My New Job

I started a new job last week. I had to. They didn't want me showing up at my last job anymore. Even though I had been with them for 28 years, through three corporate owners, three locations and umpteen downsizings, reorganizations and reviews, suddenly I was the red shirt beamed down to the planet. Expendable. I`m unsure what I did to become surplus stock, but it must have been bad. After all, they didn't just lop off me and my position, but closed the entire warehouse and ceased distribution in Western Canada. I feel so responsible! I suppose I should explain to people that the job I had was with a different company than The Pipestone Flyer.

Many assume I make my living from writing this column when, in reality, what Brian gives me for my hours and hours of fashioning each weekly masterpiece would only be enough to qualify as beer money if I quit drinking alcohol. Until the hearty handshake and the heavy-hearted heave-ho, I actually worked for a multi-national conglomerate that sold and distributed a vast array of staples from the staple mines that riddle the bowels of the earth. Luckily avoiding the mines, my main tasks fell into two categaries; order desk and warehousing. The order desk is where you answer telephones and explain to people why we are out of a particular staple and how many arms and legs it will cost them to place the backorder.

The job I had for the other half my career was in what they call "shipping and recieiving".

Shipping is a job where you pick up heavy staple boxes off a rack and put them on a pallet, while receiving is picking up heavy staple boxes from a pallet and putting them on a rack. I really liked shipping better than receiving but then, the jobs were as different as night and dark. I remember so well, how badly I had wanted the job when I first applied. I had been working at McBain Camera in Edmonton and had never heard of the sage advice against "dipping your pen in the company ink". This led to me wooing a considerably younger version of Cupcake. (That is, if wooing means to be finally cornered into proposing.) When we began dating and, ultimately, living in sin (Woohoo! The good old days!) we realized that working together, playing together, socializing together and sleeping together might possibly be too much togetherness. I became highly motivated to find a new job somewhere... anywhere other than McBain`s. It was a tough economy then, too. The early 80`s. The big bust, and I ain`t talking Pamela Anderson. Interest rates were at 20% on mortgages. Unemployment was high. Gloomy economists were talking about The End of the World As We Know It, years before R.E.M and Great Big Sea.

Unemployment was huge. In fact, when I got the job, I had beat out 127 other applicants. The guy that made the hiring decision told me long after I came onboard, that he picked me ahead of the others because, in my skill set list, I included "morale booster" with such important workplace abilities as telling jokes and spinning yarns. Also the fact that he didn`t know I lied about having forklifting experience helped greatly. So I started out in the lowest rung of the corporate ladder, since they had yet to recognize my obvious genius and corporate leadership skills. Instead, they felt I had other assets to draw from, namely the aforementioned picking up heavy boxes and putting them down again. Still, as easy on the brain as that sounds, the fact that you have to pick the correct box up and set it down in the correct place every time weeds out many warehousing wannabees. After about eighteen months, I was transferred into the service department to fix staplers. I am not sure if they recognized my incredible potential and wanted me to have the widest field of expertise for their products as possible or I was a lousy shipper but they still wanted to keep me.

Eighteen months and 15 bazillion T5-8 pusher spring replacements later and I was given another position: the order desk! I knew I was on my way. I knew that OD`ing was a stepping stone to sales, then management and inevitably to the CEO`s office. My career path was set. It was great. I loved the order desk job lots. I got to talk to customers and help solve their staple-related problems. I was the face of the company to many and I loved feeling like an ombudsman between them and the big, scary staple empire.

Then, in the late 90`s, my career path became so lost, a bloodhound couldn`t have found it. The Graph Jockeys and Chartoholics in Head Office decided they needed more Control. They sent the order desk jobs to their Canadian head office in Ontario, shortly after Cupcake`s job had suffered an identical fate. She was, as they say, not amused. The company did, however, decide to keep the warehouse in Edmonton and make it into the Western Canadian Distribution Centre. I could keep my employment if I went back to being a warehouseman. I had come full circle. Oh sure, eventually, I became The Boss in the warehouse but it was harder to take than those gigantic pills they make you swallow when you have a sore throat.

I will admit that being The Boss was kind of cool but it didn`t last. I was only in that capacity about 18 months when the Graph-holes struck again and deemed our operation to be expendable. So now I have a new job. It`s at another staple company! On the order desk!! Life is good!!!