Chapter 27: Pole Inspecting with the Devil

Chapter 27: Pole Inspecting with the Devil

Jobs 80 – 81

2005

I’ve been dreading the moment when I would have to sit down and deal with Osmosis – the worst job I’ve ever had.  This period was a dark one for me and my family. Osmosis definitely contributed greatly to the difficulties, but there were other unfortunate things which happened to us during this period.

Yesterday I sat down and re-read all the 35 or so pages I had already written about Osmosis years ago. It was not a comfortable experience. What’s even more uncomfortable is I still haven’t quite figured out why I left Lear Memorial Chapel. It was probably one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made.

My wage at Lear was pretty decent. Also, Mrs. R returned to the work force. Our youngest was now old enough that she didn’t need her mom around the all the time. J’s health was stable enough to allow her to contemplate employment. Through our family friend Sue, she got a job at a small social service organization. This program provided perinatal support services to low-income families. When J and I got together, she had been an eligibility worker at the county welfare office, but she left there after she got pregnant with Rimpy Jr. Her education and experience in social services put her in good stead for this new job.

J has great organizational and people skills, and her new boss loved her work. J kept getting raises, and was soon making more than I did, which made me a little envious.  It was also the first time in our marriage that we achieved something like a middle-class income. For a little while we had enough money that life didn’t feel like quite such a struggle to pay for rent, bills, food, and all those other necessities of life.

However, having both parents working created a situation we had not encountered before: who was going to do the cooking? We hadn’t intended that our family roles should be divided along such traditional lines; it just worked out that way. J already knew how to cook, and fantastically. I didn’t. Since I was working, it only made sense that she would take care of feeding us.

Now that she was also working, it wasn’t fair to expect her to also be responsible for all the cooking. Unfortunately, I never had been any kind of cook, and certainly hadn’t had any reason to learn in the nearly two decades of our marriage. I was at a loss as to how we were going to handle this situation. We ended up eating out a lot, and sometimes it seemed like the financial gains we were getting from our new two-person income were being negated by all the food from restaurants. It was obvious to me that I was somehow going to have to learn how to cook so we could at least split that chore.

As I write this, it’s occurring to me that it’s just possible that this dilemma may have played into my decision to try my fortunes with a new job. I hope that’s not true, but if it is I will accept the blame for being a wanker. Another bit of wankerishness which probably factored into that decision, has to do with my ADHD. As I mentioned before, up to this point I’d only had a couple of jobs that lasted for a couple of years: paratransit driving and mortuary transportation. If you don’t count the time I returned to the paratransit job after my first departure, both of those jobs, in fact, lasted EXACTLY two years.

In both of those jobs, I had noticed that as I approached the two-year mark, I started getting restless, especially with the paratransit, which was full-time, as opposed to the part-time, on-call nature of mortuary transportation. I became bored with the routine, and the pride I felt in doing a good job tended to decline. When I became aware of this feeling of boredom and frustration in paratransit, I also attributed it to another realization. My dad had always trumpeted the twin ideals of “finding something and sticking to it”, and that work was the only thing that defined a person. I thought that if I just kept working, everything would be fine. After close to two years, I realized I was still struggling to make ends meet. I thought steady work was the cure for such ills. Of course, my dad made much more than I had, and my parents had good credit, and owned their homes, and all the other yardsticks of middle-class “success”, which helped them have a comfortable existence on a one-person. I had not achieved anything close to that.

Also, after long enough in a job, even if it gave me a lot of strokes for being a good worker, I would start to feel like I didn’t want to just be known as good receptionist, or a good paratransit driver, or a good hauler of stiffs. I wanted more, somehow, but I was too scared to attempt anything creative. It’s too bad I couldn’t just learn to accept the fate of so many of us who just have to work to live, and tried to find happiness with in that. I think the “two-year itch” was starting to hit me at Lear, and that may have contributed to my asinine decision to depart.

My memory of the exact timeline of events for this period is a little fuzzy, but in many ways the new problems inherent with a working couple got resolved in an unfortunate way. Poor J’s health took another downturn, and before long she had to leave her job at the perinatal agency. But that didn’t mean I was off the hook about learning to cook. She was so sick, that she couldn’t really do many of her former domestic roles, either. It still causes her great sadness that she can’t do a lot of things she used to do. A sad practical effect of her not working was that now our income had been reduced by more than half (since she made more than me), but we were still spending a goodly amount of money eating out, since there was still no in-home cook.

I got it into my head that somehow I could do better than I was doing at Lear, where I got an annual raise of one dollar, which I viewed as being rather stagnant. I figured I was going to have to do something bold in order to increase my earnings. I wanted to go against tradition and truly apply myself in some job where my income could increase with the more time and industry I put into it, as opposed to a flat hourly wage.

But what kind of job? Incredibly, I began to think about trucking again. The fact that Rimpyette was now old enough for J to work played a part. There were no long any little children who needed a daddy around all the time, as well. But there is another problem with my brain in that I often feel a need to return to things I regarded as failures in an effort to correct the past. I viewed my past experience with trucking as one of those failures and I wanted another shot at being good at it.

And here’s the final, dirty little secret: I was probably running away again. I wasn’t handling J’s illness very well. My dad had been an asshole about people being sick, and it was hard for me to shake that modeling. I think I wanted to distance myself from it, physically as well as emotionally. So, there it is: a whole bunch of poor excuses for a terrible decision. I began to put my redonkulous plan into action.

Job #81: Truck Driver-in-Training (again!)

 My commercial license had long ago lapsed, so I was going to have to find a company other than Turkey that provided training. I found one, and applied and was accepted. I gave my notice at Lear. I then traveled by Greyhound to somewhere in southern California (where is immaterial, since it’s all horrible), and checked into the company-provided motel. I didn’t even last a week. I quickly realized it was one of the worst decisions of my life. It wasn’t a problem with the company - I wasn’t there long enough to even find out if they were bad, although I was already having some trepidation about their strange team-driving set-up. No. The real problem was that I had left a very sick wife back home. Poor J was just falling apart. What had I been thinking? So I quietly slipped out of the motel one night with my bags and  took a transit bus to the Greyhound station and bought a ticket home. I never did hear anything from that company regarding the money they had already spent on me. I guess they considered it too small a loss to fuss over.

