Off to work we go
Personal tales of surviving in a downbeat economy

COMPLAINING ABOUT CORPORATE cubicle life was once the best way to while away a slow Bay Area evening. There was something almost comforting about trading keyboard-and-console horror stories because you knew that when the cubicle got too cramped, you could always partition-jump to the next job. But in these lean economic times, many of us would give anything to have our once-hated jobs back. Or we've become reconciled to the fact that we may be stuck in a not-so-perfect job for much longer than we imagined. But we're surviving. And many of us are actually enjoying doing work that we never thought we'd be doing. What follows is the Bay Guardian's tribute to everyone who has ever worked a shitty job or found joy doing incredibly strange work.

Worming your way in

"I made these big, beautiful, fat, juicy worms. My god, they were beautiful."

Paul Cosmides, who sells compost-ready red wiggler worms from his San Francisco house, can't contain his passion for the slimy little crawlers. When his worm-and-rabbit farm in Oroville went belly-up, he tried to wing it from his sister's backyard. But there wasn't room for the millions of invertebrates he wanted to grow. Now he's a middleman, a "worm jobber," connecting worm farms to Bay Area customers.

Cosmides hates to admit his middleman status. "I really want to grow worms. I want to do it so bad. I miss it, I miss it ...," he trails off, remembering when he could get "zillions" of worms in one scoop of dirt.

It's not hard to grow worms. Throw 'em in the ground, throw rabbit or cow manure on top every four days, water daily, don't disturb them, and in several months millions will be squirming around. Cosmides derived this magic formula when he gave up his comfy real estate job in San Francisco to raise rabbits in the country. With so much rabbit poop, it was natural to grow worms. Now with a Cosmo's Red Worms Web site, he gets calls from all over and even sent an order to Saudi Arabia's royal family. It turns out the worms died in the airport heat, so he won't be getting that order again.

As long as Cosmides knows that his wigglers are helping people to compost trash, he's happy. "What else is better in life than doing this?" he muses. (Will Evans)

Taking shit for a living

Ever wonder where those urine samples and stool tests go? They go to the same person who gets the pneumonia-tainted phlegm, the cervical secretions, and the toe fungus ... the only person who is supposed to be sent anthrax. Someone like Thomas Van der Heide.

Van der Heide is a laboratory scientist at San Francisco's California Pacific Medical Center. He'll take anything that comes from your body and figure out if there's something wrong with it. Send him giardia-laced feces, and he'll "mash 'em up and dribble 'em on a slide and find out if there's any bacteria," he says. "Sometimes we get some really esoteric organism, and that's kind of exciting."

It's hard to gross out Van der Heide, who majored in French literature and never thought he'd study stool for a living. He deals with herpes, influenza, "colonic aspirations," semen, intestinal lining, the worms a sushi-eater coughs up, and once, a giant, blood-bloated tick imbedded in a trucker's belly button. "Once in a while we have a recognizable body part delivered here, and that's really disgusting," he says. "My mom thinks I work with blood."

But even after dealing with all that crap, labbies like Van der Heide go unappreciated. The industry is trying to cut labor costs by making idiot-proof lab kits and stripping the job of its licensing requirement. "We're struggling to make people understand we're an important part of the professional team," he says. "It's really sort of depressing." But Van der Heide knows his worth. Doctors need him to treat patients. Lab scientists also identify disease outbreaks before it's too late. On the front lines hundreds die yearly from work-related infections.

There's fun to be had too. "It's sort of exciting to get a culture for anthrax," he says. (Evans)

Spread 'em for science

Cadavers don't really express their opinions the way frightened, seminude women do, which is why pelvic models are so important to a medical student's education. When that doctor is tinkering with your privates as you lie helplessly strapped in to stirrups, do you really want his or her experience to be limited to working on dead people?

You may not have heard of pelvic models, but that doesn't mean you haven't benefited from their hard work. They are the ones who help guide nervous second- and third-year medical students toward better bedside manners during their first frightening encounters with the vagina. It doesn't quite rank as a "hot" job in the medical profession (it was just above plasma sales when I was involved), but few would argue its importance.

