Work-Related Fiascos

I. Tedium

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working in the office of the University’s MFA creative writing program, mostly tearing old manuscripts into peices or using a black sharpie to redact social security numbers from antiquated documents. The job is tedious at times, but I have a special knack for accomplishing monotonous tasks at a breakneck speed. At once, surprising my employers and rendering my presence on the payroll superfluous. I actually quite like jobs like this, but I do them too fast, and end up standing around saying, “What’s next, waht’s NEXT?!” and the employer says, “Welp…hmm… I guess you could clock out!” This happens with many jobs I take. It sounds like something someone says in a job interview to the question, “WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST WEAKNESS?” You could say, “I AM TOO HARD A WORKER.”

II. Right Hand Man
The other day I was sat down and told that my job would only last through January 15th. Maybe now that I’ve developed such a hearty skill for redaction, I can get a job at the State Department or as Vice President Cheney’s RIGHT HAND MAN. Though the title of Right Hand Man would bring with it a great deal of clout and would get me into all the trendy Young Republican Dance Parties where the Arcade Fire is chained to a radiator and blackmailed into playing their hits, it would also garner a sprawling laundry list of anathemas and undesirable responsibilities. But these are just the things one must do when they are acting as Dick Cheney’s “Right Hand”. I will sit perched on the man’s right arm, doing anything his right hand WOULD have done. Because that is true power and true slavery. To abandon the normal requirements of being human, like using your hands to complete tasks, for example. I would:

1) Signing of secret orders to steal Amoxicillin from the children of the lower middle class.

2) Leading Senior Colleagues by the hand to remote places and shooting them in the face.

3) Private Time

4) Strangle Mistress

5) Wipe away tears of guilt with an old hanky

6) Sign the name of one of many aliases onto a check in exchange for a vast cache of Nazi paraphernalia including a lamp made of human flesh.

The worst of these is probably “Private Time”.

III. Working For Love
I was, for a while, under the impression that I would have maybe had a permanent position at this MFA office. But, as it turns out, I am only being employed a short time longer. So sooner than later I’ll be back on the streets, waving a cardboard sign with sharpie writing on it that says WILL WORK FOR

1) Love

2)Food

3) Money

4) Student Loan Remission

5) Fatherly Approval

6) Free Quiznos

This job has been a weird dream job, which is to say, a combination of WEIRD DREAM and DREAM JOB. I was accepted into the administrative ranks of the SELFSAME MFA Program which had looked at my portfolio and rejected it.

IV. Desperation
Sometimes the telephone at the desk where I’m been stationed will ring. I will pick up the phone and a shaking voice on the other end will ask me easily answerable questions. They know these answer well enough but they ask anyway because they want some connection. They want for someone to see them not as a name and number but as a human person, a walking talking genius. SO DESPERATELY they want to come to this city, to be accepted into that program, to have a prestigious office of authority shake their hand and proclaim YOU ARE A WRITER!

Though one day they abandon the writing life, finding that it is not the elegant life of Johnny Depp in a movie about a writer, sitting at a type-writer sometimes, smoking ciggarettes and saying important, profound truisms of life and then high-fiving the stuffed corpse of George Plimpton. It is, instead, a lonely life of sitting at a desk in a quiet room, spending hour upon hour, carving out fake worlds in your brain with the aid of a dull hunting knife. They find that it is not the life of Johnny Depp. They find that George Plimpton died in 2003 and has not been smiling because of them, but merely because he was taxidermied to smile. And most of all, they find the writing life is very similar to that of an asthmatic child. So maybe they abandon literature and become contestants on Cindy Mccain’s favorite television show, “WORLDS MOST DEADLIEST CATCH”.

{NOTE: The story about being a Right Hand Man is a bastardization of story concocted by myself, Michael Gerkovich, and Ricardo Jose Perez in the year 2003 wherein Ricky was to act at the Right Hand Man of “Danny Wegman”, owner of “Wegman’s”, a chain of Luxury Food Stores that carpets the North East. The most disgusting part of this scenario involved Ricky perched atop Danny Wegman’s right nub, facilitating his “Gas Powered Chain Saw Fetish” pornography watching sessions.}