So once again I was back home in O-Town and unemployed. I had been warned that anyone who left Lear was never welcomed back, but I tried anyway, with predictable results. Great. I needed work fast. In addition to any job, I also started trying to again find something in geospatial. I didn’t have much hope for success there. Geospatial skills go stale quickly, given the ever-evolving nature of the technology.  I hadn’t been able to get a job immediately after graduating, so my chances three years hence were even more dismal.

I put my meager geospatial resume on Monster.com. To my surprise, I was contacted by a company called (and here I shudder involuntarily) Osmosis. If you haven’t read my lengthy history with Osmosis in this blog, I’ll briefly recap. Osmosis started life back in the 1930s as a company that made wood preservatives. Soon they began specializing in applying the preservatives to wood that’s currently in use, such as railroad trestles and utility poles.

Now Osmosis is a leader in inspecting and treating utility poles. They have a small GIS division at their headquarters in New York, which is what brought my resume to their attention. However, they weren’t really interested in me for my questionable GIS skills. They just needed warm bodies to fill their ranks of foremen for their pole inspection and treatment crews.

I talked to a recruiter from Osmosis, which should have warned me away right from the get-go. Way back when I was in the army, there was a common joke – more commonly attributed to lawyers – that circulated among the enlisted ranks and went like this: “How can you tell a recruiter is lying? His mouth is moving.” After my experience with Turkey, which also has recruiters, I realized that same folksy wisdom applied to them as well. I was slow to realize that any job which has to have people who talk other people into working there is not a good job.

I drove down to Sacramento to meet with an Osmosis supervisor, a pleasant Canadian named Jason. We met at a McDonald’s because due to the highly mobile nature of their business, Osmosis doesn’t really have offices, except at their headquarters in New York. I think Jason had a desk in the SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utilities District) building, but it wasn’t conducive to job interviews.

After talking with Jason for a bit, I rode with him to where one of the crews was working. I met a foreman named Peter, who later became my trainer. Peter looked a little harried, but he had time to shake my hand and say hello. We watched Pete and his crew work for a while, then Jason drove me back to my vehicle. The work looked a bit rougher than what I had been used to in my comfy job as a funeral director, but I hadn’t seen anything to frighten me away. I told Jason I was interested, and I drove back to O-Town.

Jason must have given a favorable report of our interview to his superiors, for a couple of days later the recruiter called me with a job offer, at the handsome fee of approximately 18 dollars an hour (the exact wage varied depending upon the contracts with the utility clients). That was the highest wage I had ever been offered. There was also the potential for extra income (so they said) from “production bonuses” if I exceeded my daily quotas. That sounded like a fine way to make good on my earlier idea of earning more money for more effort. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

My only qualm about the job was being away from home. Everyone I had spoken to at Osmosis had openly admitted that the job involved a lot of travel. As with trucking recruiters, however, they weren’t entirely honest about exactly HOW long I would be gone at a time. I talked it over with J. After all, I had just come back from the trucking school because she was sick. She said that for 18 dollars an hour, she could put up with anything. So I signed with the devil.

Job #81: Utility Pole Inspection and Treatment Foreman

2005 - 2006

Around mid-December Osmosis flew me down to Ventura, California to begin my on-the-job training. That was a couple of weeks before Christmas. Osmosis took a break during the winter holidays, and when I returned to training it was in Sacramento. First I stayed in a flea-bag motel in West Sacramento at Osmosis’ expense. Then I stayed in a room over my brother’s garage in Sacto proper. Osmosis gave me a 600 dollar stipend for my own lodging. My brother wasn’t charging me rent, so I got to pocket that money.

I trained with Pete for a few weeks during the rainy northern California winter. Our district manager was a psychotic hillbilly with moldy teeth named Rick. When I finished training, I got my own Osmosis truck and a crew. I even hired Step-Rimpyette for my crew, whom Rick fell head over heels in lust with.

Step-Rimpyette and I were transferred to Turlock. Then things started getting shitty. I had a new district manager in Turlock, so at least I was rid of Rick, but already I was starting to realize that Osmosis and I weren’t a good fit. I was having a hard time finding my groove as a foreman. I had trouble making quota, let alone making any production bonuses for exceeding it. I did one day manage to exceed quota. My production bonus for that day? Five cents. No, really – a freaking nickle. Wow.

Basically working for Osmosis was like living with my father again: I constantly had a critical authority figure telling me I wasn’t good enough. I began to take my feelings of frustration and worthlessness out on those I loved. I actually fired my beloved Step-Rimpyette because she was sick with vague symptoms one day and couldn’t work. Little did I know then that her occasional mysterious illnesses were an early sign of her own future health problems. We now know that she has Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and panhypopituitarism. She’s a very sick puppy, much like her poor mother. But all I understood then was that my father was a dick about sick people, but he was a successful, hardworking man. If I was going to be a successful, hardworking man like my dad, then I had to be a dick with sick people.

And that dickishness extended to my ailing wife. From the faraway places I was working, I thought of my sick wife at home and instead of seeing a person who needed sympathy and support, I saw a weakling, a slacker. Just like Daddy would have done. And J was going through more than just her own illness. Her mother was dying of congestive heart failure.

But I just kept spinning away into more anger and resentment. Meanwhile, Osmosis was sending me to such charming places as Las Vegas (where I nearly died more than once on Mt. Charleston) and Reno. 

 

In early July J’s mom passed away. I went home and officiated at her funeral (as she had requested), which was hard, because I had loved my mother-in-law, and I was crazed by Osmosis. While I was home, I got a phone call from Pete, the Osmosis foreman who had trained me. He had moved on to a job with a company called which provided merchandising services in the electrical departments of a popular chain of home improvement stores. He needed someone for the Butt County stores. He knew I lived in the area, and that I was a good worker. He also figured that I – being a relatively normal and intelligent person – probably hated Osmosis as much as he had. He said it was only part-time work to begin with, and my wage would be 15 dollars, which was less than Osmosis was paying. The main reason I had stuck with Osmosis for as long as I had (other than trying to work out my daddy issues) was because I couldn’t afford to just quit and start looking for work again. Going down in pay and hours was risky, but it was better than nothing for the chance to be free from those fuckers. I told Pete “YES!”

