Yay, the Twofer Tuesdays continue, and save me from having a blank page for twenty-four hours:

What was the best job you ever had?

I had to think about this one, because while my current job is probably the most profitable and educational, I’m too close to it at the moment. I have no idea whether I’m doing well at it or not on any given day, and I’m too busy running around to give it any thought. I don’t have any perspective right now, and if I try to think about it from a distance, it just sucks me in and the next thing I know I’m circling the bowl, obsessing about charts and reports and deadlines.

So, instead, I’m going to say my Ontario Place job.

I started at OP in the summer of 1996, after my first year in University. I wasn’t having the best time with my friends, and it was far, far from my house and home and constant surroundings. I was in among a huge group of people my age, being supervised by people only slightly older, governed by a woman who was probably as old as I am right now.

I worked in a parking lot, for thirty-five to forty hours per week. The entire summer, I would either take money from people who were viciously complaining about being gouged for ten bucks a space — twelve during concerts, and fifteen during the The CNE — or quietly patrol the parking lots, counting spaces and reporting them back. On especially busy nights, I would have the privelege of “packing the lots,” grimly directing cars to park on the hashmarks at the end of each aisle, and sometimes even next to the cars on the hashmarks. Initially I was shy, but eventually I was able to stuff an extra fifty or sixty cars into a parking lot after it was full, happy in the knowledge that I would be long gone when the time came for all of them to leave.

When it was quiet, I could get through about a book a day. I would sit quietly in my parking booth with my feet up, doing my best impression of a safety pylon, pawing through my Foundation novels or whatever Anne Rice smut I had found at the used book store. It shames me that I didn’t take that time to, say, get ahead on my university reading lists, but there were enough other people there doing homework — I didn’t want to join them.

When it was busy, I would throw myself into the job. I’d stalk the parking lots, I’d get angry when the customers screamed at me, I’d occasionally hide in the bushes by the lake and just stare at the skyline for a while, feeling the breeze on my face. I hated it while I was there, but I loved it at the same time. I was a different person at the end of the summer there, and an even more different one by the end of my second year, after I was promoted to a supervisor job.

I learned make small talk, which I had never been very good at before.

I saw how much money you save when you spend fifty hours of your week working.

I discovered that promotions cost you more goodwill than they win you.

I was shown how referring to yourself in the third person, pointing at yourself a lot, and brushing your hair were extremely attractive to women.

I came to see that there are women I don’t want attracted to me.

I grew thicker skin. I learned to laugh at more things. I learned that I could breathe the air outside of my suburb and not die shrieking.

What was the worst job you ever had?

One of my worst jobs was also one of my first, when I was dishwasher at the Hobo’s Family Restaurant near my house. My sister’s then-boyfriend got me the job, since he was a line cook in the same kitchen and I wasn’t too embarrassingly stupid for him. One of the dishwashers had been switched to a hosting job, after pleading with the manager for months to be promoted into something that let him share the tips, and they were looking for someone desperate and hardworking to fill in the job.

Since there aren’t two words that better describe me than “desperate” and “hardworking,” I was in there with no problems, spraying dishes and slamming them into a washing machine that apparently cleaned flatware by heating it up to four hundred million thousand degrees, atomizing any food remaining on the plate and converting it to searing heat. I would then stack those dishes, occasionally leaving behind my fingerprints, since they would be so hot that my fingers would stick to them.

One things characterized my time in the Hobo’s kitchen:

On my first night, fully fifteen minutes of my training were dedicated to the act of sweeping. Cam, the guy I was replacing, finally settled on the broom after giving me an exhaustive tour of the kitchen.

“Over there is the dishwasher,” he said. “Next to that is the dishtray, where the servers will dump stuff. And, like, that’s the sink. And that’s where you put the dishes. When they’re clean? When they’re clean, that’s where you put the dishes.”

“Okay,” I said. Cam was a nice guy, and now that I think of it, he had a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead that was remarkably like Harry Potter’s. Except instead of giving him the magical power to drive flying cars or whatever, I think it gave him the ability to be incredibly slow.

“And then, like, when you’re done washing?” he went on, taking the broom into his hands, “You can always clean up the floor. There’s always, like, stuff on the floor.”

“Right,” I said.

“So, then you take the broom?” he instructed, listlessly whiffing it on the floor, “And you, like, broom.”

I didn’t think I heard him correctly, so I asked him again. Lightning-bolt-shaped scar in mind, I kept it simple. “I broom?”

“Uh, yeah,” he answered, looking at me, and then I realized he was keeping it simple for me. “You broom with it.”

I broom, therefore I am.

For that, and for having to nightly scrape from huge pots a kind of gravy that was made from powder, served as a liquid, and solidified into a tar, that was my worst job ever.