I was recruited as an employee of the women-run Women's Needs Center more than 10 years ago, and sensing (wrongly) that there was easy money to be made, I eagerly, if anxiously, spread 'em. Why donate your body to science when you can get paid? Working conditions were fairly brutal: two hours and 12 students, all stabbing (as delicately as they could manage under the glaring gaze of their fully credentialed instructor) specula inside my quavering person, taking a pap smear once an hour, and asking whether it hurt.

For the record, it did, and I'm glad they were able to practice on others before heading out into the real world. I, for one, had to drink my sore, tired pussy to sleep on those nights, and for $30 an hour, I didn't last long.

Working conditions, I'm glad to hear, have since improved. According to one woman who performs the function for students at UC San Francisco and Stanford University for two to three times what I once was paid, gynecological "teaching associates" have largely replaced the pelvic "models" of yore. They're better informed and more interactive, and they work with smaller groups of students. They actually teach the students and are empowered to give substantive feedback other than "ouch!" – going through at least 20 or 30 hours of training, even learning how to do the exams themselves before putting their own bodies on the block. The woman I spoke with was recruited from the San Francisco Sex Information hotline and knew exactly what she was getting into as a breast and pelvic exam educator. The only drawback? The river of lube crawling down the leg at day's end.

And yes, in case you're wondering: positions for men are now available. Rectal, anyone? (Susan Gerhard)

Tracking down those that go bump in the night

Anyone who has had the displeasure of waking up to the sound of a rattlesnake under the bed understands the need for urban wildlife control. Alan Merrifield, who has been in the business for 23 years, says he considers his job a form of conflict resolution between humans and animals. And Merrifield has made many animal kingdom friends, including bats, pigeons, ravens, raccoons, roof rats, possums, coyotes, peacocks, skunks, and feral chickens.

Feral chickens in San Francisco? OK, those were in Redwood City, but raccoons, skunks, and bats frequent even the densest city neighborhoods. People call 24 hours a day with a range of problems, he tells us. "It could be the noise," he says. "But more often the complaint is the droppings."

Working out of a blue metal trailer on Sunnydale Avenue, Merrifield tailors his efforts to the customer's specific concern, trapping and relocating animals whenever possible within the confines of local law. In San Francisco, for example, ground squirrels must be euthanized because they carry disease, but pigeons can't be killed. Go figure. But trapping is only a small part of the job; most of it involves "excluding" animals by finding and patching up holes, installing one-way doors, and encouraging humans to change bad habits.

One can train to be a nuisance wildlife control operator (or NWCO, pronounced NUKE-oh) at UC Davis or Utah State, but it's not a requirement. "You don't even need a high school diploma," Merrifield says.

NWCOs are different from pest control operators, or exterminators – a fact that recently prompted a bit of a turf war. The result was a new state law restricting NWCOs from handling mice, rats, or pigeons when they're indoors. Skunks are fair game because, Merrifield says, the exterminators didn't want to deal with skunks.

Merrifield, on the other hand, has no problem with skunks. He seems proud to be chasing vertebrates instead of spraying for bugs. "Everybody's doing termites," he says. "The yellow pages are full of those. But you don't see many people doing what we do." (Cassi Feldman)

Sandwich theory

I spent my senior year of college working at a deli making sandwiches. My impending degree in English had prepared me to write essays about Chaucer and poems about grief, but it hadn't led to any lucrative internships. All I was qualified to do, according to capitalism's unyielding logic, was take orders and produce sandwiches. In truth, I liked it. It was clean work, in a brightly lit store. I spent my afternoons chopping vegetables, opening glistening packages of sliced meat, and devoting myself to memorizing strings of words whose meanings were blissfully clear: turkey without onions; pastrami with no mayo on rye; cheese and avocado.

At school I had to wrestle meaning out of Gertrude Stein's fragmented chunks of hyperironic prose. At the deli language meant exactly what it was supposed to. Knives cut; wax paper wrapped. I liked the little perks of the job too, like getting a free slice of cake from the old women who ran the place. I even had a modicum of power. When a particularly attractive man or woman ordered a sandwich from me, I could give that person a little extra meat, or the freshest tomatoes.

But I knew that I wouldn't be working in a deli forever. I had just gotten a letter of acceptance to the English Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley, the university whose population made up the bulk of my customers. It was easy for me to relax at my job because it was a stopping-off point, just one rung on the ladder up to a better life. My future was a secret at the deli. None of my customers knew about the poems I wrote on break, or the Joseph Conrad books I read on BART. To them, I was a generic service worker in an apron, somebody who could do little more than take orders and make sandwiches.