I dutifully returned to Osmosis, but immediately gave them two weeks’ notice. Going to that hateful job for those two weeks was one of the hardest things I ever did, but at least there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I had barely been with them for 7 months, but it had felt like years.

Sadly, my mental health did not immediately return just because I was no longer with Osmosis. There were some difficult times in the ensuing weeks while I transitioned to my new job. J and I still fought about money. I wasn’t done being an angry fuckhead. J and I almost separated. All told, my reaction to my time with Osmosis nearly cost me my sanity, my marriage and my family. I sunk so very low, and I am still inexpressibly grateful to my family for not giving up on me.

And that, I think, is enough about that rotten stuff. In the next chapter, we get to the best job ever, and then it’s a short hop (with a brief stumble) to my current job. Bye for now.

The end.

Chapter 26: You Can’t Spell Funeral Without “REAL” and “FUN”

Chapter 26: You Can’t Spell Funeral Without “REAL” and “FUN”

Jobs 77 – 79

2002 -2003

Job #77: Temp Agency/Packaging Company

Shortly after I was laid off from Walmart, my sciatica was sufficiently healed to allow me to look for a new job. I had registered at several temporary staffing agencies. The most famous one (let’s call them “Smelly Services”) actually found me a job, albeit not the kind I was hoping for.

After the debacle of the Walmart truck crew, I wanted a job that was a little more…gentle. I had plenty of clerical experience, and was hoping for something where I could sit down, indoors, and not sweat so much, and not throw out my back. I took Smelly Services’ test for clerical work, and while my typing and other mundane office skills were fine, I didn’t have any experience with 10-key operation or data entry. Despite that, my handler – Curtis – explained that with my college degree, I was rather over-qualified for such work.

So I thought it was interesting that they didn’t consider me over-qualified for the job they did find me – at a company that made paperboard packaging. Their biggest contract was making six-pack holders for College Town’s world-famous brewing company. They also made six-pack carriers for other breweries, as well as packages for all kinds of products, food and otherwise.

I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of factory work, so I was pleasantly surprised by what a decent place to work it turned out to be (at least temporarily). The work wasn’t particularly strenuous, everyone was  nice, and they had a great lunch/breakroom, with a decent variety of snack vending machines. They even gave Christmas hams to the temporary staffers.

2003-2005

During this time, I even attempted to return to college. I figured that my best chance of getting any kind of geospatial job was to get a Master’s Degree. Even though most graduate courses are held at night, I knew I couldn’t work full-time at the packaging company during the day if I was going to have any time to read the endless required amounts of dry scholarly books and reports. I needed a part-time job to supplement my financial aid package.

Job #78: Mortuary Transportation Driver

I saw an interesting item in the local want ads: someone needed an on-call mortuary transportation driver. I wasn’t even sure what that might entail, but I figured, “What the heck?” and applied. I was a little confused when I went in for the interview, because it was held at the owner’s day business – a small auto repair shop and used car dealership.

The owner was a guy named Ken, and he had a contract with a mortuary in O-Town to do all their after-hours transportation. When someone passed away, and they were slated to be handled by this mortuary (who shall be named later when I can think of an appropriate alias), Ken and/or one of his employees would transport the decedent in a black van from the place of their death to the mortuary. Most of this type of business came from nursing homes and hospitals, but death can happen anywhere, so Ken also had to transport accident and crime victims. He asked me if I had a strong stomach. I wasn’t sure I did (I didn’t, really, at least not at first), but I lamely told him that my wife liked to watch surgery shows, so I had at least seen lots of blood and guts there. He thought that was funny.

During the course of that interview, I learned some things I had never really thought about before. For one thing, I found out that Butt County didn’t have a morgue. In movies and television, bodies are always shown being hauled away, either my ambulance or a coroner’s vehicle, to some mysterious place full of drawers full of dead people. That may be true in better-funded communities but in Butt County, the various mortuaries in the county took turns acting as a de facto morgue on a monthly rotating basis. If an unsupervised death occurred, the county medical examiner would travel to whichever mortuary was hosting him that month and perform the autopsy in their embalming room.

Despite my lack of experience, I got the job. I have a feeling not many other people had applied. I made Ken aware of my plans to attend school, and he said it would be no problem working around my schedule there.

I went with Ken on my first few calls, to learn the ropes, and for him to see how I handled myself. I had seen a couple of dead bodies before, including, sadly, Mrs. R’s grandmother, Mildred, who had passed away not long before, and whose final arrangements had been handled by the very mortuary Ken was contracted to. Still, it was a little weird actually handling someone who had just passed away.

Most of our first few runs together were pretty cut and dried – hospitals and nursing homes. There was one fellow who had passed away unexpectedly on the floor of his bedroom. He was a bearded guy, and was laying face-down. When we turned him over, I was a little creeped out to see his whiskers slowly relaxing en masse from the unnatural position they had been in.

Pretty soon I was ready to go solo, as it were. Ken supplied me with a pager and cell phone. If the call was at a hospital or nursing home, I could do it alone, since those places are designed to handle gurneys. One person could easily slide a normal-sized body from a hospital bed onto the gurney. If they were large, I could get a facility employee to help me. However, if the body was in a private home, or at an accident or crime scene, I had to take a helper. Even though the gurney could be lowered to just a few inches high, it usually took two people to lift the body that far. Then there might be stairs or other difficult access which would require a person at both ends of the gurney.

I had a number of helpers over the two years that I worked for Ken, including my own Step-Rimpyette. The work was strictly on-call, and I made 25 dollars per call. That may not sound like much, but I got enough calls, whether they were solo or team, that it was actually a pretty decent part-time income. However, my helpers only got 20 dollars per call, and team calls were much less frequent. It was difficult to retain people who were willing to get up at odd hours of the night and schlep dead bodies for such meager and inconsistent earnings. More than once, my boss Ken had to be my helper when no one else was available.

Ken let me keep the van (which I sensitively dubbed “the Death Mobile”) at home. He also said I could use it as I needed for errands. Ken had made the questionable choice of putting landau bars on the sides of the van. He said he wanted it to look appropriate because he occasionally used it for funerals, either as the hearse itself, or a flower van. If it hadn’t been for those bars, no one would really have had any indication that it was anything other than a black, windowless utility van.

