Since its birth on September 5, 1882, Labor Day has provided every workingman and woman at least three crucial with things: an excuse for a picnic; a chance to sit in shore-related traffic; and an occasion to complain about work. For the al frescolunching and OBX traveling this Labor Day, you’re on your own. But when it comes to capturing just how miserable work can be, C-VILLE can get you started. From roller-skated table-waiting and street corner traffic-counting to cigar-making, box-packing and propaganda-spreading, 15 Charlottesvillians here unleash their horror stories from the job market. If nothing else, on this workforce holiday, you might find yourself grateful that you don’t have to pick coffee beans all day.
James Watts
Manager and cook
Garden of Sheba
In 1998, I was in need of some quick cash, so I took a job picking coffee beans for a day while visiting Guatemala. Not only was the job located high in the mountains but the weather was too cool in the morning, and far too hot in the middle of the day.
At the time, I thought it might be an adventure—until I realized how many actual beans you had to pick to make one U.S. dollar.
If I had owned the field, as if it was my coffee, maybe I would have seen it differently. But at that rate, picking one bean at a time, I knew it would take me years to get one day’s wage. I only lasted half of the day.
Susan Payne
President
Payne, Ross and Associates
In the early 1970s my mother made me take a job at the Vermont State Fair, so I worked at the "pig in a blanket" bar, a fancy name for selling corndogs out of a sweaty trailer. I was about 18. Eventually I made friends with everyone in the traveling circus.
I hung out with all of them from the bearded lady to the sword-swallower every night at the beer tent and little did I know I was making friends with them for life.
More than five years later while attending the Virginia State Fair with my new husband, [L.F. Payne, former U.S. Representative for Virginia’s Fifth District], lo and behold, who should run up to me but all of the same people from the traveling circus.
They all recognized me, ran up and started saying, "Hello Susan," and my husband must have really been wondering about the person he had just married.
Devon Sproule
Singer-songwriter
I waitressed at a restaurant in Woodstock, New York, called Heaven. I partly waitressed and partly answered the phone to take take-out orders. So it started with me answering the phone, "Hello, Heaven. This is Devon."
The worst day I had there I came in 15 minutes late and it turned out the boss had fired all the cooks. He was the only cook that day and I was the only waitress. In addition to yelling at me for being late, he was the most demanding and perfectionistic gay restaurant owner I had ever met. Every time there was a mistake in the order he would blame it on me. As a waitress you want to offer people breaks on things, and he would remind me to charge an extra 90 cents if someone ordered the black currant sauce instead of whatever else. At the end of the day I was literally in tears, and he said, "Guess it’s time to take off the roller skates, huh?" It was the only nice thing he said to me all day.
Saul Barodofsky
Owner
Sun Bow Trading Company
The year was 1966 and the President was Lyndon B. Johnson. I became a research investigator for the Office of Economic Opportunity under the President’s Commission for Manpower in Los Angeles, California. I supported the President’s Commission and actually took the job thinking I could make a difference. Instead my experience was utterly hellacious.
On my first day, I wore a suit and I was immediately told I was overdressed. When I asked them what was wrong they said it looked too expensive, and that I was making everyone else look bad. I told them I only owned one suit, and they said, "Well then, wear a sport coat."
For 20 hours per week, another part-timer and I collected data on the program, which was set up to retrain potential workers at different companies. That data then made work for 23 separate people in the LA office. For three months, I carried around this personal letter from President Johnson stating that he would personally appreciate it if the person I was talking to would give their full cooperation.
For one national moving company, for example, I learned that the "retraining" of potential workers amounted to 1,200 hours worth of lessons on sweeping and 3,000 hours on properly moving boxes.
And these companies actually got tax write-offs for this, while we taxpayers paid for this supposed training in which no one, in reality, was given any work experience. I would continue to ask these employers I was talking to, "What percentage of these trainees actually go to work for you?" They’d consistently respond, "Uh, we’d have to get back to you." I’d say, "Can you just guess a number, be it even a very vague number?" And they’d say, "We’d have to get back to you."
The best part is that they told me if I stayed the course, I could go to exotic and exciting places to have conferences, which is what most of these people spent their time doing. I couldn’t do it. I decided I would never work for another employer again. And I never did.
Cindy Stratton
Vice-chair
Albemarle-Charlottesville Branch
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
I worked as a carhop at Shoney’s on Barracks Road in the 1960s. People pulled their cars up to the monitor and placed their order, and I had to bring it out on my roller skates. I could barely even roller skate. But the worst part was my too-short black poodle skirt and dirty white blouse, full of not only food stains, but dirt from repeated falls on my skates.
