STORIES FROM WORK
Paperboy
I come from a long line of paperboys. My father and brothers all did it before me. By the time I started, we were living in a neighborhood with big houses spread far apart. I had twelve brothers and sisters, so we needed a large house, and most of the neighbors had large houses simply because they were rich. The route was not the most lucrative given how few houses there were, but the tips were better in an affluent neighborhood.
My job was to collect the papers from the dispatcher, fold them, rubber band them, slip on the plastic cover, load up my bike, and throw them in the driveways. I collected my check every two weeks. I still remember one woman inviting me in and showing me around her house a little. I always hoped that someday she, or some woman, would seduce me. I kept the job until I landed the dishwashing gig.
Iron Gate House
Dishwasher
The Iron Gate House was a fine dining establishment catering to a wealthier crowd. It seated only a hundred people and featured a unique gourmet menu that changed every night. Mike Auxier got me the job because he was dating my sister. The owners and staff were genuinely good to me.
My first task each day was to clean sand off fresh lettuce and vegetables in the sink, then assist the prep cook with cutting while making sure the trash was out and the floors were clean. As the evening picked up, the dishes would start piling fast. It was a small kitchen, and we had to stay on top of clean wine glasses and silverware for the guests.
I was fifteen and looked up to the other guys. Mike and Jim Setcaco were only three years older, but those long-haired rockers seemed to have the world in their hands. I admired how much better Jim was on guitar than Mike, but Mike was the one who showed me that the Gibson SG is the best guitar ever made. They also taught me how to take the wine glasses with lipstick on them, pour them into a side bucket, and get drunk throughout the night while listening to Ozzy Osbourne. We figured the lipstick glasses came from women, so that made it less gross.
Sometimes the waiters in their tuxedos would meet us out back while we were taking out the trash to smoke a joint. I always wondered how they went back inside and poured fine wine for the patrons without missing a beat. Mike would occasionally drive me to school in his dented up car, a three foot bong riding shotgun, Black Sabbath blasting. I would walk into first bell so high I was convinced everyone could detect my paranoia through their brain waves, until it wore off by second or third period.
I heard later that some of the owners and waiters were involved in dealing cocaine and that the Iron Gate House was eventually shut down in a sting. It is funny how oblivious I was to all of it at the time.
Howard Johnson
Pool and Laundry Boy
The pool had to be open by nine in the morning. I would splash some Ajax on a few feet of tile and scrub away. It was a reliable way to kill the morning buzz.
After that, my job was to carry piles of used towels and soiled blankets downstairs to the laundry. As I hauled them down I would try to imagine what the people on top of those sheets had been doing the night before. It was a humid Virginia Beach summer, and I remember wiping the sweat off my face with the dirty towels on the way down, while being careful not to get any perspiration on the clean ones on the way back up.
The Howard Johnson was one of those residual hotels that received its curtains and blankets secondhand from the mergers and acquisitions of bigger chains. It is no longer a Howard Johnson, but I am fairly certain my pool brush is still somewhere in that building. Rumors persist that they still have the same sheets, identifiable by the stains.
Log Cabin Pancake House Busboy
Virginia Beach is a tourist town and home to more pancake houses than any reasonable city needs. My friend Eric Johnston got me the job as a busboy at the Log Cabin Pancake House.
My job was to carry one of those big gray bus pans through the dining room collecting dirty dishes. For some reason we did not have a cart, so I carried it by hand and my shirts would get pretty dirty at the belly. Then we would wipe down the tables with a damp rag. There was a really pretty girl who was a senior at my school that made the whole shift easier. I also got to know one of the waiters who was in a class with me. He was a good talker, and even though he was younger, he had already worked his way up to waiter. The waiters were more preppy, made better grades, and earned better tips. I figured that was just the natural pecking order of pancake houses in Virginia Beach.
You can still visit the Log Cabin Pancake House in Virginia Beach today. If you go, see if my initials are still carved under table thirteen.
Louka Lawn Service
Nelson Louka got me a job with the lawn service he worked for. His boss was good at talking his way onto the large properties in the Kings Grant area of Virginia Beach, and by the end of most days he was pretty well into a bottle. Nelson was a friend of my sister Carol, a few years older than me, and I had known him since about fourth grade. He was a cool older kid and so was his brother Doug, who showed me how to play Smoke on the Water on bass, along with a few other things. Nelson had a van, long hair, and a cute girlfriend. He used to take me and some others to the video arcade where he would play pool while I dominated at Galaga, Defender, and Stargate. Doug and Nelson also helped us build forts in the quarter acre of woods behind my house.
My job mostly consisted of pushing lawn mowers out of the van and getting to work. Sometimes they let me ride the standing mower, which felt like a significant promotion at the time.
