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So I have to laugh. Y’know, my cousin Philip is doing his first job search since graduating from college and it…watching him struggle and go through it and apply for, honestly, fairly bad jobs, it just brought back a lot of memories of all the terrible jobs I’ve had over the years, especially, y’know, my 20s and 30s and I know you had, too.

Oh yeah, both of us. God, where do I start thinking about those?

I know, Well, it all started badly for me. My very first job was at Arby’s which is a fast food…y’know, fast food?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they serve roast beef sandwiches. I was in high school, just wanted to get some extra money and, oh, that was so terrible, y’know. It was just so, it was kind of dirty y’know, and then I just remember every day coming home feeling like there was grease all over me.

Yeah. I’ve worked at a…back when I was in college, I think my first or second year, I worked at a fast food place, Del Taco, and I would just leave there smelling of tacos and burritos and just feeling greasy and…

And it can be a high pressure environment, too, because, y’know, when they would get busy oh my god, y’know, people were coming and I was doing the drive-thru a lot. The cars would be stacking up. I’d get all stressed out. It was…yeah.

Yeah, restaurants, in general, are very fast paced or can be if there’s a lot of people coming in and so I’ve had several restaurant jobs and it just…I didn’t do well at them because I’m…I have a much slower pace. I can’t think that fast. You have to multi-task and it’d actually be perfect for Joe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah…that’d be a good kind of job for Joe.

Yeah.

Yeah, man, what about you? What are some of the other bad jobs you’ve had?

Besides restaurant jobs, god, oh remember when I worked at ASA…the airline?

Oh yeah, you were a flight attendant, yeah.

Flight attendant, so that was probably one of the worst jobs I’ve had, working for this huge company and I had to wear makeup and high heels, which I don’t do.

I had, y’know, I had a lot of earrings in my ear. I couldn’t wear those and, in fact, I started sneaking it and wearing it on flights and somebody told on me, somebody I worked with, one of my coworkers…

Snitch!

…actually reported me, yeah. And I got in trouble for that. I got written up. Three write-ups and you were fired. So there was always that hanging over me, the oh gosh, I’ve already got one write-up, two more and I’m gone.

It was just awful in so many ways. The pilots were…so many of them were male chauvinists. And, it was just…I was like a fish out of water in that job. It just did not match my personality at all. And many of the people I worked with, same thing, I just didn’t…they didn’t resonate.

Yep, yep, Yeah, I know what you mean. I…one of my worst was delivering sandwiches. I drove this truck and I would deliver these packaged sandwiches to different convenience stores all around north Georgia, right? What made that job so horrible were the hours. Oh my god, I’d have to get up at 4:00 a.m. and make sure the truck was all stocked and start driving around, doing my deliveries, and then many days I wouldn’t finish until 6:00, 7:00 in the evening, and then I would have to do like the inventory of the truck and check it.

So it felt like that’s all I did. I would just get up at 4:00 a.m., work until like 6:00, 7:00, y’know, have a little time for dinner, go to sleep and that’s it. That was my whole life. It was just driving that damn truck and they didn’t treat me very well either. The managers at the convenience stores, some of them weren’t very friendly.

Ah, it was a miserable job.

It made me think of that commercial, “Time to make the donuts.” You remember that?

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, that Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, right. Yeah.

Oh and then there was Korea.

Oh yeah, one of our favorites. We shared that one.

Do you know I still have a knot in one of my muscles that goes back to that job.

It’s probably like a trigger point…

1996.

Yep, ‘96 to ‘97.

Yeah, I still have soreness. I remember you working on it at the time. I was always just so stressed and tense, like my muscles were just probably contracted all the time.

We were both so stressed. I was super stressed, too. I remember I was just getting sinus infections all the time when we were there.

Yep.

And I think it…I think it was just because of the stress. And, y’know, we were treated like…oh, we were treated so badly there. I mean, y’know, the bosses would spy on us. They were constantly criticizing all the teachers and yelling at us. And they worked us…oh man, they worked us a lot, too.

Yeah, they did. They expected a lot and then remember they were having financial problems and…

Oh, they weren’t paying us remember, we got paid late, like a month late sometimes.

Yep. We started protesting towards the end and then, of course, y’know, they would retaliate in any way that they could.

Yeah, it was…do you remember, too, I got fired actually, right at the end. We had…I think we had two more months to go in our contract and I got fired. So, of course, you weren’t going to stay. We were just…you were going to quit.

And then we got all our students, there was really no e-mail back then so we got their addresses or phone numbers or something and we were going to…we threatened to call all of them and tell them what was really going on behind the scenes.

Yeah, unless they gave us our pay.

Unless they gave us our pay, yes.

Because if they weren’t going to pay us, they owed us money for what, the teaching we had done and, y’know, once again because of their financial problems they were like, oh, we’ll pay you later. We’ll send it to America and, of course, we didn’t trust them.

Right.

So we were like, no, you give us our money before we leave or we’re going to start calling the parents.

Right.

Yeah, it was just such a hostile, disrespectful environment. And it was so bad because that was, both of us actually, both of our first teaching experience, right?

Yeah.

Had never taught, had no experience. They told us they were going to train us. I tell this story all the time about that first day because they told us when they hired us, when we were in America, that they would train us. We’d come over, we’d get all this training, because we weren’t teachers. And we actually got there and the training was they just pushed me into the classroom and said “Here are your students” and then they just walked out and closed the door and I had those students for four hours, as did you.

Yep.

They spoke, my kids spoke zero English.

I was lucky, mine spoke a little.

But I had no idea what to do.

Yeah.

Nothing. So there was no training. They lied to us about that. It was just such a kind of a dishonest management.

Yeah. You’re right. There were a lot of lies actually.

Yeah. And that’s, y’know, when I look back at bad jobs, y’know, sometimes the jobs themselves are really terrible, just what you’re doing can be horrible. And sometimes, y’know, it’s the schedule like that sandwich job. But what makes it all much, much worse is when you have bosses or managers that are really just super disrespectful or controlling, like you said at the airline.

And they just treat you badly. They treat you like a child or they treat you disrespectfully or they’re constantly saying bad things to you and that just makes your life miserable.

Yes, it truly does. I can remember at some point, once we got back from Korea, we were living in Atlanta and I started working for a vet and I was really excited because I love animals and I thought “Oh, this will be such a great job. I’m going to learn so much.” And I didn’t last long there because the vet was so mean to her employees.

And the thing that really bugged me was she could turn it on and turn it off. Like I would be in the room with her with, I don’t know what you call them…

A client…

…the client with their pet and she’d be sugary sweet with the animal and the client and then come out of the room and just lay into us, “Why didn’t you get that ready or why didn’t you do…”

Right, right, right.

So…

I think something happens when people, y’know, become bosses or managers or owners that, y’know, they get that little bit of power over people who work for them and a whole lot of people abuse it. A whole lot of people may be, I don’t know why psychologically, but they use it as a way to try to make themselves feel, y’know, better or superior and they treat people like crap. And it’s sad.

Yeah, it is.