Jon of All Trades, Master of None.

          I have had more jobs than anyone I've ever met. "Jon of all trades, master of none" my dad would affectionately joke. Before I made my living doing what I love (film making) and working for myself on my own schedule, I was a slave of sorts to whatever my task was at the time.
I was not able to hold down a single job for more than 9 months straight from age 15 to 28, mainly because of my chronic back pain -that not one of my plethora of employers fully understood. "Everybody's back hurts!" was the line I hated hearing the most. Yes, back pain is common but blacking out and collapsing from it is not, and that happened to me a couple of times. Back pain is horrible for two reasons: it covers such a large portion of your body that you can't change positions to avoid aggravating it. Even worse than that, it's impossible to communicate to someone just how bad your back actually hurts. If someone has a cast on their leg all they have to do is point to the cast and the boss will surely not request that they start climbing a ladder. When I would point to my back, sweating bullets nearly out of breath from the searing pain, my employer, whoever they were at the time would just think I was "acting" to emphasize how much I wanted to get out of doing my job. It can be completely humiliating. I still have chronic back pain but it's a lot more manageable now that I'm not beholden to the time clock five days out of the week. Sometimes I would end up quitting because the pain was so intense, sometimes I would get fired because I couldn't concentrate on my task because of the pain. It was always a factor either directly or indirectly. Oh, and if someone ever tells you about their back pain in the way that I just did, please don't ask them "have you tried stretching?". Yes I've "tried stretching" as well as acupuncture, physical therapy, meditation, reiki, I've tried it all. They always ask as if they know of this mystical herb that they were lucky enough to have been bequeathed to by a shaman's called "stretching" and that I should probably get my hands on it soon before the DEA bans it.
          Because everything I did involved hurting my back somehow, I was constantly on the look out for something completely new to do to keep a roof over my head which over several years elongated my resume to look like three wandering lives combined. I've been a roofer, I've worked out at sea, I've made pizzas, delivered pizzas, I've picked up dog poop, built fences, I once drove a RITZ moped handing out crackers for 12 bucks an hour, the list is endless but for this blog entry I'm going to focus on three strange work experiences I've found myself doing over the years. Maybe I'll make "crazy jobs" a recurring column here, we'll see how many I can remember. 
          Among the three different times I was a door to door salesman, one of them was cold-knocking doors (that means no leads, just find someone's door and knock on it) and in this case, trying to sell them a forty pound box of frozen meat. There was some bullshit speech I was supposed to deliver about how I just sold one to their neighbor, and they can have this at cost, and it's the same stuff that gets delivered to all the steak house restaurants, and bla, bla, bla, bla. There were three options; the beef collection, the chicken collection, or the seafood collection. I personally wouldn't recommend any of them. I would get $50 at the end of the day for every box I sold. In my week doing the job I sold one box. This was one of the most miserable jobs I've ever had and I officially made the least amount of money compared to hours put in to anything I was ever hired for. For my training day they threw me in a car with a woman who was obviously heavily addicted to some sort of speed and was craving her next fix badly. She was driving around so aggressively I thought I was going to die. Four hours went by of rude encounters with strangers at their doorstep while I stood helplessly about 20 feet behind her trying to astral project myself onto a beach in Hawaii. To my shock, right near the end of a shift of no sales she sold three boxes to some old lady in a trailer who had no idea what was happening. The guy they had me train (yes, they had me train someone even though I only had one box sold in my entire career thus far as a door to door meat salesman) was a kid who apparently had made it to the final 40 or so in American Idol and had delusions that his moment in the limelight was just a few meat boxes away. Studio time is what he was saving for of course. He was one of the most talkative, annoying people I had ever had the displeasure of driving around with for five hours. The worst part about this kid was all the other meat salesman would treat him like a movie star back at the office, further enforcing his enormous ego and idiotic blathering.
          There was the time I worked for a gardener that I'm pretty sure was an escaped convict (he hid behind a bush whenever he heard a car coming). He was a foul man who was constantly itching his groin and wincing in pain when he did so. I don't want to wonder what STD he had contracted and worse yet, what he contracted it from. Although, contrary to the meat selling singing sensation, listening to his endless stories in the truck going from house to house was my favorite part of the day. He once told me about when he and his buddy were shooting up coke (who does that?) and as soon as he had the syringe in his arm, his buddy yanked it out of him on his way down from collapsing into a fit of convulsions. He continued to explain that his buddy was experiencing "some bad shit", understood that it was causing him to overdose, and had the presence of mind in his last second of consciousness to pull it out of my boss's arm just before he shot it up as well. Having avoided the "bad shit" himself, my boss was able to drive his buddy to the hospital where they revived him moments away from death. These types of stories, and ones including details about the different whores he picked up over the years, were a constant flow from his mouth at yelling volume because the truck ran so loudly.