Once I was coming back into town after picking up a body at the College Town hospital. There were two chubby hillbillies whose car had broken down or run out of gas at the off-ramp I used. I stopped to see if they needed any help. I offered to call someone for them, but told them I couldn’t offer them a ride because I had a “passenger” with me. One of the yokels was staring at the van, and when he saw the landau bars, he loudly exclaimed to his brother, “Dang, Butch, this thing is a hearse! It’s a full-on hearse!”

Another time I picked up Grandrimpy in the van from his elementary school. It was the practice at this school for a staff-member to walk the child to his or her vehicle. The staffer couldn’t tell that my van only had a front passenger seat, and since any child would ride in the back, as California law required,  she opened the side door before I could stop. She was greeted by the sight of a gurney covered by a tasteful gray velour shroud. She said, “Oh my”, while my grandson excitedly shouted, “See!? I told you it was a death mobile!” I was somewhat embarrassed.

There are many other blackly humorous and down-right gruesome tales I could tell you of my time under Ken’s employ, and perhaps I’ll include some more in subsequent drafts of this memoir. My work for Ken wasn’t my only experience in the business of death, however. I had rather quickly given up on my graduate school plans. Much like my experience with evening classes during Army AIT, I couldn’t stay awake in class at night, and I was bored to death by all the reading. All in all, I only lasted a few weeks into the semester.

Now that I was a free agent, I was able to pick up more work with Ken, including day runs. During business hours, the mortuary handled their own transportation, when they could. If they were tied up, however, they called Ken, which meant me. Because of this I got familiar with the staff at the mortuary, particularly the manager, Mike. He liked me, and more importantly, the owner liked me. The owner, a nice lady named Susan, along with her husband, had purchased the mortuary – or memorial chapel – in O-Town from a family named Lear (not their real name) and had kept the name, because it was a well-established business. They also owned a memorial chapel, named after a type of flower, in Mountain Town. Susan’s husband also ran a successful computer repair business in Mountain Town, where they lived.

Job #78: Funeral Director

I began talking to Mike about the possibility of me coming to work for Lear Memorial Chapel, and after a few months he hired me as an assistant funeral director. I continued to work for Ken for the next several months. It was an odd arrangement, to say the least. I spent my days at the chapel, which of course included making transportation calls in their vehicle. If we were too busy to pick up a body, we had to call Ken himself, which he grumbled about. He had originally hired me to take some of the burden off himself. At night, I was on-call for Ken, and was transporting bodies in Ken’s van to the same funeral home for which I worked during the day.

One of the best things about this whole arrangement was that the memorial chapel was only a block from my house. By day I would walk to and from work. At night, after a call, I didn’t have far to drive back home. It was the easiest commute I’ve ever had.

Eventually the unusual nature of the relationship between my two jobs created some problems. Ken’s resentment about having to pick up bodies during the day because I was unavailable finally caused him to cut me out of day runs, and he hired someone else to do that job. Then Susan’s lawyer pointed out that as an employee of Lear, if I was injured on the premises while doing a call as an employee of Ken, I wouldn’t be covered by their workers’ compensation insurance. This meant that I essentially I couldn’t work for Ken anymore, so I had to give him my notice. Amazingly, my last day was exactly two years after my first day, just like the time I left the paratransit driving job.

But at least I still had my day job, which paid a decent wage. For my first few months there, I did not have any kind of license to be a funeral director, and it didn’t seem like I needed one, because all I was doing was assisting with funerals and their arrangements. I certainly wasn’t an embalmer, which requires two years of schooling. At first, I wasn’t sure I this was something I was interested in. I would sometimes help out in the embalming room, and even assisted the medical examiner with a few autopsies. The first few times I got a little light-headed and turned an interesting shade of green, but I never actually passed out or threw up. I was used to seeing gore after having already worked for Ken, but there was something about watching someone slicing or poking a human body, especially if they were so recently deceased as to still be warm. Eventually I got used to it enough to the point of wishing I could go to embalming school. Not only would I have made more money, but I would have been more useful to the business. As a funeral director, I was supposed to be in the rotation of on-call directors for after-hours calls. Most arrangements were handled the next day, but it was desirable that any embalming, if requested, or just setting of facial features (which is way more involved than just shoving the corners of someone’s mouth into a smile) be done as soon as possible. I couldn’t do any of that stuff, so the other funeral directors, who were all also embalmers, had to take extra days on-call, which didn’t make them happy.

Susan used to be willing to finance her funeral directors’ embalming training, but had been burned by a former employer who let her pay for his education, then quit and opened a competing funeral home in O-Town. There was no financial aid available for private schooling of that kind, and I couldn’t afford it myself, let alone the fact that the nearest embalming school was in Sacramento. So I contented myself with my informal status, until one slow day I was reading up on the laws pertaining to funeral directing, and I came across a passage which said that anyone who acted as a funeral director, but who did not have a license, was guilty of a crime. I thought that described my situation exactly. I showed this to Mike, who said, “Well, I guess we’d better get you a license, then.”

Getting a license as a funeral director is pretty easy: you read up on the rules, pay 100 dollars (which Susan put up), get a background check (which was actually less involved than the one to become a cab driver), and take a test in Sacramento. If you pass, you’re a licensed funeral director. Once I had my license, a framed copy was displayed on a wall of the funeral home alongside the other directors’. I didn’t get any more money for being licensed, but I got something almost as good: my very first business card, with my funeral director’s license number right on it (as required by California law). I felt more excited about getting a real business card than I had about getting my Bachelor’s Degree.

I worked for Lear for a total of two years and a couple of months. I had many interesting experiences there, but this is getting over long, and there is one other thing which transpired there which I wish to share with you, for it was one of my proudest accomplishments.

It is well that I am writing this pseudonymously (I love any chance to use that word), for the information I am about to reveal could get me rubbed out by some secret cabal of funeral home owners. It often happens that funeral homes become the unwilling long-term custodians of cremated remains, or cremains. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a person dies without anyone to handle their final arrangements. In cases like these, the county will pay for disposition of the body, which is always cremation. Butt County has what is often called a “potter’s field” for indigent decedents, but there has not been a burial or inurnment of cremains there for many, many years. Despite this, Butt County is disinclined to actually take responsibility for the cremains. Perhaps if they had a morgue, they would have a place to keep unclaimed cremains, but as it is, the funeral homes get stuck with them.

