Duds 'n' suds

"Boxers, Briefs, and Books," an article in yesterday's New York Times (read it here), reveals that John Grisham and I have at least one thing in common: we both hated working at Sears.

Grisham describes the long line of dead-end jobs he pursued in his youth, including spreading asphalt, laying fence, and creeping into dank, dark crawl spaces to locate plumbing problems. Retail sales caught his attention because "it was indoors, clean and air-conditioned," but the only opening he could find was in the men's underwear department at Sears, a job he found so humiliating that he tried to get fired:

"I became abrupt with customers. Sears has the nicest customers in the world, but I didn't care. I was rude and surly and I was occasionally watched by spies hired by the company to pose as shoppers. One asked to try on a pair of boxers. I said no, that it was obvious they were much too small for his rather ample rear end. I handed him an extra-large pair. I got written up. I asked for lawn care. They said no, but this time they didn't offer me a raise. I finally quit."

I never landed a retail job at Sears, but I worked at a Sears distribution center in the personnel department, where I did a lot of filing while watching a steady stream of desperate job-seekers come and go. Once a girl I knew from high school arrived for an interview wearing a tight dress slit up to there and went into the boss's office to be interviewed behind closed doors. After the applicant left, the boss (male) came out and made an announcement to the rest of the (female) staff: "I'll tell you what, ladies, we'll hire the dress and you can all take turns wearing it."

But aside from the occasional sexist comment, that part of my job was not bad: the work was easy, my co-workers were pleasant, and best of all, I was bringing in a steady paycheck, small but much appreciated.

Everything changed in the evening when the lights were turned off, all the pleasant people went home, and I was shunted over to a dark little cubicle in a huge building where the only other human beings were the security guard and the one or two other unfortunate peons stuck with the job nobody wanted: calling up customers whose Sears appliances needed work to let them know that the repair crew would be arriving on the next day.

I would start the evening with a list of names and phone numbers. That's it. The only other thing I knew about the people I was calling was that something had gone dreadfully wrong with some Sears appliance and they were eager to get some help. I was empowered to tell them that help was on the way, but I could not tell them what sort of help or how much it might cost or why help hadn't arrived sooner or exactly when help might be arriving. Everyone wanted to know when the repair crew would arrive, and I would have to admit that I had no access to that information, and they would then say something like "Well if you don't know anything, what's the point of calling?"

The point was detergent. We were told to "push the detergent," and sometimes I did. The goal was to persuade people that since our repair crew would be coming out anyway, it would be convenient for us to send along a jumbo-size box of whatever type of detergent we were trying to push at the time. I believe we were actually offered prizes based on the amount of detergent we were able to push.

I never won any prizes. My detergent-pushing skills were less than stellar. I was calling people whose washers and dryers and refrigerators and dishwashers were making horrible noises or spurting soapy water all over the floor or bursting into flames, and all I could offer to ease their pain was a good price on a jumbo box of detergent? No thanks.

I could push detergent no better than Grisham could push underwear, but the frustration of all those horrible jobs drove him to the hardest job he ever tried: writing fiction. "It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear," he writes, "But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had--but it's worth it."

Given the choice, I'd rather write about difficult jobs than perform difficult jobs--even if writing is the difficult job I'm trying to write about. As long as no one is asking me to push the detergent or wear a dress slit up to there, I'll take this job over any other, even when it's difficult.