Generally I tried to wait until I rolled inside to drop a tray of food, which didn’t always work. Luckily for me, shortly after I started, they decided to do away with the carhops on roller skates theme. I only lasted about three months.
When I look back on that I know I’d rather clean people’s houses than ever do that again.
Andrew Holden
Living Wage Activist
The worst job I ever had was three jobs, a few years ago. I’d wake up at 4am, be on the road by 5 and arrive at my first job, working the line at the Plow & Hearth factory, by 6 in the morning. That job lasted until around 3 in the afternoon, though in December, 16-hour days weren’t uncommon.
I was employed seasonally, which meant I would get an extra 50 cents an hour—bringing my pay up to a whopping $6.50—if I lasted until after Christmas. A lot of people quit early, since the job meant working in a rush all day in silence, packing boxes and breathing in dusty, dry air from the mass quantities of cardboard in the warehouse.
After that I’d head home and rest for a few hours while waiting for my next job, at 6pm, washing dishes at the Tokyo Rose. Atsushi Miura’s a great boss, and he pays well. No complaints.
I’d head home around midnight and be up at 4am to do the whole thing over again. On Sundays I did janitorial/gopher work for Blue Ridge Mountain Sports.
Aside from just being exhausted and smelling like dead fish, the worst part was thinking it would never end. My insurance carrier had dropped me and I was paying most of my earnings directly into the 12 pills I have to take every day (for a genetic disease). There were a few times when I fell asleep at the wheel and almost drifted off the road on Route 29, which I’m not proud of, but it happened. I sold off most of my stuff to make ends meet, got a couple Madison County speeding tickets, and missed my family and friends terribly.
Eventually I just gave up on surviving with a job, and found life was a lot better without one. Some of my new streetpunk friends taught me about dumpster diving for food, and I eventually fell into a small anarchist commune house on the outskirts of Charlottesville. I’m still working hard of course, but now it’s to produce a better society, not more wealth for the already rich.
Jill Hartz
Director
UVA Art Museum
I think my worst job was during a college summer, when, because I was a fast typist, I took office jobs. I worked for an insurance company where I had to transcribe all day long interviews with people who had accidents, including car accidents where people had died. As a young person it was traumatic and frustrating to be inside every day during the summer. But it was a difficult job.
Horace Gerald Danner
Co-owner
Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie
My worst job was one in which I had to wear a three-piece suit. I learned very early on that I never wanted to do anything that required me to wear a suit and tie. Even now, if I have to go to an event, or a funeral, I’ll wear one of those straight collar shirts that don’t even allow you to wear a tie.
In 1985, I took a job as a glass salesman in the D.C. metro area. One other co-worker and I were considered "Beltway Bandits"—visiting large companies who bought glass in the greater D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia area.
I basically spent all day driving around and telling jokes and being jovial to these big-wig guys who were buying glass for one building project or another. It was horrible.
Along with my three-piece suit, I had this slicked-back hair and I weighed about 200 pounds.
Sadly enough, that was the most money I’ve ever made in my life. But it definitely wasn’t worth being rich, fat and about to have a heart attack.
Susanna Nicholson
Director
Union Yoga Loft
The best part of this particular job is I was fired on my birthday, which in some ways was a present. I went to work for a small, essentially vanity publisher in Northern Virginia and I did it because Eugene McCarthy had a manuscript there. I was told that he was too perfect to edit. They asked me instead to market these huge boxes of a book called Feeding Fido: A Gourmet Guide to Feeding Your Dog. It was a cookbook with incredibly time-consuming recipes dog owners could make for their dogs. I had to call around, go to cable station after cable station trying to push this.
The funny thing is, I’ve done window washing, but usually you find nice people in the grungy jobs. I remember once I did dishwashing but the guy next to me was a retired member of the Australian Navy who would recite Shakespeare. The worst part is these so-called glamour jobs—I worked for Us Magazine and I was forced to write a positive review of a Bruce Willis film, one of his bombs, and I had to write three positive lines for Us to be able to interview him. The next day my review was reprinted in an ad in The New York Times in big bold letters. You get a feeling in your gut, that stomach-churning feeling, when you realize you have your "dream job" and it turns into ashes.
