Dec 03 2008
Crummy Jobs, I’ve Had a Few: The Great Rock and Roll Album Swindle
I posted my first crummy job experience back in October, but for some reason, it didn’t appear on the site. So, I’ll briefly review crummy job #1, and then go onto #2, which was closely related to #1.
Crummy job #1 was your typical teenage dead-end job, just to get a little extra spending money and little else. I was a cart-hauler for a major gorcery chain, the store itself was located in North Jersey. The job was simplicity itself-go out to the parking lot, collect the shopping carts, line ‘em up, and return them to the front of the store. I was stupid enough to start this job in the dead of winter, when the weather was an extra added disincentive. Oh those carts are cold to the touch too. Well, I got tired of that job very quickly. I think a lasted three or four months before I’d had enough, so I quit. Thus ended my first slightly gainful employment. Before long, it would be time for the second.
It was the summer before I was going to leave for college. I needed to get another job, because my folks wouldn’t just let me hand around for the whole summer. Something about responsibility or something or other. So I headed out again and wound up with another dead-ender of a job: dishwasher at the restaurant inside the W. T. Grant department store. Now dishwasher at a restaurant is about as low on the work totem pole you can go; it’s more in the dirt than in the totem pole proper.
So there I was scraping off filthy plates with half-eaten something on them, and running the dirty dishes and utensils through the dishwasher. Yea, definitely a crumb-bum of a job. But at least I knew I would only be there a few months, and then it was bye bye dishes, hello textbooks. So I didn’t mind it too much, despite the fact that the conditions were shitty, the pay was shitty, and some of my co-workers were shitty. But hey, I wasn’t going to be around even for the short haul.
After hours of washing dishes, it was time to close the restaurant, maybe around 9, can’t remember for sure. Then we had to clean up and mop the floors. But we got to help ourselves to sodas and ice cream and any leftovers we could get our hands on. Our boss was an laid-back guy who didn’t give us too much grief. He was handsome and quite popular with all the teenage waitresses. Little did we know he had a little larceny in his heart.
The restaurant was located at the end of the department store building and you could enter if from the store itself, the record section being right by the entrance. And that record section was just chock-full of albums, the 33 1/3 kind, that are now long gone. These were the days when vinyl ruled, with those nice big album covers and their alluring art.
The rumor started to spread that the boss might be on his way out. I don’t remember all the details, but that was the general rant. And apparently it was true. One night, a few minutes after the restaurant closed, and the store already closed, what should I see, a few hundred few away from my kitchen door post, but the boss with a shopping cart coming out of the record department. And said cart was packed full of albums. He rushed toward the entrance, and another employee checked outside the door to make sure the coast was clear to the parking lot. I couldn’t see clearly, but it appeared the boss had pulled his car up near the entrance. He came back in a minute or so with an empty cart, and headed for the record department a second time. A few minutes later, out he came with another cartfull of albums. He repeated this trip a few more times, each time with a cart full of records. He must have stolen hundred of records from the department. The few workers there, after a moment of surprise, just went about their business. I did the same. As the saying goes, I was just a kid, what could I do? Well, that was the last we saw of the boss. I don’t know if he ever had to pay for his crime, or if the store considered it more trouble to prosecute than let it go. The sheer bravado of the whole operation was something to behold. And all those records. Something that I would save up for, there went a whole five years worth out the door. What a lucky guy. And just think what a pile he could now make on Ebay, if he kept all those records in good condition. Nobody talked too much after the deal went down, except for a chuckle here and there. It was still kind of hard to believe, but we had seen it with our own truthiness eyes. I was soon headed off to school, but it was a long time before I forgot about the amazing, incredible great rock and roll record swindle. The Pistols couldn’t have done it any better themselves.
