialisms abound.  Where else do you drink from a bubbler?  For years, I went “down by” places, not “to” places.  Grilling was “frying out,” and I didn’t even hear it when people ended their sentences with, ” and so?”  It’s not quite as severe as Fargo, but it’s not far off, either.  I called a boat something more like “bow-ut” and shoes “shoo-uhs.”  Native Wisconsinites speak these words a bit faster than you probably just read them, but there is a slight hint of an extra syllable thrown in there, and it happens all the time.  I’m not sure exactly how I shed my accent, but I did, some years ago.  Most people can’t detect it, unless I’m really, really tired, or have had a lot too much to drink, and even then I only slip now and then.

I am, however, easily influenced by the speech of others.  I went to visit a friend in Oklahoma when I was around 12 or 13.  I stayed for a week and came home with a drawl.  I pick up terms other people use, most of the time oblivious to it until it’s too late and I sound like I’m copying them all the time.  What has surprised me lately, though, is how I’m being influenced by the people I work with.  And not in the way I might have suspected, adopting such words my boss uses, like “cycles” and “prosecute” which I’ve written about already.

First, let me say very clearly, I am not being critical or judgmental of the way anyone I work with speaks or doesn’t speak.  It simply is what it is, and it rubs off on me.  I work with more foreign people than native English speakers, especially if you count the hundred employees we have in China.  What’s crazy is that broken English is rubbing off on me.  It’s really hard to comprehend that I would just toss out all the grammar and vocabulary I’ve built in years of speaking and reading and writing, but I’m finding myself slipping into broken English in both speech and email.  It’s kind of nuts!

I catch myself writing things like, “Can you have team work on this today night?” or “Please have a look on this.”  So far, I’m catching and correcting these crazy sentences that are only crazy because English is my first language.  One guy whose English is fine still uses odd phrases now and then.  Instead of saying something happened a long time ago, he says “Remember long back when we talked about that?”  I have used the words “long back” in a conversation with him.  It could be worse.  An email I was copied on tonight had this sentence in it:  “Sorry about my misunderstand cause this idea so delay.”

In all seriousness, though, it is a real challenge to communicate effectively in my organization.  It’s not a challenge I am upset about – it’s a challenge I sincerely think is a good one for me.  I’ve studied diversity and the issues faced in global business – the communication challenges that not only have to do with language barriers, but significant cultural difference, and I am absolutely getting the biggest dose of both of those issues that I’ve ever gotten.  I’m determined to succeed in communicating with everyone, though, and I’m sincerely interested in understanding the cultural differences we all face.  Maybe that’s why I’m so easily influenced by the speech and writing – maybe I’m subconsciously trying to meet them on the terms I hear from them.  Whatever the cause, I will keep you posted on how my language continues to evolve, or devolve, as the case may be.

Jobs from my youth – Younkers, 1992 & 1993

Posted by

0

I recently wrote about one job I had in 1993, waiting tables at a restaurant/night club.  I had many other jobs that year, though.  I started the year working at Younkers, a department store in downtown Sheboygan.  Socially, it was a pretty fun job.  My best friend and roommate at the time worked there with me, and we made a handful of new friends there, too.  I have never been a very fashionable person, but J was.  He had that gay man’s touch when it came to clothes and hair.  He could make rags seem trendy, and I became fully reliant on him to maintain a “look” after we became roommates, though I had never had a “look” before.  When I had to start my shift earlier than his, or work when he had a day off, I woke him up in the morning so he could do my hair.  He was such a good sport about it.

I still can’t do anything with my hair – every time I get my haircut, I walk out looking how I want to look, and every time, I go home and take a shower because I hate having itchy hair around my collar, and I am hopelessly unable to recreate whatever my hairstylist has done with just a few waves of her fingers through my short hair a half an hour earlier.  The accompanying picture gives you an idea of what J used to do – remember that it was the early 90s, and we liked to think of ourselves as “alternative.”  Not goth, not punk, nothing so specific – just alternative and definitely NOT mainstream.  That was the thing to avoid.  I am fairly confident there is little chance anyone would recognize this photo as me.  As I said, the only time I had a “look” was when I had someone to put it together for me.

Younkers had an old-fashioned lunch counter.  When I worked there,  I could order a chicken sandwich pretty cheaply with my discount.  I ordered a chicken sandwich with cheese every time I ate there – with mashed potatoes and gravy, of course.  Even today, I have this puzzling tendency to eat the exact same thing day after day for lunch, but when dinner time rolls around, I’m rarely content with the options available to me in the kitchen.  My current lunch streak consists of a turkey sandwich with a slice of swiss cheese on potato bread.  I bring potato chips so I can put them inside the sandwich just before I eat it.  I get an unusual amount of satisfaction from the crunch of potato chips inside the sandwich.  I also bring a pear or a nectarine or some other kind of fruit.  I bet you are picking up on the potato trend in my life.  I blame it on my great-grandfather, who is rumored to have reached America as a stowaway on a ship carrying potatoes, which were all he had to eat on the way from Romania.