Blacksburg, Virginia
Prep Cook
I took this job to pay off the mountain of parking fines I had accumulated at Virginia Tech. I remember making a big poster out of all the tickets shellacked together. The work was standard prep cook duties: cutting vegetables and getting plates ready for the cooks.
I actually got better grades while working this job. A lot of people have told me that the busier you stay the better you do, and I think that is true. This was also around the time I was playing in Defunct Bloom, so my memory of the details is a little hazy.
Executive Productivity Systems
Computer Diagnostics
My dad got me this job through a connection with his employer. The work involved diagnostic testing and shipping of new computers, primarily for office use.
It was my first job where everyone wore a tie and worked in an office. Since my dad knew my boss I had to be on my best behavior. We used floppy drives to run diagnostic tests on the machines. If a part failed I would replace it and run the diagnostics again. I genuinely enjoyed that part because it meant working with tools and electronics. Once the computers passed testing we packed them back into their boxes to be shipped to clients.
The company bought computers from a manufacturer called Convergent Technologies and sold them to businesses in bulk for their early networks. Back then computers did not have graphics or spreadsheets. The salesmen called their surge protectors bricks because that is exactly what they looked like. I would hear them in the background pitching the benefits of computers to clients during the dawn of the computer era. The company is no longer in business.
Disabled Veterans of America
Telemarketer
This was commission only telemarketing. You could come in whenever you wanted and get on the phone.
Because there was no set schedule I showed up less and less until my presence petered out to nothing. While I was there I learned from the old timers how to lean into a southern drawl to sound more like a Vietnam veteran. We would work straight through the phone book, calling numbers ourselves, following a printed script. My pitch went something like: "Hi, this is Brian at the Disabled Veterans of America, and we are trying to get the boys down to the Special Olympics this year. These boys have been beat up and neglected after serving our fine country and it would mean a lot to them to go and bond with other disabled veterans. We are not asking for a handout. What we have to offer are these fine flags and calendars and pens of support. If you could donate thirty nine dollars and ninety nine cents it would really help out the guys."
If we got someone to commit, we would write their address on a piece of paper and hand it to Scotty. Scotty would send someone to their house that same day to close the sale, collect the donation, hand over the merchandise, and leave them with a tax receipt. Sometimes donors would haggle us down to a smaller package. This job was where I first started getting over my phone shyness.
Virginia Firefighters Gazette
Telemarketer
Like the previous gig I found this one in the classifieds. This time there was an actual set schedule, which felt like a step up in the promising telemarketer career arc.
I got off to a rough start but eventually found my footing with cold calls. The boss had me begin by selling classified ads to babysitters, which meant going through the babysitter listings in the big local paper, calling the numbers, and explaining the benefits of advertising in the Virginia Firefighters Gazette. I did pretty well at it and moved on to massage therapists. While I was there the team was working on the next issue, which was already three months behind. I did not quite make it to the glory of print ad sales before I moved on to greater pastures.
"Every job I ever had taught me something. Jobs influence how we see the world and how we create."
- Brian Donal Diederich
Nestle Coffee
Coffee Roasting Plant
I was working for a temp agency when they sent me to Nestle Coffee. Walking in, I thought I had landed a real union job. They put goggles and gloves on me, handed me a handheld grinder, and told me to crawl inside a coffee bean roaster and grind out all the plaque left behind from roasting. I wore a week respirator. It must have been ninety degrees in that plant. It was like cleaning bong resin out of an army tank.
I do not know if the boss ever actually inspected my work or just wanted to put a checkmark on his clipboard. And if you have ever had coffee that tasted faintly of something human, it is because my baby sister left her nail clippings in my pocket and they fell into the grinder.
After a few days of grinding I went back to the temp agency and told them I was having trouble breathing from all the dust. They told me they had a more prized assignment waiting for me at a recycling plant in Portsmouth.
Recycle Plant
I showed up at six thirty in the morning. When they saw I had a car, they offered me an extra two dollars an hour to drive myself and the four other guys waiting outside to the plant. We all piled into my old truck and I realized I had no gas. Everyone had to pitch in. I was broke but told them I would pay them back from my extra voucher money. Some complained I was making them late by stopping for gas. They were more seasoned at the temp work and were already excited explaining to me that at this plant we might get real jobs out of it.
When we arrived we all pictured this as the big time. The final career. The one that would carry us to retirement.