Another reason cremains get abandoned is due to family dynamics. A survivor may have arranged for the cremation, but then either flat out refuses to take charge of the “ashes”, or can’t deal with it right away, and so leaves them at the funeral home. A week goes by, then it’s July, then it’s a couple of decades and, well, “out of sight, out of mind.”

This may not sound like much of a problem for the funeral homes, and on a practical level, it isn’t. Cremains don’t take up much room, and require no special storage. The only real problem is that in California (and probably other states, as well) it is actually against the law for a funeral home to keep cremains indefinitely. However, the funeral home cannot dispose of the remains themselves, not without something signed by a survivor. So funeral homes are in this Catch-22 of having no choice but to illegally hang on to people’s unwanted cremains, which is a lesser crime than unauthorized disposal. The keepers of the laws are no doubt aware of this conundrum, and mercifully turn a blind eye to it. So I’m sure every funeral home, at least in California, has this dirty little secret of abandoned cremains hidden away in some dark corner. In Lear’s case, the cremains were kept in a locked cabinet in the basement.

This situation bothered me. I thought it was awful that the last mortal remains of these people were just gathering dust in some musty cellar – abandoned, forgotten and un-memorialized.  I also hate an unresolved mystery, and that’s what these cremains felt like to me. I think I would have made a great detective (but a lousy police officer). Here was a chance to put my amateur sleuthing skills to work. I got Mike’s permission to undertake (see what I did there?) the task of finding the responsible parties for all those cremains, which totaled about 20 urns. He said I could try, but he didn’t think I’d have much luck. The other funeral director on the staff agreed with him.

I gathered up all the files I could find regarding the abandoned cremains, and then I began making some phone calls. A few of the cases were actually quite easy. Those were mainly the result of simple forgetfulness. Sometimes survivors said they thought that one of their siblings had picked up the cremains. That may have been just an excuse, but one lady was genuinely upset that her sister had not done what she said she would do, and came right in to get her mother’s ashes.

Other cases proved more difficult. Often the survivors had relocated, and it took a bit of digging to track them down. The first case of that kind was willing to pay for us to ship the cremains to them, but others balked at the expense. I got Mike to agree to Lear paying for any shipping to facilitate the egress of the cremains. Pretty soon ashes were practically flying out the door. Mike seemed to like to pretend as though none of this was happening. I think he was worried that word might get to the wrong ears. The other funeral director had to admit he couldn’t believe I was having as much success as I was.

One sad case turned out to have a burial plot waiting for his cremains in Susanville, California, but none of his survivors could be bothered to transport him up there. On a slow day at the funeral home, I grabbed a shovel from home, drove up there and personally buried him.

I began keeping separate files for each of my searches, with a log in each one of what I had done and the dates, so that I wouldn’t accidentally repeat some phone call or letter. After a few more months, I was down to one last stubborn case, which became quite personal to me. The decedent shared my first name: Rimpy (not my or his real first name) – Rimpy Johnson. His cremains had been there the longest - almost 20 years - so it’s not surprising that it was so difficult to find any information on his descendants. I dug and I dug and tried everything I could think of in my limited arsenal. I even consulted with a local private investigator and a detective at the Butt County Sheriff’s office (the sheriff is also the coroner for the county – which just means he is responsible for investigating suspicious and unattended deaths and signing death certificates for same) for any tips and tricks I hadn’t thought of. The private investigator told me about an amazing professional investigator’s database program, but Susan was unwilling to pay for a subscription to it.

I did manage to find a couple of sisters of Rimpy Johnson’s. I almost had some luck with the family of one of them, but suddenly they stopped answering my calls. The other sister was living in a nursing home in Texas. Unfortunately, she was too far gone with Alzheimer’s for me to talk to, and the staff couldn’t give me any information about her immediate family. Finally I just had to put Rimpy’s file away in a drawer and try to forget about it as a lost cause. One day, a few months later, I suddenly had a feeling. My funeral director/private detective sense was tingling! I pulled out Rimpy’s file and called the sister’s nursing home. I was informed that she had passed away. That was the intuition I’d had! Now that she was no long a patient, they were able to give me her granddaughter’s phone number. When I called and explained who I was and why I was calling, she was very gracious. Even though she had barely known her great-uncle Rimpy, she was willing to take responsibility for his cremains.

So Rimpy Johnson had been the first one in and he was the last one out. I had successfully found resting places for all 20-odd abandoned cremains. The other members of the staff said something to the effect of “cool, good job” and went about their business, and of course, it wasn’t something I could brag about too much, because of the weird laws regarding cremains. After an initial feeling of pride and elation on my strange and secret accomplishment, I experienced a let-down – a feeling of emptiness after all those months of obsessive work. That low feeling may have contributed to my eventual decision to leave Lear. But I’m getting ahead of myself, again.

I did get a bit of recognition for my mystery-solving skills from an unexpected source during the time I was still “working cases”. The sheriff’s detective whom I had contacted called me one day. There was a peculiar case of someone throwing a container of cremains in a dumpster behind a gas station. The security cameras had caught the act, but the resolution of the footage wasn’t great. A local man was incorrectly identified as the culprit, but he was able to prove that he wasn’t near the area at the time. The detective called me because he knew I was well now versed in identifying the owners of cremains. The answer to his problem didn’t require the skills of an amateur cremains detective – any funeral director knows that each container of cremains includes a metal tag with the name of the crematory and a unique number identifying the decedent stamped into it. Then it was a simple matter of contacting that funeral home (which was all the way in Florida) and finding the name. The falsely accused man also called me and thanked me for proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn’t involved, since no connection between him and the cremains could be found.

I don’t remember if they ever caught whoever it was who so unceremoniously disposed of somebody’s ashes that way. That’s such a shitty thing to do to someone. He could have just emptied the cremains out on the ground somewhere (which is not always legal, depending on the location, but who’s going to know?) and then thrown the empty container away (which isn’t illegal). Maybe he was just squeamish about ashes (like I was as a kid with that woman’s cremains in my garage), but it seems like you must really have to hate someone to just trash their earthly remains in such a callous manner.

