On Temping and Crotchless Pants

I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but I tend to be a little bit lazy. Therefore, in the past I have used temp agencies to find a job when I was in need of employment. Well to be honest, laziness was only part of it; I have a lot of anxiety when it comes to doing things out of my comfort zone. As ridiculous as it seems (at least to me), I have a lot of trouble putting myself in new or unfamiliar situations. That is why temp agencies are such a good fit for me when it comes to job hunting. All I had to do was go in, fill out an application, give them a resume (for office positions) and wait for them to call me back. There was no searching in the paper, no driving around town, or dropping off resumes and going through multiple interviews. Many companies get new employees from temp agencies, so there was always a chance of the temp job becoming full time employment.

I have worked all kinds of temp jobs over the years. Some were good and some sucked horribly. Being a temp is not exactly the most glamorous position to be in. When you're in an office you feel like an outsider to your workmates. Most companies have a set amount of time that you are going to be working for them so you don't have time to really get to know any of your coworkers. The people I have worked with were always nice, but again, when you're only there for a week or two, no one is really looking to make friends. Using someone else's desk, and not wanting to move anything, can get very annoying. Other than the people you directly work with, barely anyone even knows your name. You are just "the temp". Sure -- you get invited to have some cake for someone's birthday or anniversary, but you feel like no one really wants you there. It is hard to celebrate when you have no idea who the person is that you are celebrating with cake.

I worked 5 or 6 office jobs in my temp days and the company I have worked at for the last 12 years started as a temp job. Actually there were two companies that did the same exact thing and were competitors in our town. I got hired at one as a temp and worked there for about two weeks. While I was there I got a call from another temp agency (yes, I was registered with three at the time). They offered me a position at my current assignment's competitor for a dollar more an hour. Needless to say, I regretfully informed the company I was working for that our relationship was over. It wasn't them, it was me... I headed over to start at the other place.

I worked at the new company for about three months in their pagination department and it got to the point where I wanted to become a full time employee. Benefits sounded like a cool idea. Sick days? Vacations? 401K? Those are things you don't get from a temp agency. I wanted to stay in the department I was working in but they did not have any daytime openings. I ended up taking a job in a different department working 5:00 am to 1:30 pm.  I thought it was going to be great. Getting home in the early afternoon sounded amazing. Just think of all the things I could do with my afternoons free. Well, the problem with this situation, which I quickly came to realize, was that I had to be to work 5:00 am EVERY morning.

After a month of this I began to realize that this situation was not going to work. I began looking for another job and I saw in the paper a position in the company I had temped with originally -- in their pagination department. It was a daytime position and I applied. I ended up getting the job and started working there again. About two months after I switched companies again, the company I left bought the company I was working for. Geez, if they wanted to keep me that badly they could have just offered me the daytime position I wanted in the first place. So I got to keep my job, and it was in the department I wanted to be in, working the hours that I wanted. I guess it all worked out in the end.

So far I have talked only about office jobs. When there weren't any cushy desk jobs available, I was often forced to take whatever they had. Several summers while I was in college were spent doing jobs I was thankful I would never have to do full time. I washed dishes for two summers, and I don't mean the soapy sink full of water, wiping, rinsing, drying and putting away dishes like at home. This was loading racks, stuffing them in a machine, unloading the racks at the other end of the machine -- where the dishes came out at about 200 degrees -- and stacking them for someone else to put away. This was also at a posh resort, where I can still remember the management telling us that employees were not allowed to walk on the sidewalks that the customers used. We were supposed to walk through the parking lots to avoid contact with the guests. Nice! At least they let us eat pastries off of the pastry cart once breakfast was over so I was able to let the whole parking lot thing slide.

One summer I worked on the night clean up crew at the same resort where I had washed dishes. We had a great boss who told us that management gave us 8 hours to clean up the place, but it did not take 8 hours. We were to do what he told us to do, then find a good place to hide and chill out for the night. Fountain soft drinks were free at the numerous bars in the resort and I would often find the crew chilling at the poolside bar, drinking soda and relaxing. My favorite spot was outside on the lawn chairs overlooking Lake George. If I got there at sunrise, the view was amazing! Our boss told us that we had to make sure the hiding spot was good because if any of the other departments saw us, they would probably report us and that would ruin it for everybody. It was a good summer, except for working nights. I hated working nights!