Then one day, not long before I became a full-time graduate student, an English professor came into the deli. Even after all these years, I still remember his exact order: BLT on wheat, not toasted. I had just signed up for my fall classes, and one of them was going to be this professor's graduate seminar on literary theory. I was so excited about finally becoming a grown-up Ph.D. student that I blurted out, in the middle of making his sandwich, "I'm going to be in your literary theory class next semester!"

The professor stared at me, sized me up, and quite literally turned pale. I had never seen such a profoundly obvious example of someone physically recoiling. Finally he spluttered out, "Oh, I see! Well, isn't that something!" His patronizing response left me speechless. Suddenly I became aware of how mayonnaise feels on your hands when they start to sweat. His reaction was so weird I wondered if he thought I was lying to him. Maybe I was just an insane sandwich girl with literary aspirations. After all, how could someone in a hair net surrounded by sliced pastrami understand literary theory? My world was concrete. Literature was for people who transcended condiments and cold cuts.

I skimped on his mayonnaise and bacon, by the way. And try as I might, I never quite got the hang of literary theory. (Annalee Newitz)

Grease under fire

Blood and guts are not exactly my thing, but puss and grease have always held a certain cachet. Yeah, yeah, we can deny it to the bitter end, but we've all picked our faces at least once. Undoubtedly you derived a certain satisfaction from it. If squeezing your zits is more than a slight turn-on for you, perhaps skin care is your calling.

Karen, a soft-spoken 50-year-old San Francisco aesthetician with glowingly perfect skin, was turned on to the profession about five years ago when she was looking to change careers (she reveals that her skin wasn't as pretty back then). She won't admit that puss was the draw (sorry!) – instead, she claims, skin care is an "interesting combination of technical skill and of touching people in a spiritual way or in a kindly way." It's nice to know Karen feels so enthusiastic about her job, especially since she spends much of her time squeezing other people's white and black heads and analyzing their skin pore by pore. Like many holistic-leaning skin care specialists, Karen also integrates massage and aromatherapy into her treatments. "The head is a powerful place," she says. "There are a lot of acupressure and reflexology points on the head and neck, so a good face-and-head massage can feel almost as relaxing as a body massage."

Karen points out that a good facial isn't just a surface pleasure. Acne can be a horrible self-esteem killer. Even those without breakouts need extractions due to urban pollution, which actually settles into the pores. Karen notes that the skin is sometimes called "the third organ" because "there are some toxins that can't be eliminated through the kidneys, so the skin then also works as an organ of elimination." Who knew popping zits could be good for you? (Amanda Nowinski)

Toxic avengers

My street-level bedroom window looks onto an alley, a living arrangement that has required some sensory readjustment. At first, early-morning visits by the neighborhood garbage collectors seemed to simulate Communion-style UFO experiences. Half-awakened by the whirring machinery and flashing lights, I felt like I was about to be beamed into another dimension.

But once I fully regained consciousness – many hours later – I discovered that I was still on Earth (or San Francisco's version of it) and my trash had vanished.

Thank you, Sunset Scavenger.

Paul Giusti has been at Sunset for years, a tenure that has ranged from garbage collecting to his current position managing operations. Unsurprisingly, Giusti has a flair for trash-related maxims. "At one point or another, just about everything gets thrown away, on purpose or by accident," he says. Conceptual artists wish they were so offhandedly profound.

Giusti has seen garbage collector garb change from Ben Davis shirts to the company's current high-visibility uniforms. When he started working there in 1978, recycling was a new concept. "Newspapers were the only things recycled, and people tied them up with a string," Giusti says.

Garbage collection definitely has its, um, pitfalls – hazardous materials and the operation of large vehicles, for a start. And not-so-domestic animals. "When I was still fairly new, I was in the Mission walking down an pitch-black alley," Giusti says. "A cat jumped from the top of a fence, landed on top of my head, and grabbed on to me with its claws."

Giusti phrases a garbage collector's worst fear in the form of a question: "What are people throwing away?" He says that two or three Sunset Scavenger employees "get a needle stick" each year, adding that hypodermics should be placed in Sharps containers before they're thrown away. "Something as innocuous as a compressor from a fridge can be dangerous," Giusti says. "Someone threw one out, and when we compacted it, it released Freon, and I couldn't breathe. That scared the hell out of me."