I think that’s about enough for now. In the next chapter, I will try to explain my stupid reasons for leaving Lear (I’m not sure I understand them myself), and briefly relate the brief job which immediately followed it. Then I have to deal with…DUNT DUN DUNNNN...Osmosis! Until then, you can read the long version here, or just wait for the condensed version. Tah!

The end

Chapter 25: Caged Ennui

Chapter 25: Caged Ennui

Jobs #73 – 76

2002

There was one major life event which transpired while I was a student at the university. My dear mother passed away, rather suddenly in October of 2000. Her health had been rather poorly for a number of years. She had given up smoking several years earlier, but it may have been too late. She had long suffered from angina, and had some close calls with cancer, resulting in a double mastectomy, and I think a hysterectomy as well.

Finally her health became poor enough that she sold her little house in Cambria and moved in with my sister Buff and my brother-in-law Roy at their home in Fair Oaks, near Sacramento. Then one day she had what was apparently a massive stroke. My poor sister performed CPR on her for a good hour before the paramedics could arrive.

Unfortunately, it was too late. My mom lingered for a day or so before the painful decision had to be made to turn off her life support. It all happened so quickly that I didn’t even have time to drive down to the hospital to say goodbye. Actually, that may have been one of the times we were carless. I got updates from my siblings via telephone. I had seen my mom that summer at my brother Dick’s house in Sacramento, so at least I had seen her fairly recently after a gap of a couple of years. My other brother Jack had come out from Virginia for a rare visit and my mom wanted to see all her children. Perhaps she sensed her time on this earth was short.

I was rather stunned, to say the least. It may sound callous, but I hadn’t been terribly moved by the passing of my father, so this felt like my first real experience of losing a parent. I didn’t really know how to behave. I emailed my teachers to tell them I’d be taking a couple of days off and why, but I went to work for Scot as I was scheduled to do. My heart wasn’t in my work, though. When I told Scot that my mom had just passed away, he very kindly told me I should go home, which I did.

My mom had made arrangements with the Neptune Society to handle the disposition of her earthly remains, and there were no immediate plans for a funeral. In April, which was my mother’s birth month, my sister held a memorial service at her home. In the intervening months, the settling of my mom’s estate had taken place. My mom had always been very good at being frugal – to the point of rinsing out and drying paper towels for re-use. I reckon the house in beautiful sea-side Cambria probably sold for a pretty penny as well. Whatever the reason, my mom left behind the tidy sum of almost exactly 200,000 dollars, and each of her kids got one-fourth of that. Roy said he used to try to encourage her to have some fun with her money rather than leaving it for her children, but she wouldn’t listen to him.

50,000 dollars seemed like all the money in the world to my perpetually financially-developmentally-delayed mind. Lurleen asked if we were going to buy a house. I doubted without really knowing that even that princely sum would be enough of a down payment for a person with extremely bad credit to purchase a home. To be honest, I didn’t even consider it. I figured even if we could buy a house, then we’d just be sitting – broke as ever – in a house we owned, with all the expenses involved in that. There’s something to be said for renting, especially when you’re poor. If something goes wrong with your domicile, your landlord is responsible for it (provided you have a decent landlord). Of course, it is a shame that all that money we spend on rent doesn’t build up anything, the way equity in a home does.

 A few years later, I sometimes watched “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”. I thought it was cool how the show helped struggling families, but it was interesting that these poor families always somehow owned their homes. It amused me to think that if we had somehow been able to purchase a house, we might qualify for a makeover from ABC. However, those families always had something else going on besides financial difficulty – whether it be a family member with a dread disease or life-altering disability, or they are just super-duper people who do tremendous things for their community. None of those things applied to us.

As it was, I spent some of my inheritance paying back my long-suffering brother Dick for some long-overdue loans. The largest single investments we made with our windfall were a mini-van and a maxi-family vacation. The van was just under ten years old, which made it the newest car we had ever owned. For the vacation, we drove the kids and my mother-in-law to her family’s annual reunion picnic at her brother’s house in Arlington, Washington. Mrs. R’s grandmother traveled by train every year to attend the event, but her mom, Jordana had not been for able to attend for many years. After the picnic, we took the ferry to Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The trip was spread over several days, and a splendid time was had by all.

We hadn’t been able to afford to take our kids on the kind of vacations that both Mrs. R and I remember from our childhoods. Critics may say we spent a little too much on the trip, or didn’t invest the rest of my inheritance wisely, but I (no longer) have any regrets. I used to torture myself wondering how things might have been different if I had just been smarter with money, but I finally decided that I was expecting too much of myself and 50 thousand dollars.

Okay, back to the jobs! After graduating from the university, I tried to find work in what I had just been trained to do. Unfortunately, I had a run into a problem while in my upper division classes. For one thing, I learned that while I’m generally very good at academic stuff like reading, writing papers and taking exams, I’m a little slower at learning things which are more “hands on”. Unfortunately, old-fashioned cartography and its newer incarnation – GIS (Geographic Information Systems) – are very “hands on”. I was already pretty comfortable with computers, but the software for GIS was overwhelmingly complex. Many of the younger students seemed to take to it like ducks to water, but I struggled.

I ended up passing with C grade from my GIS and cartography courses, and those were the core classes of the particular geography option I had chosen. I thought desperately of changing my option to planning – which I also found very interesting, but didn’t require so much computer gim-crackery – but it was too late to switch. If I could have repeated the classes, I’m sure I could have improved that grade, but that wasn’t an option, either. Getting C’s was a blow to my ego, and it made me worry for my chances of finding gainful employment in my chosen field.

However, the old saying says, “‘C’s get degrees”, and besides, the rest of my grades had been almost all A’s. I hoped that any potential employers wouldn’t be looking too closely at my actual grades. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to enter a field for which you have no practical experience, employers don’t have much else to judge you by. As it was, one job I applied to did ask me to send copies of my transcripts. I complied with their wishes, with little hope of success, and – as expected – I never heard back from them.