I also got to spend two summers in a row erecting giant tents for an annual motorcycle rally. That was nasty and exhausting. Unloading trucks filled with giant aluminum girders in the rain is a memory from one of the years. I did not have a coat that day and during my lunch I ended up trying to dry my shirt with the hand dryer at McDonald's. It was a lot of long hours and hard work -- two things I have always tried to avoid in my employment history. One of the few highlights was the fact that I got to use a jack hammer for the first (and last) time. This was a special one that had a cup at the end that we had to lift and put on the tent stakes to drive them into the ground. I still vibrate everytime I think about it.

I did landscaping once, which equated to my carrying giant stacks of bricks around as my boss built a walkway at an Albany Golf course. Another summer was spent resurfacing tennis courts around the Lake George area. Most were clay courts and there was a lot of raking and hauling large bags of artificial clay around. I also worked a day at a manufacturer of aluminum soda cans. All I did was stand around and watch the machine drop giant stacks of cans on a pallet. My job was to make sure the machine did it right and tap any cans that were askew back into place. Snore fest! I am not going to mention every job I did; that would take way too much time and be as boring as hell.

And now I will tell you about the job where I had one of the most embarrassing moments of my employment history. As far as I know, no one noticed, so I guess I should say it had the potential to be monumentally shaming. This goes back to a time when I was out of college, married and out of work. I needed to get some money into the household. My name was in at a couple of temp agencies when I got a call offering me a position at a large printing company. I really did not want to take it but, when you're desperate, you take whatever you can get. They told me when and where to show up, and that I needed to wear steel toed work boots (never a good sign when you are a wanna be office worker). I managed to borrow a pair of boots from one of my in-laws. They were about two sizes too big but they worked. I got dressed and showed up, feeling a bit like a clown in my giant shoes.

They took us (there were several other temps that were hired as well) to different machines and explained what we were supposed to do. The machine printed out whatever was on the run and the paper piled up in a special area. I would stand there and watch the pile grow until it got to a certain height. The machine had a marker that would tap the stack where we were supposed to grab it. We then had to carry our little pile over to a pallet and stack it. The folded ends had to point out, because if not, the whole stack could fall over and make a mess. I screwed it up once. Oh well, it was my first time. It was a lot more tiring than one would expect and there was a lot of bending over. Every now and then they would stop the machines, either to change runs or because the machine broke. When the printer was down we were supposed to sweep and clean up our work area.

It was one of these down moments, when I was cleaning up, that I bent over to pick up a scrap of paper when I heard this terrible ripping sound. With the sound came a refreshing breeze in the region of my groin. I looked down and saw that there was a very large rip in my pants. Now this was bad, because of something many people know about me -- I will share now with those who don't -- I stopped wearing underwear somewhere in late high school. Don't ask me why I chose this route. Maybe because all the guys in porn movies never wore undies and I thought that was all part of the secret for making these sort of encounters happen, or maybe my equipment just needs to breathe, I don't know. Commando is just the way I roll!

So there I was on my first day at a new job, and every time I bent over, my equipment was in danger popping out. Being a good worker, I kept going, though. Besides, there were only a few hours left in the day, so I decided to walk carefully, to bend with my knees like a proper young lady and avoid my coworkers as much as possible. I made it through the shift without anyone seeming to notice and headed quickly to my car. As soon as I bent to get into the vehicle the crotch of my pants ripped out the rest of the way. There was no longer any point in hiding. There was my junk, for all to see, except that now I was in my car, safe from prying eyes. I looked around the car for inspiration and found a plastic bag from a local convenience store. I tucked it my pants to cover everything up and headed home.