Fran Smith
Graphic Artist
I worked for Blackstone Cigar Company. I sewed tobacco leaves together so that the little climbers from Puerto Rico could climb up to the rafters to hang them. We took the green leaves and sewed them on machines, 32 leaves per lath. Then Puerto Rican guys would come and climb to the top of the barn and hang the leaves to dry. It was in Simsbury, Connecticut. It was cigar tobacco, not cigarette tobacco.
I got this job because I wanted to go to college and I wanted to earn money. I could get hired there at 13. Because I was so big I got hired to be a supervisor, so I was a supervisor to kids my own age. After a few months they upped my salary to $2.25 an hour and that’s where my trouble started.
If you couldn’t get 32 leaves together sewing you could turn the machine down so you could do it slower. I told this one girl that if she couldn’t do it fast, she would have to have another job. So she went to Betty Jean, the power girl from North Philly, and told her that I said I was going to kick Betty Jean’s ass. Well, Betty Jean rode the bus with me back to Bristol. She sat behind me and it was an unusual day because the black kids and white kids were sitting together on the bus. I had no idea what was coming. Betty Jean said, "I heard today that you were looking to kick my ass." And then she hurt me pretty bad. Put a nail file on the inside of my mouth. I still have a scar over my eye from where she hit me. I got one good punch in and then she pulverized me. I walked home and my father said, "What happened to you?" I said, "I just walked into a wall." He said, "Whatever wall you walked into you better face it tomorrow. " And I did.
The next day I waited for her. I knew she smoked pot at 10 o’clock. I waited for her to come out from her potty break. I was much taller than her. I grabbed her hands and twirled her around until she was dizzy. I got her on the ground and punched her lights out. That girl’s face was a mess. It was to a point that if I was going to keep this job and get respect, I had to do this. It was not about being vicious. After that we became friends. She said, "Hey you’re tough." Then nobody could play us off each other. Betty Jean and I went to this girl who set us up and we just looked at her. She left.
Alex Gulotta
Executive Director
Legal Aid Society
Sometime between college and law school I worked at the Gunite Steel foundry in Rockford, Illinois. They had a steel foundry and an iron foundry, making wheels and brake drums for semi trailers. It was the best job and the worst job. The best because it was cash, baby. I was working my way through college, and it was good money. If you didn’t care about the conditions you worked under, it was the best summer job you could come by.
Working conditions…how should I put it? You couldn’t find OSHA in your alphabet soup. Dante’s Inferno is a fair comparison.
Most of the college students are on the night shift, so lunch is about 1am. The foundry is well over 100 degrees at that time, and you’re wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, a mask, earplugs, a long-sleeved shirt with leather arm covers, long pants and steel-toed work boots. You’re in this little cocoon.
There’s a job students would do called "skull pulling." Essentially, they’d melt metal in a huge oven that would tip and pour molten steel into big cauldrons, maybe 8′ tall and 6′ around. When you pour steel into a mold, some of it bubbles over. While it’s still red hot you have to break off the extra steel or it screws up the mold. You get a hook about 12" long and this little shovel, and for hours you "pull the skulls," these pieces of red-hot steel and dump it in a bucket. That’s your job. In the daytime, it would get to 130 degrees, and the guys who would do that job would pass out, so they’d round up college students to keep the line going. What got me through it was the fact that you worked on various aspects of the job. The concept of doing one thing all summer was death.
The crowning blows were "shutdowns," where everyone had a week off and the maintenance people would come in and work. We spent an entire week crawling down into these sub-basements that flooded regularly and get filled with this black, gritty, muddy sand. Our job was to spend all day shoveling this smelly muck into buckets someone would haul up and dump.
The dirt, the loud noise…it was almost awe-inspiring. The force and power of the machines were incredible. You cannot help but respect people who work in a place like that for a living, because it’s such hard work and the conditions are so disgusting––at least that’s how it was in the late ’70s.
I think that job influences me every day. I’ve worked a lot of labor jobs to work my way through school––working at grocery stores, blacktopping roads, painting houses. I respect the jobs people have to do because I know some of what’s involved, and I have to say it motivated me to stay in college.
I hope my kids have a period where they do different jobs. I can’t think of a better way to teach them about how the world really works.
Paul Curreri
Singer-songwriter
It’s really difficult to narrow it down. I was just making a list of all my bad jobs. The first on the list was telemarketing tickets for the Broadway musical Rent. The boss insisted for our morale on having the music from the show piped in all day, every day. We had to keep track of exactly when we made our calls. We have to make three a minute. So you’re writing down 3:31, 3:31, 3:31, 3:32 and in the meantime this music, "I will liiiiight a candle…" is playing in the background.