The three problems I had with finding work in geography were location, location, location. There was just nothing available in Butt County. Most of the jobs I could even hope to get would have required relocating, which wasn’t really feasible. The closest place I could have found work would have been in the state capitol, Sacramento, and that would have been a very difficult commute, as I had no desire to live there. In fact, I did apply for a state job there, and even traveled down for the civil service test, which consisted of both a written and an oral exam.

I quickly found out that oral exams are the most awful things in the whole broad spectrum of job search hurdles. Having already gotten over 70 jobs, I had become fairly adept at the art of the interview, but an oral exam combines the worst aspects of an interview with the stress of trying to answer questions without benefit of pen and paper. For some reason, oral exams always seem to involve three interrogators, rather than the usual one-on-one of an interview.  I’m not very fast at thinking on my feet, and here I had three people staring me in the face and expecting me to answer questions off the top of my nervous head. At one point, I mistook their request for an explanation of the term “topology” in relation to GIS for “topography”. I think my answer included a fairly good definition of topography, but it certainly didn’t answer the question. In fact, I’m sure I appeared to just be babbling. I did wonder at the time why they were looking at me funny, and I really wondered later why they didn’t see where the mistake lay and give me a chance to correct myself. Needless to say, I didn’t get that job.

I’ve had to endure a few more oral exams since then, for various types of jobs, and I can safely say that I’ve never passed a single one. I don’t know if they represent a valid way of evaluating applicants, but they certainly seem to be effective at keeping me from getting hired for the job in question.

Job #73: Cage(d) Cashier

While I was engaged in the increasingly hopeless task of looking for a job in geography, I also needed to think about how I was going to feed my family. One of the local Native American casinos was advertising for cashiers. I applied and was hired for the swing shift. I was the only guy locked in a cage with a bunch of women, which sounds like the plot of a Z-Grade exploitation film, but wasn’t nearly that fun.

It’s already established that I’ve never been good with money, and, to my chagrin, this extended to the simple task of making change. At the end of the night, my cash register drawer almost never balanced with what I had started with, usually to the negative. It was never a huge amount, but I was giving a little too much change to some lucky recipients. It became something of a joke, but amazingly, they kept me on.

Job #74: GIS Technician (!)

Meanwhile, I still kept my eye on the geography market. Soon, my fortunes seemed to take a turn for the better. A lady who ran a small consulting firm in College Town needed a part-time GIS technician. Her daughter had previously filled that role for her while she was in the geography program at the university, but she had recently departed for a real job in a city far away. Fortunately, she didn’t ask to see my grades, and I was able to talk my way into the job with a combination of sincerity, charm and a little bullshit.

I continued to work at the casino while I worked part-time at the consulting firm. My wages at the casino were decent, but my new job paid a whopping 15 dollars an hour, which the highest wage I had ever earned. So I was feeling pretty good about my situation. I occasionally felt as though I was paying for the bullshit part of my interview because I sometimes found myself stymied by some aspect of the GIS software. I had to call my employer’s daughter a couple of times for help, which caused my boss to question her hiring of me. However, in some ways that job was a bit bullshit itself. It turned out that the GIS software she had me using was the same student version I had used when I was in school. Obviously her daughter had provided her with a copy of it. So she wasn’t even paying for the software she was using for profit, which is illegal. It also meant that we could get no updates or technical support. I kept this fact in mind whenever my boss seemed dissatisfied with my lack of experience.

Soon my boss got a rather lucrative contract, and she began to pressure me to come to work full-time so we could get the project done in short order. I was a little reluctant to quit my full time casino job for short-term gain, but she assured me that she would have plenty of work for me afterward. So urgent was she that I didn’t even give the casino the standard two weeks’ notice of my departure. That was my second mistake. The first was believing my other boss.

I have no doubt that she simply fucking lied to me. I went to work full-time at her dodgy little firm, and thought that at last I had “arrived” in the job market, with a good-paying “professional” job for which I had studied at a university. I figured I was finally doing everything right. Even my long-deceased father might have grunted approvingly from the belly of whatever fish had mistakenly swallowed his bitter, bitter ashes.

I quickly finished the project she was so hot for, and no sooner had I done so, then she laid me off, with the added insult that she wished my GIS skills had been just a little better. I thought about reporting her illegal use of the software, but didn’t follow through on that.

I petitioned the casino for my job back, but it had been clearly stated at the time of my original hiring that failure to give a full two weeks’ notice was clear grounds for not being rehired. I continued to beg and plead, even taking my case all the way up to the general manager. I explained that the only reason I had not given sufficient notice was because of the pressure from my duplicitous other employer. I think I had them on the verge of relenting, and at one point one of my supervisors from the cashiers’ cage told me over the phone that I could come back, and to give her a call later to finalize the details. When I did call back, that supervisor was mysteriously unavailable, and one of her male superiors told me that she had spoken in error and under no circumstances would I be coming back. I was crushed. Perhaps if my drawers (the cash ones, not the ones I wear) had balanced more often I might have had a chance, but I’ll never know for sure.

Job #75: Cashier, 7-11 Store

Meanwhile, the winter holidays were fast approaching, and I needed work. I started applying everywhere I could. One place was at one of the three O-Town 7-11 franchises. Another was Walmart. I got hired at 7-11. Seemingly moments later, Walmart called me for an interview on what would be the second day of my new 7-11 job. I must have had an intuition. I agreed to come in for the interview, because Walmart sounded like a better deal, but I had already committed to 7-11, so I reported for training there.

It took only one day to convince me of the folly of that decision. I’ve stated before that I’ve never been comfortable in fast paced jobs, and working alone behind the counter of a busy convenience store/gas station is the very definition of “fast-paced”. I thought I was in hell. The young man who was training me seemed at ease in his job. He liked the hurly-burly of it. He told me of one incident in which he had jumped over the counter and tackled a man who was trying to run out of the store with a purloined 12-pack of beer. He had enjoyed the fracas, but I couldn’t imagine risking limb and possibly life over your employer’s money.

Another interesting thing he told me was that I was going to see “a lot of tit” (as he put it) on that job. Apparently a common way for young women to get free products was by offering to show the clerk their breasts. I guess this wouldn’t be very effective on female clerks, unless they were of a certain persuasion. I also wondered what a clerk would do if he found the proffered bosoms lacking in some way. Could he insist the woman had to pay cash, or had he already agreed to give them their Slurpee just for the viewing? Even the promise of boobs was not enough to convince me that this was a worthy job. When Mrs. R picked me up after that first day, I said, “I think I’ll see what Walmart has to offer.”