           The way it worked was he would show up at the Safeway parking lot every morning at 7am and choose among a group of homeless dudes who were the two he would take along that day because he only needed two people a day. I wasn't homeless myself but I was having a particularly awful morning having not slept the whole night before because of stress of not having a job. Did I mention I'm also an insomniac? it goes hand in hand with back pain unfortunately. I was walking by at the just the right moment and was "chosen" as one of the two workers that day. I later understood why he developed this method instead of just hiring two guys because he would basically choose whoever were the least two fucked up at that time. There was always one that would be absolutely smashed at 7am and it was a different one every day. I usually got an easy walk on because I was on time, not fucked up, and most of all I had an old pickup truck and on certain days he needed two trucks. Once I was late, and that was the one thing he absolutely couldn't tolerate so when I showed up to the parking lot at 7:05 he was already gone, I knew I had just missed him because there were three disappointed looking drunk homeless guys still milling around. I was driving back to my apartment and to my great surprise a few turns away from my place, I pulled up right behind him at an intersection. I honked and he saw me and indicated I should follow. We drove back to the Safeway parking lot where "Bear" got out of my boss's car. A rarely sober and serious Bear proceeded to give me the stare that said "I will kill you someday". We then continued to the job site. It didn't take me long to realize that I had just replaced Bear for the day, probably because I had the truck. I worked the remainder of that day, got my hundred bucks cash and never went back.
          Another job worth mentioning among the unique jobs list I've made over the years is when I was a traveling Karaoke machine salesman. I got the job by joining a conference call with a few hundred others from all over the country. The number was placed on a Craigslist ad and said to call it if you can sing, sell, and had your own transportation.
         The instructions were simple: during the holiday season, drive from Costco to Costco up the west coast and sing karaoke to people with the machine (that was provided on location) as they entered the bulk warehouse. There were teams of three and while one was singing the other two would convince people to buy them. We rotated like that all day for 12 bucks an hour plus $30 in commission for every machine sold. For most, it was a tough sell because they were grossly overpriced at $300 a machine. The whole "machine" was a just a mic that you plugged memory cards into and then into your own TV and stereo system. The actual music sucked as well. It wasn't real Karaoke tracks, rather cheap midi files that barely represented the song. Even the lyrics were usually written wrong as I assumed they were poorly translated from somewhere in China. They were made of cheap plastic and throughout my two months of singing into them, three of them stopped working for no apparent reason. Despite the shortcomings in product quality, I sold an average of 10 units a day making me the national top salesman and plenty of commission. I only had one problem. The paycheck came months later (of course it did, what was I expecting a 401k?) and I took the job because I was flat broke.
          I forget what I did for gas money at the time, I must have had some cash but I certainly had no money to stay in hotels as well. The car I had at the time was a little Dodge Neon and after sleeping in it for a week with no shower I was ready to quit even though I was killing it with commissions. When I was in Eugene, Oregon I decided to do something about it. I didn't know anybody in Eugene but I knew there was a university there and I knew where there's a university there are fraternity houses. I figured among the chaos that daily ensues at a typical frat house, who would notice an extra dude crashing on the couch? The plan wasn't perfect but I was desperate and I ended up getting lucky. After talking with a few drunk bros on frat row I discovered that one of the large frat houses was recently decommissioned as a frat because of too many alleged rape cases and was now being rented out room by room to college kids that hadn't all jerked off on a cookie together (it's worth mentioning that the same thing happened to a frat house two blocks from the Safeway where the gardener would recruit from in Seattle, I hate frats).
          I discovered that the new shared housing experiment was currently only about half way rented out. The front door was locked so I climbed in through a window on the second floor by using the fire escape. As much as I hate frats, in this particular case I did appreciate that no one around was going to question a twenty something dude climbing a fire escape after dark into one. Once in, I saw two dudes coming my way down the hall with a bong and I just said "wussup". They replied "sup" and we passed each other without any questions asked. I made my way to the basement where I discovered a stack of foam mattresses. I used one for my bed and the rest of the stack as a partition to hide my bed. I stayed there for a week in comfort and quiet. Foam is also a great insulator of sound as well as makeshift fort material. I even got a fresh shower every morning in the large bathroom down there before serenading people preparing for the apocalypse with Blind Melon at 9am. That was the only time I was ever a squatter in the true sense of the term and although it was comfortable, the experience certainly contributed to the way one must think as a van dweller. The mode of thought that appreciates common comforts that the average person takes for granted.