Kiss My Ass
Today I was standing at a bus stop on Sheridan Blvd in Denver waiting for a bus. I had to take two buses to make a ridiculous return to Amazon. I don't have a car, so as much as I would like to shop locally my options are limited. On my way back I walked a while and decided to stop for the next bus. The sun here is killer. A few memories were stirred by the old Bulbs Plus building across the street. Amazing that the guy is still holding on, but why not? He dealt in specialized, commercial lighting. The dreaded online places you order from are a pain in the ass. The quality is never what you would expect, the sizes are usually wrong and you can't speak to a human. But here I am having no other options in my own world. Believe me, the public transportation in Denver is dreadful. I could fly across the country quicker than what it would take to get across town.
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"Let's change the mood from glad to sadness."
- Jim Morrison
But suddenly my mood changed. I was pissed. The place finally went down because of so many reasons. Did you know that a lot of the packaging you get with the crap you buy is printed in China? I'm talking about big companies, big accounts. We had one guy who we supplied film to that used to jump on a plane to China to oversee the output. Nobody could ruin the files, it was written on the film. I don't know what happened to him, but the company I was at couldn't find enough work anymore to keep the doors open. First it was the recession of 2008-2009 and technology made it too easy and cheap to have people that were making journeyman's wages onboard anymore. It's not like we were raking it in, but in that time period hourly wages in the $20 -$25 were enough to keep you afloat. The cost of living in Colorado was still good then. Now people walking off the street without a learned skill make that in fast food joints.
Here's the memory that got me. The economy really stunk. The change in technology put people out of work. I kept hitting the wall. So many places.... you're overqualified. They would actually say to me "If a better job comes along, you'll just quit. We can't hire you." I'm not kidding. It's not like I was just looking for upscale hoity-toity jobs. I needed a job. Thank God for unemployment because this went on for two years. I dumbed down my resume. I tried to find places I could fill out a real application so I didn't look like a pompous asshole. It was quite the job trying to find a job. It wasn't just me... I had mouths to feed in my household.
None of the people I worked with were pompous assholes. We were working class. Over the years, I think I've been laid off five times. In those days if you were working for a mid-sized printer, things were pretty cutthroat. Work came in waves. All deadline. You had to stand on your feet, lift things, use your eyes, use your brains, use your skills at non-stop frenetic speed to get the work done. You didn't just think about yourself, you had to work as a team. Your concern was pride in your work and keeping the doors open. Bread and butter on the table. Even working for the large companies things were tough. The best place that I ever worked changed hands three times in the ten years that I worked there. The last owner was Quebecor Corp. The largest printing corporation in the world in the 90's. But that's because it was one of the companies that kept taking over smaller companies, merging, whatever. Eventually they'd close you down because they finally destroyed all the competition. Well, when they closed our shop in 1999 we were told it was because of NAFTA. They even had people from the state unemployment office in the day that they announced our closure to explain our classification. A lot of what we had done was going overseas. The big companies didn't want to pay the American worker anymore. We even had the nerve to take lunch breaks. Our job loss was directly related to NAFTA so we were able to collect unemployment while "enjoying" our separation pay.
But everyone in the field knew things were shaky with the way things were changing. We all tried different extra money making schemes to keep us afloat during the slow times and all the while expecting the inevitable. When I worked at Quebecor, we kept the place going 24 hours a day. So that meant weird shift work. Some of us 10 hours a day, 4 days a week. The rest of us 14 hours a day, 3 days a week. I did both. The 14 hour shifts were killer because they were overnight. I did that for a while and you became crazy. The darkness outside. The hum of the giant whisper cabinets. You ended up playing weird word and music games just to keep the brain going. Well at that place, we all delivered phone books on our days off. All of us just to make a few extra bucks. You should have seen the back of my Metro weighed down with phone books. When that place closed everyone I knew scattered. It was survival. One guy I knew went to the western slope to get into plumbing. I ran into another guy that started working for a courier service. He begged me to let him know if there were any jobs opening up where I was. His wife left him and he lost his house. Quite a few moved out of state because the job market for printers was still better in other states. I don't even know what happened to most of them.
