A Job That Really Sucks
I'm self-employed, and as bosses go, I suck.
The work isn't steady, and when it does come, it comes in torrents. As a result, my sleep habits are erratic, and meals are irregular. In the end, I work ridiculously long hours, often on nightmarish projects that take way too much of my time for the pay I get.
I wish I could give myself a pink slip. I wish I could go country-walkabout-Johnny-Paycheck on my crazy, slave-drivin' b*tch of a boss and tell me: "Ty-ake thee-us job ay-yun' shuv ee-it. Ah ain't a-werkin' heere no more."
Yep. It's "Brokeback Mountain" meets "The Office." I'd quit me if I could.
See, it's only Wednesday, but already it's been a sucky week. I should be working now, in fact, to meet a deadline, but I'm playing hooky, blogging instead. Yep, I'm goldbricking -- on myself.
Staff morale is bad.
Still, I've been thinking about how things could be much worse. I remind myself that black unemployment in the U.S. is officially at 8.1 percent (down from almost 10 percent for black males in 2005), though I'd guess the real number right now is probably a lot closer to 9 percent. Lots of people simply have no employment and no prospects, and hundreds of thousands more who are working are underemployed.
And my job could be worse. I mean when I think of things I wouldn't want to do, the list is a long one. I suppose right up there at the top, though, is anything involving killing. Like working in a stockyard or a meat or poultry processing plant. Or, being the person who flips the switch in an electrocution chamber -- or soldiering for Uncle Sam.
Nope. Definitely not my cup of tea.
Closer to home than Iraq, though, is a place I don't wanna be anywhere near. They have entertaining commercials that beckon to tourists and urge them to connect with their elders and their history. The ads are catchy and colorful, and tinged with a kind of wry, hip humor. I suppose to a lot of people it seems like great fun. I'd probably buy it, too, but there's a problem: I'm black.
The place is Colonial Williamsburg.
Put aside the notion of working there for a moment. As a vacation spot, even, for me it's completely out of the question. I mean has anybody out there seen "Westworld" -- that 1973 flick with Yule Brynner and Richard Benjamin? A bunch of okey-doke white guys take a vacation to an ersatz, shoot-'em-up Old West town complete with android gunslingers. The droids are programmed not to harm humans, so that when a slow-as-molasses greenhorn take one on in a quick-draw showdown, he won't get his butt blown away. He gets to live out his macho fantasy harmlessly, and everything's just hunky-dorey. Right?
Not. The androids go runagate, and proceed to coldly and emotionlessly stalk about, hunting down and exterminating the horrified vacationers like an Orkin guy in a Big Apple Taco Bell: http://www.shoutpost.com/%22http://youtube.com/watch?v=sdVLJhWhnyQ\". It's "City Slickers" on crack -- and Jack Palance really is a psychotic, homicidal maniac.
With my luck, I'd go to Colonial Williamsburg and get the Westworld treatment. I'd get abducted, sold into slavery and wind up pullin' cotton as somebody's fieldhand. And it'd serve my crazy ass right. What the hell would any self-respecting black person be doing vacationing in a spot where black folks are slaves anyway?
And working there? Dunno. What do you tell people when you go on vacation and someone asks, "What do you do?" How do you tell people with a straight face (forget about any semblance of dignity), "Oh, I'm a slave"?
WTF?
Makes you wonder -- doesn't it -- just how Colonial Williamsburg manages to attract people for such positions. I mean how/what do they advertise?
"WANTED: Nigras -- uh, colored -- uh, knee-grows -- um, er ... some people of the dark-skinned persuasion to live and work in Colonial Williamsburg.
"Position: Slave reenactors.
"Duties: Mostly scattological. All the crap white reenactors won't do -- the heaviest, manual labor; shoveling cow crap; digging latrines and shoveling people crap; plowing with a mule (watch out for that rear end; it craps!); raising snot-nosed bratty, white kids and wiping their crappy butts; washing white folks' laundry -- by hand; cooking white folks' (and your) food -- over an open fire. And, oh, yes, bowing and scraping, knowing your place and generally taking crap.
"Attire: Square, homely, itchy homespun crap.
"Food: Roughage (that makes you crap), awful offal (chittlin's, fatback 'n' such) and all the veggies and critters you can grow or slaughter yourself in your off time." (*erlch*)
Yeah, right. The military (and military grub) is lookin' better and better....
Check this out. http://www.shoutpost.com/%22http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/slave.cfm/%22 It's an article called "To Be A Slave," complete with photos, at the Colonial Williamsburg website. The caption of one photo, an extreme long shot of toiling reenactors (I guess a close-up would have been too brutal?) reads: "Shouldering tools, reenactment slaves trek to the fields under a merciless sun."
Screw dat! I'd be on the phone to OSHA in a minute -- if I had a freakin' phone. They couldn't pay me enough.
And I'm wondering what the job interview sounds like when it comes time for the prospective employee to ask questions.
"Do we have to read and write in secret?"
"What happens if I get caught doing either? Will they sell or dispose of me? Sell my kids?"
"And what happens if I try to escape to, like, the mall down the road to catch an hour or two of football in the Wal-Mart electronics department?"
"Oh. Okay. But are the beatings and whippings for real?"
"What about the lynchings?" "The rapes?"
"Can we burn massuh's crops in retaliation?"
"Are bloody, brutal slave rebellions allowed? If so, how many overseers and random white folks can we kill?"
(Now we talkin'!. That's my kinda slave. ;) Sign him/her up! "Denmark Vesey lives. News at 11.")
I'm just wondering.
How twisted, how desperate, do you have to be to voluntarily apply for a 24-7 slave (job) to be a slave?
And do you get free therapy for life when you retire?
