What's this? A keyboard? Wow! Let's hit it with our fingers! Pap pap pap pap isn't it satisfying?
So the interview for the running-of-the-circly-thing position happened today. The supe can't tell me cause it's not his call, but since I'm the only one who applied I think I stand a fair shot.
The circly thing is a trommel. It belongs in a "happle" sometimes, except try googling that word and see where it gets you. I wanna be a happle operator! It's where they make dust. You get to wear a mask and you still get to even shovel a lot and a lot and plenty more besides! Happles are stupid. But they pay better than dredges.
Here are some of the phrases used to describe parts of the happle which would otherwise have no name and so for all intents and purposes are called by these names:
- "squirrel cages"
- "bag house"
- "chimneys" (they are nothing like a chimney except they're the highest thing in the happle)
- "happle operator"
The war you fight is a war against dust. You must remove dust from all surfaces, and gather all dust into two piles near giant roll-up doors where loaders can come and scoop it up. Your arsenal is made up of brooms, shovels, a putty knife and an air wand. When they remember you exist they sometimes fix a wheelbarrow so you can use that too. Also you have an assistant who never enters the happle but is nevertheless called a Happle Assistant! You may command him, though he is nowhere to be found. True power!
The interview was hilarious. The shortest man you've ever seen with this little John Waters penciled-on moustache sits behind a desk in what is called the "penalty box", a tiny enclave of an office situated in the middle of the largest stainless steel building in North America. Seated beside him, and completely obscured from view by a 17" monitor, is the young, young, young little kid they've just made supervisor, there to observe how an interview is done. Seriously, I could almost be his father, if I hadn't been so shy when I was twelve. The position I am applying for is something that both of them consider to be a placeholder. If I get it, it'll be the most money I've ever made. It doesn't pay enough. And these two guys are struggling to get by just like me.
And don't get the idea I'm putting them down. These men (and me) are paid to deal with (not just bury, but deal with) what people throw out, at the moment and locus of history where more shit is getting thrown out than ever before. These guys make Brokaw's "greatest generation" look like a bunch of schoolyard chickenhawks.
Eloquence, however, escapes them. Never had I heard the word "fuck" uttered in a job interview before I worked here. But the kid, my son, the supervisor, he says "fuckin'" the way some people say "um". It makes me want to round up all those linguistics majors who made their term paper bones promoting the theory that "fuck" is the most powerful word in the English language and sit their dumb asses down in front of this guy for ten minutes. "Fuck" is not some kind of cornerstone. "Fuck" is a plastic bag stuck in the tree of language. It's bright and ugly and it flutters in the wind and it is of no use whatsoever, though it's what you see as you pass the tree. Do arborists study plastic bags? Or do they study the fucking trees?
The third question I was asked (after "why do you want this job" and a different version of "why do you want this job") was "Who do you see taking your place out at the dredge?" What I should have said was that it wasn't my fuckin' problem. I don't know from anybody who works on the tip floor, and I don't care to.
Before I was a dredge operator, I worked on the tip floor. (You'll love this.) The tip floor is where the garbage is brought in it's raw, fresh-from-the-curb format. It is spread in ten-feet-wide lines on a concrete floor by loader tractors. Then these guys basically walk through it, looking for hazardous materials or anything too large or too non-biodegradable to be composted. Then they take their sawed-off hockey stick and fling it to the side. Anything and everything can be found in this line: dead animals, wallets full of money, water heaters, Hep-C laden syringes waiting to find skin, perfectly good furniture, pornography (so much!), diamond rings, food you could eat and not get sick from. The life of what people throw away really begins on the tip floor. Before we get it, it's just commodity. Once it enters our plant, it is culture.
Things I earned through last year's Pepsi-points promotion from points collected from the tip floor: a carabiner, a minidisc recorder, over twenty movie passes, a digital camera. That's pure theft, baby! But it's one of those oh-so-hip victimless crimes.
Anyhoo. The tip floor is where my replacement's going to come from. And I know what I said about the greatest generation just a bit ago, but you can forget it because some of these tip floor guys are absolute retards. If I saw them somewhere outside the plant I would run. And here, among these ranks, is where my replacement is biding his time, waiting to be promoted and plunged into the impossible task of keeping a dredge moving in open waters when the ambient temperature is minus fucking thirty.
Who'll replace me? I don't fucking know. Just so long as I never have to row a boat across a lake of freezing shit to reconnect a pipe that's split away.