My Walmart interview was scheduled prior to when I was supposed to report for my second day of training at 7-11, so I wasn’t even in violation of any proprieties. If Walmart didn’t pan out, at least I could still go to work at 7-11 until something better came along. The first thing they had me do was take a sort of personality assessment.

I had encountered these sorts of tests before. The first one was when I had applied many years before as a driver/salesperson for Schwan’s Ice Cream. It was very similar to the infamous Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory, which I’d had a chance to look at when I worked at Children’s Services. I wasn’t expecting to be bombarded by such a thing at Schwan’s, and I almost ran screaming from the place in the middle of it. I wish I had. These tests are designed in such an insidious manner that you just can’t win. If you try to answer in a manner that you think your prospective employer would like, say on a subject such as your attitude toward minor pilfering of office supplies, you soon find yourself entrapped. Later questions may touch upon the same subject, but the multiple choice answers are worded in such a way so as to completely contradict your earlier answer.

As it was, I made it through Schwan’s first interview after the test, but quickly decided I didn’t want to work for such a weird, cultish-seeming place. I declined their offer of a second interview. If I had passed that one, the THIRD one would have been at my home. I had nothing to be ashamed of in my home life – I just felt that was very invasive and none of their damned business.

But getting back to Walmart, their personality test wasn’t nearly as mind-fucking as Schwan’s and some other places had been. Some of my answers were geared toward trying to make them happy, but at least they didn’t try to trip me up to the extent that Schwan’s test had. Right after the test, my interviewer went over my answers with me. She only had an issue with one of my responses. It had been a weird question having something to do with how an employee who had been caught stealing should be treated. The response I chose was that she should be discharged, obviously, but that was all. The response they preferred I would have made had something to do with her misdeed also being made known to her co-workers. My interviewer wanted to know why I hadn’t chosen this. I said that I thought that would be a violation of not only her rights as a person and a citizen of a free society, but that it was almost certainly in contradiction of standard human resources practices, and possibly illegal. She didn’t seem terribly satisfied with my response, but since it was the only question I had “failed”, I passed the test. It did make me worry a little, however, about what Walmart was willing to do to me if I ever violated one of their rules.

By the end of the interview, I was offered a job on the truck crew. I didn’t really know exactly what that would entail, but it sounded better than 7-11. I was essentially being hired as extra help for the approaching holiday season, but there was the possibility of continued employment after Christmas, so I accepted. I called 7-11 and said thanks, but no thanks, and I wouldn’t be coming in any more. Perhaps a slightly shitty thing to do on such short notice, but it was a shitty job.

Job #76: Walmart Truck Crew

I soon found out what truck crew was all about, and I was a little surprised that they had hired a 43 year old man for the job. Most of the people I was working with were about 20 years younger than me. I guess I somehow looked fitter than I was. I’ve had less physically demanding jobs for which I was given a physical examination to see if I was up to the tasks. Usually companies are wary of having to make payments to injured workers. Walmart seemed to have no such qualms. They probably changed their policy after me.

Truck crew is simple in concept, but brutal in practice. A tractor-trailer would back into one of the two receiving bays. We would set up a long, serpentine belt of little rollers at the back of the truck, then two people would stand in the trailer and furiously unload boxes and shove them down the line to the other workers, who would stack them on pallets according to which department they were destined for. We usually unloaded two trucks a night, but sometimes there were as many as three or four, especially the closer we got to Black Friday, that much anticipated “biggest shopping day of the year” that retailers dream off the rest of the year. However, even if it were only a “one truck night”, all trucks seemed to have to be unloaded at the same fever pitch.

I tried to keep up as best I could, but it was murder. I was so sore and tired at the end of each night, I sometimes wept when I got home. One night I was one of the pair of people in the trailer. Apparently I wasn’t getting boxes on the line fast enough, for at one point our supervisor stuck his head into the trailer and screamed, “FREIGHT!”  I thought he had said, “BREAK!”, and it was with great relief that I stepped out of the trailer. Then I noticed nobody else had stopped working. Realizing my error, I took a place along the line and began transferring the boxes I had just unloaded onto a pallet. Somebody else took my place inside the trailer and nothing was said about my mistake, if anyone even noticed. I think they were all just satisfied that the freight was now moving at an acceptable rate.

Eventually the rigors of the job took their toll upon my body, and I was stricken with a horrible case of sciatica, which I’d had problems with before. I had to go to the emergency room, and was off work for a couple of days, and then I returned to work, but on light duty. By law, Walmart couldn’t discharge with me a pending worker’s compensation case, but they didn’t really have an open position that fit the requirements of “light duty” for which I was qualified, so I was sort of left to my own devices. It may surprise you to hear it, but I do have a work ethic, so I made work for myself. I began limping about the store, finding misplaced merchandise and returning it to its proper department. I got pretty elaborate about it. I borrowed a shopping cart, and began carrying a roll of packing tape, some zip ties, a pair of scissors and a one-hole punch, so I could make repairs on torn packages that didn’t hang on their hooks properly. I kept quite busy that way, and no one seemed to worry about me. Much later I found out that this role I had taken upon myself was almost exactly the same as a position called “zoner”. Why no one had simply told me to be a zoner was beyond me

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I had paused in my self-appointed tasks to converse with an acquaintance of mine who was shopping. A call came over the public address system asking me to come to the manager’s office. I thought I was in trouble because I had been spotted slacking. No, that wasn’t it at all. It was worse. It was explained to me that Black Friday hadn’t been as profitable as they had hoped, and they had to lay off some of the extra help. I’m sure the fact that I was an injured free agent factored into their decision. Now they had a legal excuse to get rid of me. They gave me my final check, which had a candy bar tied to it with a bow, and wished me goodbye, good luck and merry Christmas. I left with mixed emotions. On one hand, I hated working at Walmart, so I was glad to be rid of it. On the other hand, I wasn’t happy about being unemployed again, but at least it wasn’t my fault.

And that seems as good a place to stop as any.

The end.