The entire ride home I prayed I did not break down or get pulled over. I have owned a large collection of shitty, barely legal vehicles and I thought for sure this was the time the car would die, or I would get busted by the police for a loud muffler or something. I played out the scene of the cop coming up to my window in my head, asking me for my license and registration and why I had a Stewart's bag stuffed in my crotch. Well, the scene would have been better if it was a female police officer and then it turned into a porno like I always fantasized about, but I was way too scared to think about that at the time. The other scene running through my head was of me walking down the side of the road, after the car died, wearing the plastic bag over my pants. In my mind, I had ripped two leg holes and was wearing them like shorts. Thankfully for me, nothing happened. I got home, told the story and everyone laughed.

My wife at the time told me that the other temp company had called while I was working and had two job interviews lined up. After the stress and the aches all over from a day of "hard" (well, hard to someone as soft as me) labor I decided not to go back. Any job that could do that to a pair of pants was nothing I wanted anything to do with! All kidding aside, temp companies are a good way of getting your foot in the door and got me jobs when I needed them. My experiences with temping also introduced me to some interesting people, reminded me why I went to college in the first place (so I would not have to do any of the physical jobs I did as a temp), and gave me some funny stories to tell.

On Olympic Closing Thoughts

The Olympics are over, and the Closing Ceremonies have been watched. I had some final thoughts about the XXX Summer Games (sounds dirty, doesn't it?) to share with you. The first thing I would like to say is I was quite impressed with the Closing Ceremonies; it was truly an extravaganza. England brought out its supermodels, superstars, and even dusted off the Spice Girls and dragged them out to perform. Besides Posh and her friends, we saw many more musicians -- some of England's greats, as well as some bands and singers I had never heard of (thankfully they had the band names on-screen as they arrived in the stadium). It was the celebration of a nation.

I was a little annoyed at the Opening Ceremonies, which were dubbed as a celebration of all things English but were sadly lacking England's greatest export, Monty Python. The Olympic Committee redeemed themselves when Eric Idle came out and sang Always Look on the Bright Side of Life at the Closing Ceremonies. This number was not 100% faithful to the original, as heard in the movie The Life of Brian, because the part where it switches up and says "Always look on the bright side of death..." was taken out. The producers decided to leave the line "Life's a piece of shit, when you think of it..." in,  but the sensors bleeped out the word shit. I was surprised that they left the line in to begin with. Good for them!

Throughout the evening's performances, the cameras cut to various athletes enjoying the spectacle (most of the athletes the cameras highlighted showed off their medals) and I began to think about the games themselves.

I love the USA. Well, I love living in America, is what I should say. We truly live in a land of plenty. I am by no means a world traveler -- the extent of my traveling abroad was going to see the Montreal Expos play when I was a kid, and taking a few college trips north of the border. I do watch the news on occasion, and when I see some of the conditions people are living in around the world, I thank the lucky stars I was born here.


Our nation is not without its problems: we have an ineffective political system, an ebbing economy and the government's stance on gay and lesbian rights is pathetic. Let's not forget our immigration policy -- maybe if we had tighter borders, Justin Beiber would never have been able to become the success that he has become today.


But overall, if the USA had a Facebook page (Actually, it does, and the page has 1,165,241 Likes. I just looked. See I CAN do some research.) I would be willing to click the Like button. But I wouldn't click the Like button, because although I am willing, I am a stereotypical lazy American. The point I am trying to make is that I am not a frothing at the mouth "America is the greatest country in the world! Wooohooooo!" kind of guy... except when the Olympics roll around.

The Olympics are supposed to be a celebration of the spirit of competition. All the world's nations come together, no matter what the current political situations exist between them and engage in fair, friendly competition. It is a place of brotherly and sisterly athletic love. This may be the way it is with the athletes, but not with most of the fans who are watching.

Most people can hardly even be called fans of these various competitions. Of course there are many people who do follow these sports, but the average Olympics watcher (which I classify myself as) probably had no interest in watching such sports as ping pong or track and field, before the Opening Ceremonies began. If it were several months ago and someone was flipping through the channels and hit the world swimming finals, they probably wouldn't have even paused in their surfing. But when the Olympics are on, we sit there glued to the television. In fact, this year I found myself staying up much later than I normally would to catch a certain event.