And let's not forget the smell. "That's something that takes some getting used to," Giusti says with a laugh. "When you have a week off, the first couple of days back are rough."

While the white-collar worshipers at Jobs Rated Almanac consistently give waste management a low rating, Ron Howell's book One Hundred Jobs presents it as particularly admirable and worthwhile civil-service work.

Giusti notes that garbage collection is a form of physical fitness ("Almost all of us who get off the trucks and into management put on weight"), and he appreciates the unique perspective of the city that the job gives him. "You become part of the neighborhood you work in," he says. "I was on the same route for 13 years and saw kids grow up, go out into the world, and return home. You really get to know your customers. You know when someone has a baby in the house or when someone has been drinking too much lately."

Garbage collection has one other thing going for it: job security. Freelance electricians and carpenters have lost work because of the current downturn in the economy, Giusti notes. But as long as people make trash, garbage collectors will have jobs. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Delivering the goodies

It was the late '70s; the revolution had run out of gas, the band was going nowhere, and I was broke. My cousin Paulette – she has a Ph.D. now but back in the day was a world-class screwup – told me about a pharmaceutical-supply distributor she'd worked for once. "They always need drivers," she said. "Tell 'em I sent you."

I did just that. The foreman rolled his eyeballs and gave me a map and the keys to a beat-up Dodge van. We both knew it was a mistake.

Do you remember the time Danny Bonaduce got arrested for trying to break into a pharmacy in the Valley to rip off some drugs? Did you ever wonder how all those drugs – stuff so good a famous television star would steal to get it – wind up inside a drugstore in the first place? Just ask me.

Where I worked, a driver had to sign his or her life away to get the really good stuff: morphine, pharmaceutical cocaine, and Dilaudid, for example. Still some drivers couldn't resist the call. Mohammed was only a few months out of Tehran – his dad had worked for the shah before he lost his job and his life all at once – and one day while driving cocaine to a veterinary office in Marin (it was to be used in eye surgery on a horse or something, although we'd heard that before), he lost control, broke into the delivery, and went missing. Late that evening he checked himself into Marin General in Larkspur.

"I thought I was having a heart attack," Mo told us a few days later. "When I told the doctor what I'd done, he said I was on a trip. I hadn't heard about that before. He said a trip wouldn't kill me. I was very happy."

For the less adventurous there were all flavors of codeine-based painkillers and tranquilizers. They came in jars of 1,000, and well, there wasn't much inventory oversight. Turns out – I just heard this; I don't know firsthand – that a Tylenol with codeine number four sells for $2. A driver at this Bay Area company sometimes left the warehouse with 15 or 20 thousand pills. Do the math.

I worked there for nine months. Didn't work again until 1983. (J.H. Tompkins)

Serendipity knocks

At my college graduation a man whispered in my ear ... "plastics"? No, no, not that, something more along the lines of "call this number," which, when I called it, turned out to be the number of a famous literatus, an ancient literary editor in search of a reader for his metastatic slush pile, that heap of – mostly unsolicited, mostly fiction – manuscripts accumulating in his home office like snowdrifts in a blizzard.

All very serendipitous for me, for while my hardheaded classmates were setting their courses for medical or law or business school, or for postgraduate jobs at Goldman Sachs, I had formed the idea of becoming a writer, without having any idea, really, of how one did that. Of course there were MFA programs, but I was sick of school; I wanted a different sort of adventure, and now the wise, operatic literatus was handing me manuscript after manuscript to read and evaluate in written reports.

So it was possible to make a living (barely) by reading and writing! This was a revelation. So was the dreadfulness of just about everything I read: novels of bitter academic divorces, gay hoteliers, disgruntled Hollywood screenwriters, philosophical snails, many others. Reading dreck is bad for your health – the intellectual equivalent of smoking – but in some perverse way it was also a confidence-builder. I can do better than this! I would say to myself as I wrote my dismissive little reports.

