1992 Flashback
Back in 1992 I lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I had just moved out from home to an apartment I shared with some guy who was on welfare - what was his name? Marc. Some weird guy. But I was desperate for my own place, and the rent was cheap, we split the $440 a month rent in half, including the utilities. I remember exactly what I was working as back then because I had just finished my 5 month job as a disabled van taxi driver (a horrible experience I'll share in coming months). I was desperate for work. Fresh out of School (Red River Community College with Domestic Electronics), there were NO jobs anywhere in Winnipeg. I took what I could get to get out of the taxi shit: A gas attendant on a full-serve Mohawk gas station. The work was hard as hell and the weather was cruelly cold. I remember working in the frigid Manitoba winters in -30 below celsius. It was so cold my gloves would freeze up. The boss was great, he would let you do pretty much anything as long as you weren't obviously slacking.
Unfortunately they had a terrible method of keeping money secure. In between the drops to the safe the money would be temporarily stuffed in envelopes and put into a file cabinet. This wasn't a great idea. The night shift guy ended up stealing $400 of our shift money and used it to pay for his years car insurance. We could never prove he did it but "somehow" he managed to get his car registered one day after the money went missing. My boss took the money out of my vacation pay - half of it. The other half he took off the other guy who was working with me.
When you make $5.00 per hour $200 is a hell of a lot of money. My pay check came to $385 per two weeks, after tax. It was barely enough to get by, if that. I worked at Mohawk for about 9 months, finally getting a job at a local casino for almost three times the wage of my gas station job. I was ecstatic. I had beaten out 4,000 other job applicants. Roughly two months after working there I moved out into my own place, thankful for the shitty jobs and to say that yes, I have worked really crappy jobs and I know what it means to do hard work. Hard work in the cold. Hard work in the heat. Hard work when you're bored as fuck. Some customers were just plain nice, others were sociopaths. One guy almost threw a punch at me when I told him to have a nice day. But to be honest I was a bit sarcastic, but only because the guy was a total fuckwad with my other co-worker. I regret not hitting him over the head with a tire iron. But I digress.
Unfortunately they had a terrible method of keeping money secure. In between the drops to the safe the money would be temporarily stuffed in envelopes and put into a file cabinet. This wasn't a great idea. The night shift guy ended up stealing $400 of our shift money and used it to pay for his years car insurance. We could never prove he did it but "somehow" he managed to get his car registered one day after the money went missing. My boss took the money out of my vacation pay - half of it. The other half he took off the other guy who was working with me.
When you make $5.00 per hour $200 is a hell of a lot of money. My pay check came to $385 per two weeks, after tax. It was barely enough to get by, if that. I worked at Mohawk for about 9 months, finally getting a job at a local casino for almost three times the wage of my gas station job. I was ecstatic. I had beaten out 4,000 other job applicants. Roughly two months after working there I moved out into my own place, thankful for the shitty jobs and to say that yes, I have worked really crappy jobs and I know what it means to do hard work. Hard work in the cold. Hard work in the heat. Hard work when you're bored as fuck. Some customers were just plain nice, others were sociopaths. One guy almost threw a punch at me when I told him to have a nice day. But to be honest I was a bit sarcastic, but only because the guy was a total fuckwad with my other co-worker. I regret not hitting him over the head with a tire iron. But I digress.
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