Oshkosh – NormalSapien

Minimum Wage Bakery

A lesson in time management.

So this was when I was about 22. I had two full-time jobs. I was a window washer in Fond Du Lac Wisconsin and I was working at a sandwich shop in Oshkosh Wisconsin. While working both of those full-time jobs I decided to get another job at a bakery… I guess it was just a real good time to get jobs. I liked baking and had some experience baking scones.

I quickly realized there was a lot less baking involved than I had imagined. Basically my job was to put little dough slugs onto a pans and move the pans. Those slugs were going to be baked into hot dog buns. I spent my day standing up, leaning forward, lifting metal trays of dough slugs, and twisting with them.

My dad is a physical therapist. He told me that the BEST way to get a back injury is to be standing, leaning forward, lifting something, and twisting with it. Which is exactly what I did for my whole shift. My dad explained that that’s what UPS drivers do for most of their day and they are a large number of his physical therapy clients [at that time].

So I knew that I was doing exactly what I needed to do, to ruin my back. But that’s not a big deal, you know? I figured I’d move my way up in the bakery world? I mean working at a sandwich shop you’re not really going to go anywhere with that perhaps. And window washers, well they’ll all fall to their death eventually. (It wasn’t a high rise job but that’s where you’d move up to, I assume, in that career. So I figured a bakery was a good way to go. I was no stranger to hard work or back pain 🙂 And I think baking’s cool because it’s like the metallurgy of the cooking world.

I saw at least one cockroach in the sink supply room. This is Wisconsin btw. Cockroaches aren’t super common, because it’s cold sometimes yo. So you have to be pretty dirty to have cockroaches in Wisconsin. Which that bakery was.

I worked there for a week and I got my first paycheck. Then I realized I had never asked what I was getting paid. I figured since it was such a labor intensive job (throughout the whole shift) that the pay must be pretty good, but it was pretty not. The pay was crap. I was getting minimum wage ($5.15ish at the time) which is a lot less than either of my other jobs. Definitely less than both combined. So as soon as I looked at that paycheck I politely quit, right then and there. That was the only time I never gave 2 weeks notice. Because holy crap how can you pay someone that little for that much work?

Okay, so about the other two full-time jobs. I pretty much got fired from the window washing job. I mean I came in to quit. And that’s when they were going to fire me. So it was kind of a tie. But I mean, obviously I had gotten really far behind on my window washing route. It was in a city 20-25 minutes away, I already had a full-time job at a sandwich shop, and a part-time job at a disgusting Bakery for crappy pay. But the sandwich shop that I worked at was going to throw away these two gallon jugs of Dawn dish soap because something happened, and they bought them in industrial size bottles before they got something installed in the wall that dispenses soap. And now they gotta get rid of the dish soap. Well, I happened to know that window washing place I worked for used Dawn dish soap for all the window washer stuff.

OK, back to the tie. So I’m coming in and they’re all there. And they say

Hey, we got to let you know that you’re really far behind on your stuff, and your route…

And they’re all looking at me. So I say,

Hey, I… have a different full-time job and a part time job at a bakery right now. Turns out that’s too much stuff to do. I’m so sorry, do you guys need 2 weeks notice?

And the boss said no, we were actually going to fire you right now…

So I said great, okay, no hard feelings here’s 2 gallons of dish soap that you guys use; that’s kind of cool right?

They were like oh thanks.

So that went pretty well.

I don’t know if it was before after that, but I became a manager at the sub sandwich place. So, Movin On Up in the world.

Huzzah!

Naked in the Rain

One time I decided to go streaking. I was with my friend Joseph and we lived near the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. It was one of those warm evening summer thunderstorms that would inspire even Thor to bare his cheeks.

No, there weren’t any girls with us. And no, we hadn’t been drinking. I don’t know why we did it. I remember that I wanted to. But I don’t know why Joe came with me. What a great guy.

It was obviously a bit awkward because, even though we were in an instrumental funk band together, we had never seen each other naked. And, as far as I know we still haven’t. At least, I didn’t look at him and I assume he didn’t look at me. Although I did see a photo that his ex-girlfriend took of him doing a naked kickflip in a hotel hallway in Barcelona.

Did we streak past the college dorms? Yes we did. Were there sexy college girls there impressed with our manhoods? No there weren’t. This was during the annual EAA convention. (The Experimental Aircraft Association). That is the week that Oshkosh’s population goes from 60,000 to 300,000. And I believe it’s during spring break or in between semesters, so the dorms were full of old men who love aviating. I saw a couple of them walking to their rented rooms. They were super old, and really into airplanes.

So, I was a sober 20 year old, streaking with his bandmate in front of old dudes in dorms. To be truthful it felt kind of gay.

Besides that, it felt amazing. I had never streaked before and I came to realize that it’s not all about the exhibitionism (at least not for me). I felt natural and free. That sounds stupid. But it was something like that. Especially during the lightning and the rain.

When Joe and I got back to the house, we didn’t talk about it. And we never have.

Waiting on a River

My mom had told me a couple times that I would probably be a great waiter.

One day I finally decided to go for it.

There’s this restaurant in my hometown called Fratellos. It’s like one of the best restaurants in town. It’s not super fancy compared to bigger city standards but in a town of like 62,000 people it counts as a fancypants restaurant.

I went there, applied, and went through all that stuff. Eventually they called me for an interview. It was unlikely for me to get an interview since I had no waiting experience. However, the river still had plenty of ice chunks flowing through it, and therefore they must have been real low on staff . They were likely scraping the barrel of my medium-sized hometown. But they happened to scrape out just what they were looking for. I knew that I would make a great waiter. I was good at memorizing things and I was real friendly with people. I’m also good at catching things that fall.

Here’s a little background about the place: Fratellos was a restaurant that you could get to by car or by boat. (I guess by foot has well, obviously.) So they had docks and you could park your boat and come up to the restaurant or have them serve you on your boat. Pretty fancy.

During the interview things were going pretty well. We were sitting at a table with a view of the river. She was dressed real nice and professional-like. The kind of person you don’t want to ask stupid questions to.

At the end of the interview the interviewer asked me if I had any questions. Now, I have been told that it’s always good to have questions for an interview. However she already answered everything that I was wondering about so I didn’t have any questions left.

But, I assumed that it was better to ask any question then no questions at all. I had been gazing at the chunks of ice flowing down the river while the lady was talking, and I began to wonder.

I asked, does this river ever change direction in flow?

She looked up at me.

Because I think I remember it flowing a different direction another time that I saw it.

She looked back at my resume’

I was beginning to realize that my question was irrelevant. But I did want to know.

“So I’m just wondering if the flow of the river ever changes directions like with the seasons or something?”

She stared out the window for a few seconds, and said she didn’t know. And asked if I had any other questions.

I didn’t.

And I did not get that job.

I still wonder though, about that river. And I bet she does too. Actually, I don’t think rivers ever change direction. Why would that even happen?