There is a new factor in my minimum wage graveyard shift job at a Salinas gas station and it is a new employee who is both an employers dream and a co-worker’s nightmare.
The new employee is a woman who is a blaze of energy and is in constant motion. She performs not only the assigned job duties for which she was hired, she goes far beyond by constantly organizing and cleaning and mopping and more. She does the work of three employees.
She usually arrives at least a half hour early, and starts working right away, WITHOUT signing in until her regularly scheduled work time, and then when her lunch-break comes, she signs out, but keeps working through her lunch break, and then signs back in. In other words, she is giving away at least an hour of her already significant labor during each shift.
An employer’s dream, right? What could be wrong with that?
She has been working on many different work shifts from day to night, and sometimes she comes in as my 3:00 a.m. co-worker. At first, she seemed like a nice person, however, soon she showed just how she is a co-worker’s nightmare.
As she dashes about the store doing all sorts of jobs that are not part of why she, nor I, were actually hired for, she keeps talking about how she is such a great worker, and how how lazy is everyone else who works at the store. I tried to explain to her that I am handicapped, with multiple abdominal hernias and very overweight, so I’m not able to keep up to her pace. But as I do only the job I was hired for, i.e. run the cash register, make coffee, do the nightly tobacco inventory, and a few other tasks, she glares at me as she dashes about the store with a very judgmental look that comes from a fit healthy person who does not comprehend disability and judgmentally passes it off as mere laziness.
She constantly complains that all the other employees “hate” her, and she claims it’s because they are all lazy. She has no concept that she is very unusual in her energy and fitness.
She keeps talking about her work ethic as though it makes her far more moral and thus superior to everyone else. She keep saying she is going to tell the manager that so-and-so is doing or not doing something, i.e. she’s a tattle-tale. She does not understand why the other employees would have any legitimate reason to resent her, not so much for her energy, but because of her attitude that she is so much better than everyone else. She sets a standard that I and others are afraid the manager will expect us to match, i.e. working without signing in and doing tasks that go far beyond the jobs we were actually hired for.
In addition, the gas station I work at is one of about 50 owned by a man who has no interest in treating his employees like humans, probably not even this woman should it ever come down to it. The local manager has been heard to say that the employees should be grateful that she allows us to have a job. There is zero incentive for me or most of the other employees to work harder or go beyond what we were hired to do because it’s obvious that loyalty from employees will not be rewarded with any loyalty from management.
I am vastly overqualified for this graveyard shift job at a gas station, but finding employment has been difficult for me because I hadn’t worked in a regular job for many years. I have experience in administrative support, video production, computer programming, database management, and more. However, I have had a hard time getting employed for the following reasons.
I was my father’s caretaker for fifteen years after he went into a coma in 2000. He survived, in large part, because I refused to allow the hospital to terminate his life support. In spite of being told by hospital staff that I should terminate Dad’s life support and that i was being “selfish” and “unrealistic” and needed “to let go”, I refused because, they could not prove to me, a very scientifically literate person, that Dad could not recover. Dad recovered. That’s a long story for another time.
Before Dad’s coma, In 1994 I had been diagnosed with colon cancer, and my initial diagnosis was a 90% chance of death within five years. I had a colostomy to remove the tumor, but I got very little care after I left the hospital, and I developed at least six significant hernias in the following months, and they remain with me to now, almost 22 years later. I spent the next few years preparing to die, and wrapping up my life and preparing my legacy.
However, I survived cancer, not out of any miracle, but because medical technology and new chemotherapy drugs came along that saved my life. I call it “hitting the sweet spot of medical technology”. A few months after the cancer surgery and start of chemotherapy, during a meeting at a cancer-support group, I met another cancer patient, who had almost the identical kind of tumor in the same place and roughly the same surgery, but got different chemotherapy drugs. He was then in his final stages of life. He told me then “people like you are going to live because people like me died”. He died a few months later. I wish I had written down his name.