Even a place I worked way back in the 70's, my husband would join me on the weekends with buckets and mops cleaning the place for extra money. We cleaned the toilets and took out the garbage. But back again to the company that used Bulbs Plus. A couple of the guys did painting and floors on the side. I did antique crap. I had a real knack for finding far out weirdo stuff. I had an ebay store and three etsy shops. It varied how many physical booths I had, but I used two locations. At each I had a fair sized actual booth and at one I also had at least two cases going. It was a lot of work. Online I had to take photos and list accurate descriptions. I didn't lie like so much online crap now. Then for the physical booths I was like Hulk woman. Loading stuff onto the truck and dragging it into the shop. I didn't make a lot of money because of the overhead, but I loved the stuff anyway. It was usually enough to buy food for the week. But after 2009 that wasn't bringing in as much. I don't know if you remember, but people tightened their belts pretty hard. They weren't looking for old, weird stuff as much anymore. Kept the online stuff going but shut down the physical stores.
Mind jumping ahead to one of the many prospective jobs that I tried for. A digital print shop was looking for someone to set up files for their digital printer. I'm sorry, but those things aren't presses. So far from real printing. Glorified xeroxes. Anyway, two women owned the company. Here's why I got suddenly angry standing at the bus stop thinking about my oldtime work. Two liberal women impressed that I had a damn good resume going back to a time that printing was a "man's world." Sitting down for the interview first off, I didn't like the chief woman's body language. She sat there like "Wow, look at me. I'm an entrepreneur with money and you're a lowly production worker." Ok. I need a job. Then they bring in the lead "pressman" (not a press). A kid. A snotty kid looked at my resume and said "Why would we want all this dinosaur experience?" He was plain rude in his snotty tone. Pretty much nothing else. He threw down my resume, stood up and walked out. I'm telling you... I am the most non-uppity person on earth, but I would expect common courtesy from any human. That's how I treat people. I worked with a couple of the old-timers that had come from using the old linotype machine, lead type. One was working paste-up and one had moved onto the process camera. I had nothing but respect for them and listened to everything they had to say. But what really shocked me was the reaction of these two liberal women. Nothing. Oh, ok. Why do you want me here? To take the abuse? I have further thoughts on this, but forget them. Anyway, I needed a job so I said yes. But I was feeling pretty damn anxious about the whole thing. My body took care of it for me and the morning I was supposed to go in, I started vomiting. I was pretty damn sick and thank you body from saving me from that one. That was the end of that. I could have taken some craphead treating me like crap, if I could return the favor. But the times had come where the worker's voice was removed. We all had to behave ourselves or they would move on to the next one.
I was grateful to finally get a job as a cashier working at a healthy food store.
But then as I was at the bus stop my mind moved on to what I hear coming out of the media nowadays. How the hell did it all get like this? Now we're supposed to believe that Americans don't like to work anymore. This is coming from people who've spent their whole lives sitting on their asses. However many years spent in secondary education, however many years working at a desk job for some consulting firm as experts on some problem with America and its people. Let me hand them a bucket and a mop. Where and when did these problems start? Was it all the cheap plastic crap that we kept buying from China? Cheap electronics? Or was it that they made their bucks getting paid big bucks to write up a report on why we are to blame for everything? They made their big bucks with their lazy asses sitting in their chair, so apparently no one else wants to make the big bucks? We're all lazy and evil and the experts are the only one's possibly correct. Look at them. Why else would they be making money like that? Not only are we lazy and evil, we're stupid. I mean they have their giant gray monstrosities. Why don't we all? The poor American slob deserves what they get nowadays they say. Because they are better than the poor American slob.
I hear Americans don't want to work anymore. I grew up with the blue collars. There were families in my Catholic school that had 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 kids. The family I married into was a family of 11 children. Their father was a real Irish bastard but he went out there with his landscaping company and worked from dawn to dusk to feed them. One of the sons took over the business. It seemed that the old grandmas didn't mind paying a few extra dollars so that everyone got a little more than the minimum wage. But then things started changing. Too much competition. Customers started dropping off. What are you people doing out there? It's insanity. You have an elite class now running the show and telling you what to think.
If you think Americans don't want to work I'll tell you what. I'll go out there with a mop and a bucket and show you how to use it too. And my story is lightweight, I'm not even scratching the surface. Another thing, if you think all the boomers had it so damn easy my question is where are you living? Some kind of coastal wealthy elite dream? Have you ever seen all those rusty, abandoned factories? Did you know that Americans once worked there? Their lives were torn asunder when manufacturing left our shores. They went from a decent factory paycheck to working retail. There's a whole bunch of them out there, but they are dying off now. You just don't read articles about them. You just read blurbs on google about Boomer wealth. Welcome to the age of media driven self hatred.
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