The first thing they told us when we walked into the big warehouse was that the night shift had not clocked out yet. So they handed us all brooms and told us to sweep the dust from one side of the plant to the other. The dust under those machines looked like it had been sitting there for a hundred years. They made sure we had steel toe shoes, old sweaty gloves, scratched up goggles, and hard hats that barely fit. All of it taken from the union workers whose jobs we were scabbing. Pretty soon the bosses were calling us by the names on those hard hats and we had quietly assumed their identities.
At lunch I spare changed a couple of dollars for a bologna sandwich from the food truck. When I came back in the boss pulled me aside and said, "Hey, are you the leader of this crew? You brought everyone here. When we have another opening I will call you first because you have your own transportation." That is when I understood what institutionalized racism looked like up close.
After lunch we were put on conveyor belt duty, picking out anything recyclable: cans, clean cardboard boxes, anything worth saving. Everything else kept moving up the belt and dropped into a massive incinerator burning like an eternal fire. The regular workers kept telling us to slow down because if we ran out of work they would send us home early and we would not make much. Some guys said they had found six packs, toothbrushes, and other valuables coming down the belt. Occasionally someone would find weed or whiskey.
On the way home I dropped guys off at the liquor store, at their mothers' places, at their dealers, wherever they needed to go. The first day I barely had enough gas to make it home myself. The next five days were pretty much the same routine. Then the union workers came back, we lost our precious jobs, and there was no golden parachute.
The moral of the story is never get a hotel without a lobby.
Sevco Construction
Sevco was a construction company in Virginia Beach. The name was SEVco because they had gone out of business seven times. They specialized in residential developments where every house was built from the same plans. I learned the ropes quickly and landed a little above general labor since I was friends with the foreman, Jeff Edwards.
I learned a lot about construction that summer. Sometimes I would ride around in Jeff's truck while he demonstrated his talent for yelling at everyone on site. I remember one time he was going off about how the stairs were creaking like they were a hundred years old. You really could hear every creak, like the steps were already haunted. You could feel the anxiety rise in the workers as he came through.
Jeff was younger than me and never went to college, but he got to drive a big new pickup truck and I was proud of him for that.
Gracia Vigil Construction Pool Building
Gracia Vigil was a construction company that specialized in building pools. My buddy James got me the job. We dug the holes, ran the plumbing, put up the rebar, poured the rough cement and then the fine cement, and finished with the tiling and coping stones.
James and the bosses spoke fluent Spanish, so to save money they relied on undocumented Guatemalan laborers. One afternoon a worker spotted a stray cat, compassionately euthanized it, and brought it home in a trash bag to feed his family a good meal that night. The rest of us had to ride home with it.
Blondie's Pizza
Cashier
In 1988 I broke my ankle at a Butthole Surfers concert at the Metro in Virginia. Gibby the singer grabbed my shirt at the shoulders and shook me like a rag doll, then pushed me off the stage into the crowd. The good part was that I landed on my feet. The bad part was that I came down hard on one ankle wearing Harley Davidson boots with two inch heels. I started walking around and noticed a crunching sound coming from my ankle. I told my girlfriend I thought something was broken and we drove home. I went to the hospital the next day.
I had to attend classes at Virginia Tech in a building with no elevators for an entire semester. My ancient philosophy professor, who had also watched my hair cycle through blonde, green, and blue, came to the conclusion that I had not attended class very often. At the end of the semester she failed me on that basis. The problem was that medieval philosophy was only offered in the winter semester, and since I needed it to complete my major I had to wait a full year before I could take it again.
So my friend Wayne Chicollo and I drove across the country to San Francisco. We camped along rivers on the way, took about a month to get there since we brought both cars, and worked out a system for staying in contact without cell phones. We brought an ounce of weed each to make the trip enjoyable. Passing through the Bay Area we spotted Gilman Street and decided to stop in for some punk shows at the Gilman Street Project, which we had been reading about in band reviews for years.
We ended up in Berkeley and found a patch of woods with a fallen tree that made a natural cave. We dragged a mattress out of the trash, moved in, and eventually both got pizza jobs. We squatted for a while in some condemned houses in Oakland that were actually quite nice, aside from being on a fault line. One even had a cold shower. My sister lived nearby in San Leandro but we only wanted to stay there a couple of days. I left a ring of dirt around her bathtub after weeks of living in the cave. It was during a drought, so the mantra was: if it is yellow let it mellow, if it is brown flush it down.
After becoming successful pizza men, Wayne and I eventually got an apartment in Oakland. It was a big old house converted into units, smelled of soy sauce and good cooking, and had an antique clawfoot bathtub with trash from the 1800s still sitting underneath it. The apartment filled up pretty fast with empty pizza boxes since free food from work was essentially all we ate. I also took a metal sculpture course at Laney Community College around that time.