Literatus was also cautiously encouraging, though even then (20 years ago) he was in dramatic agony about the corporate tentacles snaking through the publishing biz. But then, he was apt to be dramatic about everything, from a ringing telephone ("Shit! Who the fuck can that be?") to the innumerable pairs of glasses (reading, driving, sun) he was forever losing, even as he held them in his own hand. He was a far more spectacular character than any that turned up in the pallid manuscripts I was reading and a tutorial richer than that of any MFA class about the meaning and purpose, not to mention the very essence, of drama. (Paul Reidinger)

Boys can be nannies

Andrew Littlefield, 32, calls himself "a professional housewife." His job description does indeed sound like the sort of thing Betty Friedan would have protested in her classic antihousewife screed The Feminine Mystique. But Littlefield loves his job. "I work for a family where I take care of three kids, a girl who is 8, and two boys who are 11 and 13. Plus, I do cleaning, cooking, shopping, and I drive the kids around." He pauses and laughs, adding, "Well, I should really say that I'm learning to cook, and my employers have been very patient with the results so far."

After working in day care for five years, Littlefield found himself jobless when his last employer closed her day care facility; there just weren't enough qualified teachers to maintain the staff she needed. So Littlefield decided to get a job as a nanny, which, he says, "pays a lot better than day care." He thinks it's ironic that such an incredibly important job – day care for children – isn't financially rewarding. "In a perfect world, day care and nanny jobs would pay equally."

To get his current job working for a San Francisco family, Littlefield signed up with local nanny placement service Town and Country, which carefully screens applicants and arranges interviews with compatible families. Luckily, Littlefield already had a stellar background in day care work and had the appropriate education. Day care workers are required to have a college degree, and to supplement his undergraduate education, Littlefield also took 18 postgraduate units in early-childhood education at San Francisco State University.

Nevertheless, Littlefield says, "It's hard to get a job as a male nanny. Stereotypically it's a job women have, so people tend to look for a woman. One of the women who works at Town and Country told me that usually the mothers are into having a male nanny, but for some reason dads don't like it – they don't want their role as father usurped."

I ask Littlefield what he likes best about being a nanny, and suddenly his voice over the phone becomes strangely muffled. I hear a peal of high-pitched laughter in the background. Littlefield pretends to groan in pain and splutters, "I'd say the most rewarding thing about my job is getting black eyes from eight-year-olds." Then, more seriously, he continues, "Really, the best part is knowing you're doing a job that's important. You get to help a family out, and that's a good feeling." (Newitz)

It's the message, stupid

Maybe you've got a new brand of mango-chutney salad dressing to sell, or perhaps you're thinking of running for dogcatcher. Sounds like you need a public relations person.

But suppose the top three executives in your big HMO were just led away in handcuffs for health care fraud. Or what if several tourists have just been brutally murdered in a city where you're responsible for overseeing economic development? Well, then you need Dan Tarman.

Tarman isn't just an ordinary spin doctor. He's a "crisis-management specialist," the kind of person whom companies call when everything is completely in the shitter.

Tarman, 35, works out of the San Francisco office of Burson-Marsteller, the giant global communications firm that become famous after helping Johnson and Johnson weather the Tylenol poisoning scare and advising Union Carbide on how to spin the chemical leak at Bhopal that killed thousands. The firm has had more than its share of less-than-savory clients, including the tobacco industry and, in the 1980s, the military dictatorship in Argentina.

A polite, soft-spoken former Miami lawyer who clearly enjoys his work, Tarman doesn't want to discuss the possible guilt of any of his clients. "I advise people to have a good and credible message and be present to face the music," he says.

Educated at Tulane and the University of Miami, Tarman got into P.R. almost by accident. "I quickly figured out I didn't want to practice law," he says. "I ended up doing economic development work for the city of Miami, and when several German tourists were murdered, and then Hurricane Andrew hit, I found myself learning how to do crisis management."

Recruited personally by the head of Burson-Marsteller, he ran the Miami office for several years. An early client, HMO giant Columbia HCA, saw some of its top people indicted. ("We had to reassure the public that this was an outstanding organization.") He moved to San Francisco six months ago to help companies that face, as the spinmeister puts it, "significant economically driven challenges."

When asked what advice he would have offered to Pacific Gas and Electric – which has not only gone into bankruptcy but also turned itself into a political pariah in the process – Tarman won't bite. "I can only say what I tell everyone," he responds. "You just have to develop the right kind of messaging." (Tim Redmond)