As soon as I started watching whatever event was on, I would look for the American athletes. Once I established which lane they were in or what uniforms they were wearing, I waited for the match or race to begin. And once it started, I would begin cheering on team USA. Wooohoooo!


The thing I found most disturbing, was not the spontaneous patriotism, or the sudden interest in sports that I cared nothing about, but that as much as I found myself rooting for the US athletes, I began rooting for the other nations' athletes to fail. I was happy if the non-American athlete fell off the balance beam, or did a belly flop during the diving. I didn't want to see anyone get hurt, but I did want to see some major deductions. I wanted the other country's athletes to lose and the Americans to win. If I actually took a minute to think about it at the time, I would have been appalled at my desire to have these young athletes' dreams crushed, all for some fleeting sense of national pride.

This Olympic mania went even further than this. I found myself checking the medal counts every morning to see where the USA was in the medal standings. As China had taken an early lead, I found myself hoping for the failure of China's athletes. They became the Evil Empire and we were the good guys. It was just like the Soviet Union was back in the days of the Cold War. It was Rocky 4 all over again with a large Chinese guy instead of Dolph Lundgren.

When the Games ended we had taken the lead and finished with the most medals. In fact, we had more of each medal than any other country. Does that mean we won the Olympics? Do we get a Gold Medal for the Olympics? There are events that comprise numerous events like the decathlon; why not one for the Olympics? We should at least get an MVP (or a MVC -- Most Valuable Country). And is there a congeniality award? I wonder who would get this? England perhaps?

My patriotism peaks at Olympics time. Seldom do so many Americans get this excited to be Americans without a major war involved. Not even a presidential election can get people whipped into a frenzy like a good Olympiad. This is the true magic of the Olympics and unfortunately it only occurs for two weeks every two years. Now that this year's Games are over, we can all go back to our general patriotic apathy and the meat and potato sporting events that we normally enjoy. We also get to rub our victory in the noses of the rest of the world and look forward to winning the
Winter Olympics in two years! USA! USA! USA!

On the Olympics and Water Polo

I was performing my patriotic duty the other weekend, watching the Olympics, when I witnessed one of the most violent sporting events I've ever seen at an Olympiad. You might be thinking that I was watching boxing, or one of the martial arts, but you would be wrong. I was watching women's water polo.

I have never watched water polo before, so when I saw that the US women were playing I thought I would sit down and watch the match. That is one of things I love most about the Olympics. It provides you with the opportunity to watch sports that you don't usually get to see. In fact, those are the events I am drawn too. Forget basketball, tennis, swimming and running - I want to see the javelin throw, the hammer toss, the discus, anything that is unique.

I have always been a fan of obscure sports. Just like in the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story , I wish ESPN 8 The Ocho really existed. Back when I had expanded cable, I can remember surfing through the channels and hitting Australian Rugby or Football... I'm not even sure which it was. I ended up sitting and watching the rest of the game. I thought it was rugby at first but then the players were drop kicking the ball and doing some other weird things with the ball (nothing pornographic, I assure you) and I became mesmerized. I sat there, trying to figure out what the various rules were and how the game was played. This is exactly what happened to me with the water polo.

In the pool there were two teams of women flopping around in the water. When I say flopping, I mean no disrespect at all to these athletes. I grew up on a lake and spent most of my summers in the water. Treading water alone can be exhausting, but this is not the only thing the water poloers (water poloists?) are required to do. They have to swim up and down the pool, fend off their opponents and be able to keep their bodies high enough out of the water to be able to shoot or pass the ball. They have to be in peak physical condition. If I wore a hat, I would take it off for them.

As I watched I started picking up some of the rules. They set the ball in the middle and both teams swam to the ball like a dodge ball game. There was a shot clock, which makes sense because as soon as a team got ahead by a point they could just swim around and play keep away for the rest of the match. Much to my surprise, there were no horses involved.... hahahaha! That is a joke that never gets old. (How come whenever people refer to a joke as never getting old, the joke in question has grey hair, was wished a happy birthday by Willard Scott and is wearing discreet undergarments?)

