Heh, I’ve got mad drywall skillz. I worked as a carpenter for…well…three months. I used to earn money at the end of the school year repairing people’s dorm walls for them so they wouldn’t get fined.
And, well, I don’t need much. I pay $550 for rent in my falling-down-shack, and $450 is almost a hundred bucks a week. Thats more than enough for food and entertainment. I don’t have any debt (well, not till my student loans kick in in six months), and I don’t have a car or any other big expenses. So I can get by pretty well on next to nothing. And for now getting by is all I need.
The reason I’m still hanging around here is I am working on a film. It’s one of the best stories I’ve come across to do. I have access to all of the equiptment I need and a talented crew. If I can pull this off, it will be in festivals and will lead to bigger and better things. I decided that it is time for me to believe in myself and try to make a future doing what I love. I can’t give up on filmmaking, especially not with this camera sitting on my floor. I owe it to myself to give it a shot.
And yes, the pointlessness of it was what made it unbearable. I’m not talking about the work just being meaningless- I’ve done plenty of that. But it was a situation where I’d get in trouble if I didn’t do things his way, and doing things his way would make it impossible to get anything done, which would lead to me getting in trouble. And in the end, all of these tasks that I was getting in so much trouble for were not actual tasks that need to be done. They were things like calling delis, when we had already picked out a deli, and asking them about their shrimp boats, when we had already decided on a cheese tray, and asking if they deliver on Saturdays, when the party is on a Friday. I couldn’t do the task right, and i could complete it in a satisfactory manner because it wasn’t actually anything real.
I’ll give you an example of one of my more repugnent assignments. He had a bank account with a problem on it. He did not look at his mail for five weeks, and thus did not know about the problem (which they sent something like ten letters about) until it had snowballed and he ended up with some moderate fees. It was totally and without question his fault. If he had checked his mail, instead of handing it off to one of his minions to take care of months later, he could have caught the problem and fixed it. Additionally, he interpreted the bank documents completely wrong, believeing that they did an inaccurate transfer. When I tried to explain to him the money he though was in question was clearly interest and the bank was in the right on that matter, he ignored me and kept ranting about how the bank was ripping him off.
I was responsible for calling up the bank to get the fees reversed. I said I’d do my best. Whatever.
So I call, they tell me that he has to go into a branch and talk to the banker he was working with earlier. I report that to him. He tells me I have to take care of this on my own. I call the branch. They give me a number. I stay on hold for forty minutes before I try another tactic. I call the help line again. They tell me to go to a branch and they will likely reverse the fees. I report back to the crazy old guy again, saying that he has to go to the branch, and they can resolve it pretty quickly there.
He asks me what the name of the person on the giant national helpline phone bank I called was, and that I should speak to her again and have them fax a statement that the branch will reverse the fees. I say they probably won’t do that. He says I should “make it happen” because thats “what he hired me for”. So I can the helpline for about the seventh time (there were lots of pointless and illogical follow-up questions he’d have me call back to ask every time I gave him information) and ask them for a statement. Obviously they won’t give it to me. I call the branch, and the branch won’t either.
So I follow his next order, which is to demand an address for me to write a complaint letter to, and to harrass them in general for not reversing his charges on the national help line over the phone. This was the point that I started breaking down. They were just as scared and annoyed as I was. And there was nothing either one of us could do because this crazy old guy was pulling our strings. I wasn’t allowed to leave without getting the charges reversed, they were not allowed to reverse the charges. There was no way anyone could win.
And after all that, it came down to the fact that if he wants to reverse the charges, he’d have to come to the bank, since it’s his account, he’s the one who decided not to read his mail, and although they will likely reverse the charges for customer goodwill, it’s his fault. After six hours of him not taking “I don’t think it is going to work out that way” for an answer, he relented. At this point I start getting yelled at for taking so long and not solving the problem. And about how it wasn’t worth his money to pay me if I took time to fix things and about how I wasn’t “using my head”.
Eventually he wrote out a check to pay off the balance. I was sent (on the bus, since I don’t have a car) to drop off the check “on my way home” (yeah, going five miles out of my way on the bus is no problem). Yep, I had to hand the teller a check with 'RIP OFF" written in giant letters on the memo line. Brilliant.
He still has to fax them a signed letter today, and I’m sure he’d have some problem with doing that and I’d get yelled at for how I handled the situation. They had to open the account and then close it. And I am 100% sure that he’d disapprove of that and get mad about how I let the bank employees push me around and about how I didn’t ask them the million irrational questions that he thinks are imperetive to ask in all situations (not that he ever remembers or applies the answers) and about how he doesn’t have time to do things like sign faxes (but does have time to ramble and rant and write lists that he loses and ask millions of pointless questions).
If I was there today, that is.
