The Process

I keep looking at my blog and wondering why I haven't posted much lately. That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about things and hammering away at making something work.

Work.

If you listen to a person talk, they will tell you exactly what's in their heart and words on a page will tell you exactly what a person is thinking.

Work has been on my mind as of late. There's not been a lot of shifts to be had at Cr@ig, and something about having a new degree makes it hard to continue to sit in one place and do exactly what I was doing before the degree. I'm not naive enough to think a piece of paper would change everything, I gave up on fairy tales decades ago, but I guess I still hoped.

I spend a lot of time working on individualized resumes for each position I apply for. For anyone who has sat with a career counselor, they'll tell you it's the thing to do. Print out the job description, highlight the verbs and find appropriate places in your resume to plug those words in. If you think about it, there is a small vocabulary that goes into a job description. Write, edit, manage, evaluate, document, maintain, research. These words could be contained in any number of job descriptions, and chances are you've done the job, it just wears a different dress or different pants. Consequently, I have many, many resumes that have a lot of clothes in the closet.

I've had a pretty varied work history; hospitals, bargaining units, title insurance, social work.

The job I was happiest at was being a gas and electric meter reader for the old Public Service Company of Colorado. Walking in weather conditions from -25 degrees to 105 degrees was a good time. Dogs, people with guns, endless quiet suburbs and sub-sub-basements in Denver. An average route totaled about 12 miles, some days you walked longer, some days were ridiculously short. I had one route, a cycle 08, that if you started at 8:00, took a break around 9:15, you would be done by 9:30. Great route, right there on Lincoln from the Blue Cross building to the windshield replacement place by the Colorado Ballet. The nice thing about PSC was that no matter how many hours you worked, you were paid for a full eight. Get done at noon, paid till 4:30.

The cycle 08 made up for my cycle 20, which was Larimer St. from 20th to 25th, Lawrence St. and part of Broadway. I read all this before the stadium was built, and the character of the area wasn't tainted by purple and gray. The best compliment I ever had in my life was on Larimer at 20th, one morning when one of the local working girls standing in front of the little grocery told me she could get off Larimer street if she had a body like mine. Old Russell used to sit behind his desk at the auto repair shop on Broadway and 25th with a loaded 45 within easy reach to shoot the rats that inhabited the building, and he'd throw the carcasses over the back fence and try to hit one of the homeless people who held court in the back alley. How can you not love a job with those working conditions? I certainly did.

I made great friends at PSC, and I could hardly wait to get to work in the morning. It was challenging and fun, a challenge because I read about 100,000 meters a year, and you were only allowed 1-2 errors for every 10,000 meters read. And fun when my fastest route was after the new handheld computers were introduced and I read 995 meters in 25 minutes with no errors. Do the math: that's 39.5 meters a minute.

Jobs like that are no longer available, or else I'd still be there. I wouldn't have left it, wouldn't have expected anything else from myself other than keeping my bad knee (acquired after a customer let a Chow-Chow loose on me) going. Automation is a good thing when it comes to ATMs but not when it means you lose your job.

So, I've expected something else from myself and now I have a degree and a wider vision of the world. Sometimes it feels like the degree means I'm turned down for a better class of job, but only them that has them can lose them.

I'm so looking forward to working full-time again, learning new things, making new friends and seeing what I can come up with. I know there's something out there for my incredible skills, talent, dependability, creativity, wit and charm. And humility.

There is one job I wouldn't ever want to go back to. In 1973, I worked at Casa Bonita.

As the big, dancing Purple Monkey.

Never again.