Blondie's had a greasy floor and industrial mixers that looked like they could eat your arms. The bosses sized me up and put me on the register. One boss was cool and the other was a prick. The prick would count my drawer at the end of the night and tell me it was suspicious that all my receipts added up perfectly. He was used to people stealing. I told him that if I was ever short I would just make it up from the next customer. The next night I was only a dollar short and he could not believe it.
Blondie's has been a real institution since the hippie era, a place where punks could gather and talk about music. They put garlic butter in the pizza that made it genuinely addictive. I used to break down the price of a slice for curious customers: fifty cents for the bread, fifty cents for the cheese, fifty cents for the sauce, twenty five cents for the garlic. Grand total one dollar and seventy five cents. Some people got a kick out of it.
The place sat across the street from Amoeba Records and down the block from People's Park where the hippies used to protest. I made friends with a couple of the homeless regulars who hung around Berkeley. One was Hateman, who wore a dress, had a beard, pushed a shopping cart, and had made it his occupation to shout down street preachers. The other was Rich Star, who would croon Frank Sinatra songs into a Mr. Microphone and thank people for coming to his show. Berkeley was a great mix of academics, protesters, homeless people, and hippies. I fit right in.
Ramada Inn
Room Service Waiter
I walked into a bunch of restaurants with my dishwasher experience and this place hired me as a room service waiter. The woman who hired me was the mother of a girl I knew from school. I worked weekends during the summers between tenth and eleventh grade and between eleventh and twelfth grade.
I would come in wearing a white collar shirt and black pants, chat with Vernon the cook, who was a genuinely cool guy, and then carry trays up to the rooms. The orders were already prepared for me. I just had to deliver them. I usually pulled about a two dollar tip per delivery and always hoped some older woman in a silk robe would answer the door. A friend told me that had actually happened to him once, though I was skeptical. He was probably a virgin just like me.
Back in the restaurant I would bus tables. The waitresses would sometimes try to give me part of their tips, but I was already making minimum wage and they had kids at home, so I never accepted. Sometimes I had to clean trash cans. My favorite perk of the job was a really good fried burger and a Coca Cola.
Peninsula Catholic High School
Teacher
This was the only high school I ever taught at. I taught students from ninth through twelfth grade and learned what it meant to be a new teacher at a small Catholic school, even with a master's degree and an ABD in physics.
The seasoned teachers got the well-behaved advanced students. I ended up with a mix of advanced ninth graders and eleventh and twelfth graders who had failed the previous year, all in the same room. It was a constant balancing act between not corrupting the quiet, earnest younger students and keeping the disengaged older ones from derailing everything. They all agreed I was a cool teacher, though I could not make them do push-ups the way the ex-military teacher before me had. My style was closer to Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.
My one real mistake was not asking the principal what grade I should have given her son, who had missed class due to illness. That is where I learned about hierarchy and politics in school systems. Not every grade is necessarily earned on merit alone.
There was also a kid who completed no assignments, so I gave him the grade he earned. His mother came in furious, telling me I was keeping her son off the baseball team. I learned something that day too.
I drove out from Norfolk to Newport News every morning, often with a hangover, listening to soft music at low volume to manage my headache. The second I walked through the doors it was lockers slamming, paper flying, boys harassing the nerds, and a wall of noise loud enough to make your eyes water. The faculty were genuinely nice people, including an old German teacher who probably should have retired years ago and a math teacher who could have done far more with her degree.
The girls PE teacher had been there for twenty nine years. She told me that when she was a student at the same school her PE teacher was a nun who smoked cigarettes and yelled COME ON GIRLS in a gruff voice from the sidelines.
One time a girl stood on a desk during detention and I could not get her down without getting too close to a student. I lived in fear of the principal walking in to find me dominated by a fifteen year old. I eventually gave up and never gave her detention again. Many first year teachers never come back after an experience like that. The salary was lower than public school and the chaos was the same.
The lesson I took from that year: do not engage the quiet stoner in the back of the class. Once you do, you are going to have more trouble than it is worth. Sometimes it is better to let the sleeping dog lie.
Norva Networks
Co-Founder
Norva Networks was a web design company I co-founded with three friends: Carrie Volkamer as International Marketing Director, Katie Grottenthaler heading the graphics department, and Bill England leading the web design team. I served as CEO and President.
We were on the front edge of web design before the work got outsourced overseas. Katie was still finishing the brochure. Once she was done we were going to start sending it out and making sales. In the meantime, our competition went on to build companies worth billions of dollars, including some you may have heard of, like Wix and Squarespace.
Our biggest clients were the Straponics, a band with members from the Candy Snatchers and the Misfits. Each of us used Norva Networks to fill in a gap on our resumes, and honestly it served that purpose well.
