Honest to God, this happened. Since the park was so big, there were different parts for different faiths. In the Islamic section of the park, this happened twice when I was on duty. The first time really freaked me out, but the guy from the maintenance crew who was there to close the vault and fill in the ground just sort of shrugged his shoulders and said something about, “as long as the body ends up in the ground…” When it happened the second time, I just kept a casual eye on where the body was going.
Now, I did a number of services in all of the sections of the park. This was by no means a common event in any section; it just sort of sticks-out when I look back on my life. Since different cultures dealt with death differently, I guess you could say that I received an education of sorts.
Another little story of my work there…
We also had a pet cemetary that was pretty busy. I generally worked until between 7 and 9 at night just so the anarchy from the day wouldn’t bother me as I tried to do my research. One night I received a phone call from a colleage who needed some help for a series of open-casket viewings for some pets the next day. I drove over and ended-up spending a goodly amount of time learning the trade of making a dead cat look good enough for a viewing. I haven’t really found any practical uses for applying my knowledge since I left the job…but that can be looked upon as a good thing.
Last summer I worked in the Protection From Abuse office of our county courthouse. I would estimate only 5% of the people in there actually were in danger and needed legal protection. The other 95% were white trash folks who for some reason decided to bring their Jerry Springer-like disputes into court.
My personal favorite were the people that couldn’t understand “why my damn neighbor can get away with doing all thsi to me!” In Pennysylvania, you can’t get a restraining order against a neighbor–you have to file criminal charges with a magistrate. Yet people gave us all kinds of hell for this. One lady kept asking me “Is this Russia?” I finally said, “Gee, not last time I checked, but I’m not too good with maps.”
Jomo Mojo, I suggest that you contact a man with whom I have had dealings in the past. He calls himself a “consulting detective,” and he has shed light on some very tangled skeins. His name is S____ H_____, and he lives in Baker Street with an underemployed doctor with leanings toward literature…
My first job was working at a haunted house when I was a sophomore in high school. My job was to sit in this little platform in the ceiling and stare at a strobe light for FIVE HOURS. The scene was a prison cell with a fried body lying in an electric chair. I would hold this rope connected to a pulley system that, upon letting go, would send this dismembered corpse down from the ceiling and smash into the bars. Then, after the drunk guy’s girlfriend runs him screaming into the wall underneath me, I let them find their way around the corner, flick on a light, and reach over screaming and banging a pipe on the wall at them.
Straight out of college, I was paid $18 an hour to sit in a cafe in New Orleans and type up a satyrical description of ImmortaLand, a theme park of the gods (sample feature: the Maze of Theseus, at the center of which was the world-famous Minoan Steakhouse). It was for a dot-com company’s course on Web design; theoretically, students would use my text as the basis for designing a Web site for the theme park.
Sadly, the course was never taught, and ImmortaLand languishes in obscurity. And my next project for the dot-com was so soul-numbingly awful that it drove me permanently away from working for corporations.
I had a temp job when I was about 16 where I worked for Pentax putting together instruction manuals for different kinds of telescopic camera lenses and gun sights.
There was a REALLY long table with stacks and stacks of different pages, and I would basically walk along the table collating the pages and stacking the finished book at the end of the table. Then a different temp would snap them into three-ring binders. I have no idea why they didn’t have some sort of machine to do this–the whole time I worked there I wondered why they were having people do the collating.
I was also a receptionist for two weeks at a place that received zero phone calls, visitors, deliveries, etc. There was a woman there to train me on my first day who told me that everyone was on vacation for two weeks (including her) and basically I just had to hold down the fort–the weird thing was that she told me I was required to make coffee every day “in case someone wanted it”! I was like, “wha? Ohhhh kay.” I watched t.v. all day the first week and read Roots the next.