But how was the question meant? Is this the price of my new position: that I have to vouch for one of these guys? To not screw it up? So badly we're all laid off till April? Come on. Just gimme the job. Gimme the job, gimme it, gimme gimme gimme.
The circly thing is a trommel. It belongs in a "happle" sometimes, except try googling that word and see where it gets you. I wanna be a happle operator! It's where they make dust. You get to wear a mask and you still get to even shovel a lot and a lot and plenty more besides! Happles are stupid. But they pay better than dredges.
Here are some of the phrases used to describe parts of the happle which would otherwise have no name and so for all intents and purposes are called by these names:
- "squirrel cages"
- "bag house"
- "chimneys" (they are nothing like a chimney except they're the highest thing in the happle)
- "happle operator"
The war you fight is a war against dust. You must remove dust from all surfaces, and gather all dust into two piles near giant roll-up doors where loaders can come and scoop it up. Your arsenal is made up of brooms, shovels, a putty knife and an air wand. When they remember you exist they sometimes fix a wheelbarrow so you can use that too. Also you have an assistant who never enters the happle but is nevertheless called a Happle Assistant! You may command him, though he is nowhere to be found. True power!
The interview was hilarious. The shortest man you've ever seen with this little John Waters penciled-on moustache sits behind a desk in what is called the "penalty box", a tiny enclave of an office situated in the middle of the largest stainless steel building in North America. Seated beside him, and completely obscured from view by a 17" monitor, is the young, young, young little kid they've just made supervisor, there to observe how an interview is done. Seriously, I could almost be his father, if I hadn't been so shy when I was twelve. The position I am applying for is something that both of them consider to be a placeholder. If I get it, it'll be the most money I've ever made. It doesn't pay enough. And these two guys are struggling to get by just like me.
And don't get the idea I'm putting them down. These men (and me) are paid to deal with (not just bury, but deal with) what people throw out, at the moment and locus of history where more shit is getting thrown out than ever before. These guys make Brokaw's "greatest generation" look like a bunch of schoolyard chickenhawks.
Eloquence, however, escapes them. Never had I heard the word "fuck" uttered in a job interview before I worked here. But the kid, my son, the supervisor, he says "fuckin'" the way some people say "um". It makes me want to round up all those linguistics majors who made their term paper bones promoting the theory that "fuck" is the most powerful word in the English language and sit their dumb asses down in front of this guy for ten minutes. "Fuck" is not some kind of cornerstone. "Fuck" is a plastic bag stuck in the tree of language. It's bright and ugly and it flutters in the wind and it is of no use whatsoever, though it's what you see as you pass the tree. Do arborists study plastic bags? Or do they study the fucking trees?
The third question I was asked (after "why do you want this job" and a different version of "why do you want this job") was "Who do you see taking your place out at the dredge?" What I should have said was that it wasn't my fuckin' problem. I don't know from anybody who works on the tip floor, and I don't care to.
Before I was a dredge operator, I worked on the tip floor. (You'll love this.) The tip floor is where the garbage is brought in it's raw, fresh-from-the-curb format. It is spread in ten-feet-wide lines on a concrete floor by loader tractors. Then these guys basically walk through it, looking for hazardous materials or anything too large or too non-biodegradable to be composted. Then they take their sawed-off hockey stick and fling it to the side. Anything and everything can be found in this line: dead animals, wallets full of money, water heaters, Hep-C laden syringes waiting to find skin, perfectly good furniture, pornography (so much!), diamond rings, food you could eat and not get sick from. The life of what people throw away really begins on the tip floor. Before we get it, it's just commodity. Once it enters our plant, it is culture.
Things I earned through last year's Pepsi-points promotion from points collected from the tip floor: a carabiner, a minidisc recorder, over twenty movie passes, a digital camera. That's pure theft, baby! But it's one of those oh-so-hip victimless crimes.
Anyhoo. The tip floor is where my replacement's going to come from. And I know what I said about the greatest generation just a bit ago, but you can forget it because some of these tip floor guys are absolute retards. If I saw them somewhere outside the plant I would run. And here, among these ranks, is where my replacement is biding his time, waiting to be promoted and plunged into the impossible task of keeping a dredge moving in open waters when the ambient temperature is minus fucking thirty.
Who'll replace me? I don't fucking know. Just so long as I never have to row a boat across a lake of freezing shit to reconnect a pipe that's split away.
But how was the question meant? Is this the price of my new position: that I have to vouch for one of these guys? To not screw it up? So badly we're all laid off till April? Come on. Just gimme the job. Gimme the job, gimme it, gimme gimme gimme.
posted by gibletquesterrs at 8:35 PM
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