The game seemed very straight forward: there was a team on offense, trying to throw a ball into their opponents' goal. The other team tried to prevent them from scoring and get possession of the ball so they could go on the attack. Each team consisted of six players and a goalie. In many ways it was like an aquatic soccer match. The thing I was having the most trouble figuring out was the fouls.

The referees seemed to be blowing their whistles every 5 seconds. Sometimes play would pause for a second, and sometimes players got sent to a "penalty box." Other times the team on offense got what can be best described as a socceresque penalty kick/throw. Some penalties were kept track of like in basketball, and if you got more than so many, you could not return to the game. They even had yellow cards, just like soccer. This was the limit of my understanding the game. I did not know what constituted a penalty and how severe each infraction was, and was once again too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia at the time.

All I know was that as I watched, it looked like a shark feeding frenzy was going on in the water. I thought someone had switched the channel to Discovery and it was Shark Week! The women appeared to be mauling each other in the water. It did not look like splashy, splash; it was more like drowny, drown. The women were thrashing around in the water, arms flailing and elbows flying. People were shoving and pushing and looked like they were trying to kill each other. Though the stuff out of the water looked bad, the underwater cameras revealed even more: The players were grabbing each others' suits, and doing anything they could to block their opponents, or to get around them. It was brutal!

There was one girl who had a black eye that she received in a previous match, and it was not from getting hit in the face with a ball. Someone ended up with a cut on her nose in this match. If I was more thorough I would do some research and see how many injuries that were received in the various matches, but just from the one match I saw, it has to be a pretty big number.


Am I surprised that a country's athletes would be willing to do whatever they have to in order to win? Absolutely not! Competition can be fierce, especially when a gold medal (and national pride) is on the line. The real surprise was that all this violence came from something as innocent sounding as water polo. And not to be sexist, but women's water polo. Water polo sounds like a "soft" sport and that is exactly what I was expecting - women tossing a ball around in a pool, doing splashy, slash. What I saw was hard core athletes playing hard and kicking ass!


I apologize for my misconceptions regarding the sport of water polo and send my congratulations to the US women for their gold medal. On watching the highlights of the Olympic matches, seeing the ability of these aquatic athletes and the ferocity of their matches, I feel I can add water polo to my list of Olympic sports I will not be trying out for in 2016.


And on a sad side note, as I was looking for images of water poloists, you would be surprised to see how many wardrobe malfunction clips there were. (Well, maybe not that surprised.)

On Opening a Free Clinic

Here is another post that can be filed under the "things my wacky neighborhood kids do" category. This weekend I was sitting in the house (a recurring theme for me) when my youngest son came running into the house. He said, in a rather excited tone "My friend cut himself with his pocket knife and is bleeding really bad."

Let me pause my story to tell you a little bit about my youngest son. Like most kids his age (9), he has a tendency to exaggerate. On top of this, he also tends to be a bit overdramatic. I was trying to think of a specific example, but could not. Therefore I will make up a scenario to illustrate my point. My youngest would come into the house and say "My brother is trying to kill me with an axe!" I would do the research and find that my older son was chopping wood and a piece of wood flew off and landed near the younger. Just to make it clear, I don't own an axe and I would never let my 13 year old chop wood unsupervised.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that my youngest son will classify anyone that he plays with as his friend. I am not saying that he is unable to make friends; it is just hard to believe that the way most of these neighborhood kids interact with him, that "friend" is the proper word (unless there is an "un" on the front and a "ly" on the back.) I love my son, but I will also admit that he is a bit challenging. He likes to be in charge and tell others what to do. This sort of behavior is often frowned upon by other kids, but the children that live around us have no problems ganging up on him and being quite mean sometimes. Yet, my son still always refers to these kids as his "friends".

Back to the story....

So after my son told me about his wounded friend, I did not fly out of my chair to investigate. In fact, as I was casually getting up, I was thinking that this was just going to be some kid with a little nick on his hand. As we were walking toward the front door I started asking him why he was hanging out with a kid who was playing with a knife. Before he could answer we arrived at the door and there was his friend. He seemed to be about 10, maybe 11, and was holding a paper towel to his right hand. The paper towel was soaked in blood and I realized that my son hadn't exaggerated at all.