For two years I had a job called traffic engineer. But it was in reality traffic counting. From 7am to 7pm four days a week you sit on a corner at an intersection and push a button on a thing that looked like a GameBoy with a drawing of an intersection on it and a button above each lane. On the fifth day you entered your "data" in an office. It was used for timing traffic lights and it was cheaper to have two college kids do it than to pay for those strips that do it automatically. I figured out how to beat the system. For 54 minutes I would just sit there reading or sleeping or whatever and for the last 6 minutes I would record the traffic and push each button 10 times. The worst thing was that while I was doing that job I was taking medication for acne, so I couldn’t sit in the sun. So I literally had to sit there with a pillowcase over my head with a floppy hat on top of that. No kidding. I have a picture of it from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. People thought I was a burn victim or the Elephant Man or a member of the KKK or something.
There’s the mailroom in New York City where I would have to leave, because I was breaking down crying all the time. I realized I was just moving and lifting heavy stuff all day. My boss didn’t like me all that much and one day I knocked on her door. "Why don’t you just have a monkey do my job?" I asked her. Then I said, "I realized the monkey couldn’t read to see where the mail would go. That’s why you hired me."
I’m a vegetarian and the job I had for only one hour was in a steak house in Knoxville, Tennessee. I carried these enormous slabs of meat draped over my arm into the room where they would be cut into steaks. I didn’t last too long there.
Jen Sorensen
Cartoonist
I think probably the most colorful job I ever had was when I was a waitress in a Pennsylvania Dutch family restaurant. I had this big, teal green oversized jumper that was very matronly with white socks and white sneakers and a ponytail. But that wasn’t the worst part of the job. I had to serve this dish called hog maw. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy that consists of pigs’ stomachs that are stuffed with sausage and boiled potatoes. People were very enthusiastic about hog maw and very excited when it was on the menu. I would actually see trays of pig stomachs loaded into the oven—I actually worked that into a comic strip once. It’s not that it was bad, it was just kind of bizarre. The worst part was having to serve more tables than I was capable of serving.
The actual worst job I ever had was working in Hoboken in a coffee shop that seemed to be run by Mafioso-type guys. I can’t be sure that they were mobsters, but they were very intimidating and tough. One guy, when he was trying to make a point, was yelling at me once and threw a big pointed knife on the floor at my feet. There was definitely something shady going on there.
Browning Porter
Graphic artist, musician
When I finished my undergraduate degree at UVA in 1989, my plan was to take a job in my dad’s sign shop in Manassas, make signs by day and write poems, novels, screenplays, etc., by night. The first job given to me was strange, hopeless and horrible.
The shop had a client who was one of those builders responsible for throwing up McMansions all over the NoVa sprawl. Still giddy from the over-the-top opulence of the Reagan era, they had a notion to adorn each of their signs with a brass medallion about the size of an extra-large pizza, tricked out with their corporate logo in bas relief. When they learned how ridiculously expensive this would be, they still insisted that the shop imitate the effect by whatever means necessary.
My dad had no idea really how to do this, and so someone referred him to an expert sculptor who needed the work. The guy had been working for the Smithsonian, building giant fake rocks for one of their dinosaur exhibits. Apparently he knew how to do anything. His name was Viktor, and he was an unreformed Romanian Communist—somewhat of an insider in the Ceausescu regime—who had fallen out of favor and fled to America. Apparently before he had immigrated to this country, he had specialized in creating monolithic statues of party leaders, the kind that got hauled down and danced on by the oppressed masses only a few years later. Somehow this character landed in Manassas where he fashioned a method of casting giant fake brass medallions out of plastic for my father.
But Viktor didn’t quite fit in with the sign shop. He worked at his own pace—that of a party apparatchik, I suppose—and drank vodka all day long. When he spoke at all to co-workers, it was usually to disparage American capitalism or to hit them up for money. No sooner had he cooked up the first batch or so of medallions, than he quit. By the time I came home to work, he was long gone, and I had never met him. No one else knew how to do what he’d been doing, so it fell to me, the returning prodigal college boy, supposedly smart, to figure it out.
I was given Viktor’s big rubbery handmade molds, several dozen gallons of raw plastic goop to pour into them, a tiny vial of chemical catalyst, an old mechanical postal scale with which to measure out the catalyst, and a sort of dusty, wheezy Darth Vader-ish gas-mask to wear so that I didn’t asphyxiate. This stuff had fumes so deadly that I was also given an empty industrial warehouse all to myself in which to mix my vile concoctions. My dad had been able to rent very cheaply when the upholstery business it had housed went belly up, and so it was a very creepy, lonely place, filled with the hopeless skeletons of furniture and spiders.
