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Epilogue
And so, a chapter ends. My year of being an employment-nomad has finally finished, and soon a new chapter begins - a 48-state road-trip dedicated to self-exploration, maintaining old friendships, and yes, writing about the foibles of life and the humor within. And then, California - a new volume entirely, a new beginning as one page folds over and the next promises more mystery to come. Even nomads get antsy after a while and settle down.
I end the Whitehouse Series with my latest lesson learned from the grand oracle that is the Employment Monster - how to get hired for a security job, which I learned moonlighting as a guard for three months while I editing videos by day. I recall my compatriot from the bar in Minneapolis who worked as a mortician and a bouncer, and thus was impervious to any kind of economic drought the market might throw at him. Well, in this age of slimming jobs and lay-offs, I've discovered an industry that is booming even more than the alcohol business - security, in tall buildings. Yessir, if there's one thing tall buildings can't get enough of these days, it's security.
And yessir, if there's one thing tall buildings can't do enough of these days, it's background check the hell out of all these new building security people. Which explains why I was hired in the beginning of February but did actually start working until April. It was not very hard to find a company that would hire me - I simply walked into the first non-residential building I saw, asked the security guard milling about who had hired him, then looked them up in the phone book and was on my way. They told me proof of my college degree would not be needed - my high school diploma or GED-equivalent would be just fine, but I did need to bring in nine kinds of ID, my birth certificate with the doctor who had delivered me holding it, and some kind of a recognized holy man to vouch for my spiritual character.
After the usual paperwork was filled out, I needed to take an orientation class, submit to a background check, submit to a job-history check, have a personal reference actually phone them during business hours, and take an honesty test. After all that was finished, I then had to take a fingerprint test to make sure I actually was the person they'd just spent a month learning about.
Perhaps the most entertaining part of the whole procedure was the drug test. Now, I had just taken a drug test for another security company, which came back fine, but apparently urine on Tuesday is not the same thing as urine on Wednesday, so I had to do another. I mean, I did run home and do a bunch of crack Tuesday night, but still. Take a brother's word for it.
The drug test required for this particular company was really more bizarre than I had expected, even from them. Rather than your typical schedule-a-pee-cup-appointment deal, they instead herded me and my entire orientation group into a little van and drove us down to the South side to this shady little second-story doctor's office that looked like an abortion clinic on top of a donut shop. The only thing stranger than the homeless man standing outside the door was that the homeless man followed us up the stairs, put on a lab coat and became the doctor. Then, in the confined space of a clinic the size of a dorm room, they called us up one at a time to go behind this closed door into a broom closet with a toilet, and we each took our turn trying to squeeze one out with 15 people listening through the door. It was really more like a fraternity bonding experience than anything else, except half of us were women. Which made it particularly disturbing that you could hear people having trouble hitting the cup. I went last and thus had some pretty bad stage fright, until I thought about Niagara falls.
Finally when we were all done peeing in cups and snickering at each other, they made us hang around for another 15 minutes until all our samples could be labeled and documented and whatnot. Finally the Homeless Doctor came back with about 30 cups of piss in a huge clear plastic bag, handed it to the van driver and told him to take it back with us. One of my fellow employees, a little concerned about the way the labels were falling off the mixed-together samples as they jostled in the giant urine Glad-bag, asked the Homeless Doctor if he was sure the test wouldn't get mixed up.
"What?" responded the Doctor. "That? That ain't tests. It's pee!"
He chuckled to himself and went into the broom closet to drop a load. The employee, his question apparently answered, shook his head sadly and went back down to the van.
Well, apparently no one in my group had done any drugs, because we all came back fine and were able to begin the whole red tape process, which I'm confident less than half of us actually had the patience to endure. Patience, I'm becoming more and more convinced, is the most important attribute to bring to any job-hunting experience, even those which supposedly hire you right away. Patience, that is, and a good sense of humor.
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Email me! paul@paulspond.com
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(9/03-present)
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