After Dad came out of his coma, I became his caretaker beause while mentally he came back complely, physically he was very unstedy. When Dad was well enough for me to leave him for a few hours a day, I took university and college courses, and aquired one BS in computer science and media production, and nine associates degrees in a wide selection of topics from Business to Art to Political Science and more.
At the time I got cancer, I was about mid way through an Engineering degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Had I not gotten cancer, today i would likely have experiments flying on the International Space Station. Cancer very much changed the course of my life.
Now Dad is dead. My applications to jobs that pay a living wage go ignored, or in the rare cases when I get a response, it’s something like “we are looking for someone who is currently working in the field”,
I think that many HR departments look at my 15 years of taking care of Dad as being equivalent to being unemployed, or worse, and my resumes get tossed into the trash. If the do go beyond, the encounter my 10 total college degrees, and don’t know what to make of that. So my resume gets put into the “never look at this again” pile.
And this why I’m working the graveyard shift at a gas station, to which we shall now return.
So the new woman was being particularly obnoxious this early morning as she dashed about the store cleaning and straightening and more while glaring at me because I wasn’t joining her, even though i kept telling her about my hernias and general unfitness to be rushing about as she did, but she didn’t want to hear “excuses”.
During a calm moment, we started talking about how when I started working at the station, I had taken many notes about various procedures in the station, because there was absolutely no documentation in this poorly managed gas station I had suggested to the manager that I write a employee’s handbook for the station, because most of the training consists of being yelled at for either doing something we are not supposed to do or being yelled at for NOT doing something we are supposed to do. I offered the manager that I could write a manual, and she liked the idea, but wasn’t willing to give me any extra money to do it, and so if I created such a manual, it would have to be on my own, free and at no cost, at home on my own time. Since technical writing pays about 4 times the minimum wage I’m earning, and it became apparent that no good deed goes rewarded in this place, I did not continue to turn my notes into an employee manual. I told this story to the new woman, to which she became upset and acted as though there was something immoral and wrong with me about not wanting to work for free. “James, what kind of a person are you?”, she asked angrily. Fortunately at that moment a rush of people came in and I went to the cash register and we did not get back to the conversation.
Awhile later, she came to me and asked, “Where is the thing that we use to clean the bathroom”. I had no idea what she was talking about, because “thing” is a very generic term. The bathrooms are closed and locked during the graveyard shift because homeless sleep in there, junkies shoot up in there, prostitutes have taken their clients in there, and vandalism generally goes way up in the restrooms at night. In addition, because I am alone for most of the night, I can’t leave the register to either resupply or clean the restrooms, so thus they are locked. Anyway, I had no idea what “thing” she was talking about, and I said so. She looked at me with an expression of disgust and said, “James, how long have you worked here?”, and I told her “since October”, to which she muttered under her breath that the manager needed to start firing people, and at that moment I joined the ranks of her coworkers who did not like her.
I’m concerned that she may encourage the manager and/or the owner to set a new, and for most employees, including me, a new and unrealistic standard of performance, going far far beyond the assigned duties of our minimum wage job, even to the extent of working without signing in. Perhaps she will even get the manage to “start firing” people.
I’m still looking for work outside of this place, but the same issues I mentioned above still exist, and while now having a few months of this job on my resume, it may not be too impressive to the sorts of employers I want to work for. I’m striving to get into independent consulting and video production and graphic design, but it is hard to work during the day after a long and stressful graveyard shift. I have had some success with small contract media jobs that could yet turn into a living wage, and time will tell on that. For now, I have to keep trying even when it’s so tempting to give up.
#jtg
P.S. By the way, a story about how some of the other employees view me. A few were having a discussion about what parts of the world are in total darkness for parts of each year. None of them had the education to know that this is the extreme north and extreme south, i.e. the poles down to 23 degrees. They decided they were going to ask me when I came in because "James will probably know", and yes, I did.
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