One of my co-workers, an affable West Virginia country boy named Kenny, had found Viktor fascinating, and liked to visit me on his smoke breaks to tell me stories about him. "Viktor," he told me, "always used to wear them Walkmans on his head. I asked him once, ‘Viktor, what on earth are you listening to on them Walkmans all the time?’ And you know what he told me? ‘Classical music and static.’"
Casting the disks was a tricky business. The goop sort of looked like corn syrup and smelled like nail polish remover. One whiff of it without the Vader mask was enough to make you fall over dead of cancer. Too little catalyst in the plastic goop and the disks would turn out soft and sticky and gum up the mold. Too much catalyst and the chemical reaction would overheat and bake the disk right into the rubber. It didn’t help that the amount of catalyst called for in one casting was far less than the margin of error of my decrepit postal scale. I began with five molds, and after my third week I had ruined all but two of them. I was nervous, isolated and hypochondriacal.
Everyone in the shop listened to the same classic rock station, but I’d grown sick of their single 24-hour playlist scrambled fresh every day. (You knew you’d hear Strawberry Alarm Clock’s "Incense of Peppermints." You just didn’t know when.) I bought myself a Walkman, and I became addicted to NPR’s news in the afternoon, and soon I didn’t bother to change the station in the morning when they played Bach and the Mozart. The reception was lousy though, back in my ghostly upholstery shop, and so the station went in and out as I stalked around the premises, muttering chemical miscalculations to myself. One day I realized with a sudden horror that I was listening to nothing but classical music and static.
When I ruined the next-to-last mold, I got permission to purchase an expensive digital scale, and my father coaxed Viktor back for one day to show me what I was doing wrong. Viktor was very thin, white and humorless. He wore jeans and a blue denim vest without a shirt, so that his pale, round little vodka belly protruded over his belt. Sure enough, he never removed his headphones, and their wire seemed inextricably tangled in his long, greasy black hair. He talked like a sullen, mumbling Dracula.
He and Kenny and I went back to my empty warehouse to watch him work his magic. He refused to wear the Vader mask, and, in fact, kept a lit Marlboro in his mouth the whole time he stirred and poured the toxic goop, while Kenny and I stood well away and waited for him to burst into flames. He didn’t bother with the scale either, but somehow eye-balled the correct amount of catalyst, tapping it out of its vial as if it were pepper in a pot of borscht. He seldom spoke or met our gaze, and when he’d finished casting the medallion, we all stepped outside to smoke.
"Viktor, I understand that you know all about statues," said Kenny. "I was wondering what you thought of the Statue of Liberty." Viktor sneered, mumbled something about the doomed Romanticism of the bourgeoisie. And Kenny said, "Well, I think it’s a pretty good statue. There’s just one problem with it. It ought to have a No Vacancy sign on it." Viktor spit and flicked his cigarette into the weeds.
Viktor’s casting worked just fine, and he collected his pay and left. I learned nothing from his demonstration except that I had no aptitude for working with toxic and persnickety chemicals, and soon I’d ruined the last of Viktor’s molds. One of my co-workers stole my digital scale, and it no doubt was put to good use weighing out perfect quarter-ounces. My Dad convinced the client that they couldn’t afford even fake brass medallions for all their signs. I gave up on Manassas, and moved back to Charlottesville to join a band and get an MFA in poetry. I still make my living in graphic arts.
Meredith Richards
Vice-Mayor
City of Charlottesville
When I was in college, I would spend my summers as a temp working for ManPower. Most of the jobs lasted a week or two and they were replacements for people on vacation. The worst one I can remember was bad not because of the people but because of the task. It was in a construction trailer in the middle of nowhere. Nothing for miles around, but me and a bunch of men. They were doing legal construction contracts and I had to day in and day out sit in this sweltering trailer typing letter-perfect contracts on legal paper on an IBM Selectric, and every time I made a mistake I had to rip out the paper and type again. It was terrible.
I remember a lot of stressful and tough jobs during that period as a temp. Sometimes people would call a temp because they had so much work they were overwhelmed. You’d arrive Monday morning and never lift your head from your work until Friday evening. Other jobs were bad because they were boring and you had nothing to do but answer the phone. I don’t envy people who work in temp agencies and I did that for four summers.