I rushed the kid into my laundry room/bathroom, leaving a trail of blood spots along the route and started to clean the blood off his hand. As I was cleaning I could see that the cut was between his thumb and pointer finger and didn't appear too bad. I doubted it would need any stitches, but every time he moved his thumb the bleeding would start up again. As I was washing the injured hand, my son's friend told me he felt like he was going to throw up. He didn't hurl but asked if he could sit down. I grabbed the garbage can, put the toilet seat down and had him sit down. Hearing that he was nauseous made me a little nervous so I asked him how much blood he thought he had lost. I didn't phrase it like that, but I can't remember what my exact words were. He said that there was a big puddle (exaggeration?) so again, I start worrying.

I got a gauze pad, pressed it to the cut and taped it to hold it in place. I told my young patient that he had to keep his hand still and to try not to use it. I asked him how far away his house was and he said that he lived on some street that I was unfamiliar with. It was then told me that he, his brother and his sister were staying with his father for the weekend, and it was just a couple of houses down the street. He said that his father was asleep though, so I told him that I would walk him to his house. As we were walking I said that he needed to wake his father up when we got to his house and tell him what happened.

As we headed to his house, the kid seemed to be getting more and more nervous. He told me that his father would be angry with him if he woke him up. I assured him that if I was his father I wouldn't be that upset, especially because he was hurt. He insisted that his father would and I really didn't have much to counter-argue, so I let it go. As we got to the front door he showed me the knife, and next to the knife was a stick the he was debarking. Whittling? Now I could see how the cut happened.

He said that all he wanted to do was go inside and lie down, which was what he was going to do before my son had him come to our house. This was the point where I once again failed as an adult. I completely chickened out and did the the worst thing I could have: let the kid do what he wanted. I certainly did not want the kid's father to be mad at him for waking him up. Who knows what the situation was in the house? I even started having some dark thoughts: What if the father was passed out? What if he would beat the kid for waking him up? All sorts of sordid stories started swirling in my head. The true reason I let the kid go was that I really didn't want to deal with his father. As outgoing as I seem to most people, I am really very shy. Meeting someone under these circumstances was something I did not want to do.

I let the kid go in by himself and told him to lie down for a while. I did not see any big pool of blood so I figured that part of the story must have been an exaggeration. I told him to avoid using his hurt hand as much as possible and to tell his father what happened as soon as he woke up. Then I left, feeling like an ass for not making the kid wake his father right then and there.

That brings up an interesting point, however. How much should one go out of their way to help someone else's child? I know some of you maybe wondering what the hell I am talking about -- you should always help a child in need. Well, yes, in theory you should. This kid showed up at my door with a hand drenched in blood, and of course I was going to get him bandaged up and make sure he was okay. But what if I had bandaged him up and sent him home like I did, and heard on the news the next day that the kid had died? Would I be brought up on charges for not waking the kid's father up? What if the kid ended up getting an infection or something? Could I get in trouble for not cleaning the wound out properly? What if the kid woke up his father and his dad got upset at me for not bringing him directly home? You hear about these inane lawsuits where people sue others for trying to help and not succeeding, and wonder if it would be safer just not to even try. But then would you get sued/arrested for not helping, like in the last episode of Seinfeld? It's a crazy litigious society that we live in, but it all boils down to what is right is right. I will always try to help whenever I can. I am not going to be opening a Free Clinic out of my home anytime soon, but I am well stocked in bandaids so if this happens again, I am ready.

In case anyone is curious, my patient survived. He came back over to the house a couple of hours later, while I was returning my kids to their mother's house. He asked my wife for some more bandages. He also asked her if I was a nurse or doctor or something. She gave him the new bandage and sent him on his way. Why did he start with a nurse? Don't I look like I could be a doctor? Dr John has a nice ring to it! Maybe I should start wearing a stethoscope? I feel a bit like George Clooney! And like most kids, I don't think he ever thanked me! Oh well.