Boring Jobs
The Source
I see him every time I pull into the parking lot at Springfield’s Hoogland Center. He sits in his little tollbooth playing with his cellphone and when a customer pulls up and tries to get into the drive the guy will look at him as if to say, “What do you want? I’m busy texting my girlfriend. Just park your (*&$! car.” Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the guy. Parking Lot Attendant must figure somewhere in the Top 100 list of boring jobs, but I always want to slap the guy on the back of the head with my sunglasses and tell him that things could be worse. He’s obviously never bucked hale bales. Sitting and taking parking stubs cannot compare to the tedium of standing knee deep in a barn’s hay mow watching bale number 324 tumble off the elevator and knowing that it’s going to be a hundred-degree, thousand-bale day. The clover hay has been sticking to your sweaty back since early morning, the farmer pays by the bale so he’s eased the tension on his John Deere baler to make his bales as large as possible, the closest drink of water is at the pump behind the guy’s house, strange and unidentified things have worked their way into your boots, and the hay mow is the home to a dozen or so large blacksnakes that your employer purposely keeps there to eat the rodents. And here comes bale 325 . . . . There are worse things than sitting in an air conditioned parking booth and collected dollar bills. Or then there’s the endless tedium of holding hogs for the veterinarian to castrate. The guy you’re working for has waited much too long to neuter these things and they passed the piggy stage many months ago. You stand in a line holding the hogs by their back feet while the vet moves methodically down the row of boys turning boars into barrows. The trick is to hold the hog up off the ground so he can’t get a foothold in the muddy lot, thus enabling him to squirm, the vet to miss, and you go home to explain to your mother why she’ll never have grandchildren. The vet’s assistant then squirts the wound with a splash of disinfectant which by noon has thoroughly stained your blue jeans purple, and you hoist the hapless hog over the gate as he squeals in the sure and certain knowledge that he’ll never have another good date. The guy in the parking booth really should move to the farm for a couple of days. At least his job doesn’t involve the guilt that was in the back of every farm boy’s conscience as he deprived the piggies of their jewels. Perhaps my most tedious jobs came just a couple of blocks from where the toll booth dolt was sitting, right down the street at the Illinois State Capitol complex. I went to high school in the days when a little political pull would get you a summer job working for the State in Springfield, depending upon your family’s voting record. My first assignment was at the Centennial Building in the days when Secretary of State Paul Powell was busy hiding 8-dollar checks in his hotel room. I was assigned to what was euphemistically called “Physical Services,” which meant you moved desks, delivered the mail, and contributed to Paul Powell’s reelection campaign whenever called upon. Twice a day we’d make our rounds, sorting then shuffling the mail around the building. It took six of us to do this two-man job and coffee breaks were mandatory. I was fresh from the farm and nearly went crazy with all the sitting around, so the next summer I asked for a transfer. On the following summer they assigned me to the State Library where my task was to spend an 8-hour day typing numbers onto index cards. I never could type numbers. I still can’t. I know that there are books now residing somewhere in the bowels of the State Library that no one has seen in years. I was the only male in the cataloging department so I soon became the favorite of all the little old gals who worked there. I ate nothing but cookies for an entire summer. I’ve been blessed ever since. Teaching may be low pay and scant reward but no one could ever call handling a roomful of seventh-graders boring. Maybe no one ever brought cookies to the guy in Hoogland’s parking garage, but he at least had the opportunity to see and talk to real live people during his shift, far removed from card catalogs, black snakes, castration knives, bumblebees, and very disappointed hogs.