Working for a living
I usually post about my personal life at my other blog, Last One Speaks, but I'm going to make an exception today because I need a themed post for my first entry to the Tar Heel Tavern. However, since my current life in North Carolina is somewhat uneventful, I look to my past for something more colorful that may be of more interest to strangers.
The theme is labor and it got me to thinking about all the jobs I've had in my life, most of them lasting from 3 days to maybe 3 months. I worked for 3 days I'll never forget, in a Waring blender factory. I spent 3 days picking potatoes once. That was just as ungodly. You stand on a tractor like thing with five other people. It has two conveyer belts, one for potatoes and one for rocks. Your job is throw the wrong item onto the other belt. My co-workers would have rock fights.
I worked for 3 days in Greek pizza shop. Tiny little place in a little strip mall with red leather booths and posters of Greece on the wall. I loved that job. By the 3rd night, the grandfather who owned the joint and I were hanging out in the booth getting drunk on Ouzo. My first husband made me quit the next day.
I've managed 3 snack bars, been a waitress, a bartender and a short order cook in a diner. I've been a telephone operator and a grocery store cashier. Then there the jobs I did for free. I kept minutes for dozens of committees. I was a Sunday School teacher, a Girl Scout leader, a playground manager, a museum guide, a gift store clerk and worked a season on a hot air balloon crew.
That's not all of them and that was all before I spent 18 years running a law firm, along with screening every intake for the local chapter of the ACLU. This is why I blog for the working class Americans. I know them. I am them, or at least have been at times.
Now I'm in a little town in North Carolina taking care of a member of my family. A labor of love can't really be classified as work though, so I blog politics because frankly, after all those years at the law firm, I missed the stress and as our peerless misleader might say, trying to change the world is hard work.
The theme is labor and it got me to thinking about all the jobs I've had in my life, most of them lasting from 3 days to maybe 3 months. I worked for 3 days I'll never forget, in a Waring blender factory. I spent 3 days picking potatoes once. That was just as ungodly. You stand on a tractor like thing with five other people. It has two conveyer belts, one for potatoes and one for rocks. Your job is throw the wrong item onto the other belt. My co-workers would have rock fights.
I worked for 3 days in Greek pizza shop. Tiny little place in a little strip mall with red leather booths and posters of Greece on the wall. I loved that job. By the 3rd night, the grandfather who owned the joint and I were hanging out in the booth getting drunk on Ouzo. My first husband made me quit the next day.
I've managed 3 snack bars, been a waitress, a bartender and a short order cook in a diner. I've been a telephone operator and a grocery store cashier. Then there the jobs I did for free. I kept minutes for dozens of committees. I was a Sunday School teacher, a Girl Scout leader, a playground manager, a museum guide, a gift store clerk and worked a season on a hot air balloon crew.
That's not all of them and that was all before I spent 18 years running a law firm, along with screening every intake for the local chapter of the ACLU. This is why I blog for the working class Americans. I know them. I am them, or at least have been at times.
Now I'm in a little town in North Carolina taking care of a member of my family. A labor of love can't really be classified as work though, so I blog politics because frankly, after all those years at the law firm, I missed the stress and as our peerless misleader might say, trying to change the world is hard work.
posted by Libby Spencer at 7:41 PM
1 Comments:
"I am them, or at least have been at times."
I appreciated you joining the Tavern, and look forward to reading your other work. Thank you!
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