It was actually sort of an odd family affair to work at Younkers.  My mom worked there part-time behind the jewelry counter for a while.  My great-uncle also worked there.  He was an interior decorator and spent some of his time selling expensive furniture to the handful of wealthy families in the area.  He is also the only other gay person in my family that I know of, and the first time I ran into him at the local gay bar in Sheboygan, he was so thrilled he bought my friends and me drinks all night long.  Even my great-grandmother worked at the store years earlier, before it was called Younkers.  She sold fancy hats and china.

Younkers used to be called Prange’s back then.  It was a well-loved local store because it was part of a regional chain that began in Sheboygan in the late 1800’s.  The local store remained intact for just over 100 years before it was bought by Younkers.  I remember going to Prange’s as a kid to visit Bruce the Spruce – a talking Christmas tree alternative to visiting Santa Claus at the mall.  I was probably as scared of Bruce the Spruce as I would have been frightened by a strange Santa Claus, but as I re-imagine the past, I think Bruce was more welcoming.

There were plenty of negatives about working in retail, though, such as aching feet at the end of a day, utter boredom from wandering around the department and refolding every piece of clothing a customer picked up then tossed like a wet towel onto a table, and constantly reordering all the hanging clothes by size.  I did leave the industry with fairly particular ways of folding clothes, though.  My partner often marvels at my ability to quickly fold a shirt with the arms tucked in back and the front perfectly displayed, all without the use of a table or other surface.  Such important things I learned in the jobs of my younger years.

Jobs from my youth – The Downtown Club, 1993

Posted by

5

A few weeks ago, I posted about a writing exercise in Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories.  It had to do with creating a timeline for some period of your life, to help jar your memory about details and spawn some story ideas.  One of the things I did when I started my timeline was go through old tax records, which reminded me of various jobs I had when I was much younger.  There was a period between 1993 and 1995 where I reported income in two states for each of those tax years.  I moved a lot back then.  I was trying to find a way out of Wisconsin, and it took me a while to make that work.

In 1993, I reported income from five employers in Wisconsin, and one in Illinois.  All those jobs, and my income only came to $5436.18.  I wasn’t great at holding jobs back then.  Nothing made me happy, and I hadn’t developed the will power it takes to stick with something you don’t like.  In one job, I waited tables at what was a new restaurant/dance club in Sheboygan.  During the day, we opened for lunch, then closed for a couple hours to get ready for dinner.  At 9 0’clock, the dinner tables went away and the place turned into a night club.  I learned some interesting lessons at that job.  The Downtown Club billed itself as a fine dining restaurant, and back then, there weren’t many to be found in the area.  However, that also meant that those of us that worked there didn’t really know what fine dining was – not the food, not the service, certainly not different wines.

I did my best, but I remember a wealthy couple in for lunch one day.  I served their sandwiches or salads, or whatever it was the ordered, and they were drinking coffee.  As I made my rounds to see if anyone wanted refills, the wealthy woman nodded that she did.  I picked up her coffee cup, and topped it off.  She told me condescendingly this was not the way to refill someone’s coffee cup.  I should lift the cup on the saucer, so as not to touch the cup itself.  I clenched my teeth and bit my tongue instead of apologizing and walked away quickly, hoping they would soon leave and I would still get a half-way decent tip.  I felt a certain shame that I didn’t know those fine details about how things are done for wealthy people.  All my coffee-pouring skills were learned from the overworked waitresses at IHOP who poured my coffee only occasionally after they left the “Bottomless pot” on my table.  Even then, I was lucky if they didn’t pour the coffee in my lap as they leaned across the table to reach my mug.  I’ve never completely gotten over the bitterness I felt at people who had money, coming from a mostly lower-middle class background myself.  I still carry a chip on my shoulder, even when I choose to go to fancy restaurants now, and money is no longer a big issue in my life.

Another lesson from my job at the Downtown Club was how to tend bar, Wisconsin-style.  I’ve learned since then that the way people make drinks in Wisconsin doesn’t really match the way they make them anywhere else.  For instance, the Old Fashioned is a very popular Wisconsin drink.  Age doesn’t matter – everyone drinks them.  You can order an Old Fashioned with either whiskey or brandy, and order it either sweet or sour.  This is a departure from the traditional Old Fashioned, which calls for no soda whatsoever.  In Wisconsin, though, sweet means put 7-up in the drink, and top it off with a cherry wrapped in half an orange slice, impaled on a plastic sword.  Sour means put sour soda in the drink.  I have yet to find any other place where “sour” means sour soda.  When I first came to California, I’d order a sour drink – Amaretto Sour, Whiskey sour, whatever – and the bartenders put that horrible sweet and sour mix in the drink – the kind you’d find in a margarita.  The first time I took a sip, I almost sprayed it all over the people standing in front of me.  

50/50 was a popular sour soda used as a drink mixer.  It was a grapefruit & lime soda, and all bars had it.  It’s soda, but not as sweet as 7-up.  I have no idea why this soda seemed to be such a regional drink.  The closest thing I’ve been able to find in California is called Collins Mix, and it’s not available in bars.  I eventually switched to ginger ale when I wanted whiskey with something less sweet in it here.  Bourbon and ginger ale was my standard drink for a few years.  Lately, I drink fruity drinks, which I get a lot of crap for from all my friends, because I am not supposed to like girly, fruity drinks.  Maybe I’d drink Old Fashioned’s again if “sour” meant what it does in Wisconsin.