Bah dah, Munday, Munday

Monday morning is miserable. It was miserable in the 9-5 office existence for me, back to the gulag for another week, and I find it equally unnerving in my new existence. The Office, for all it's stricture, was structure. God knows we need a purpose in this life, no matter how flawed that purpose is. Getting up on a Monday, with no real plan is overwhelming to me at times. Sure, I can scrounge up some things to do, but it's the realization that I have to hustle. No one is going to give me a paycheck this week unless I hustle it. From the first job I ever tried to ask for, this has always been a problem. Because at the bottom of the hustle is your self-worth. And for me, that is a wildly-vascillating barometer, dependent on mood, time of day, time of season, if I just spoke to Mom, etc.

My dad had been courting a local pharmacist for years for my employment benefit. When I came of age to work, I went over to see him. Not even a cold call. I walked around the Pharmacy for about 45 minutes until I got the courage to go talk to him. He was agitated when I showed up back there, he had noticed me flitting around his store, seemingly without purpose. I don't know if he thought I was a moron when I looked at the Hallmark cards for the 40th time, or checked the price on the Luden's Cough Drops. I just remember him being annoyed with me. I didn't get the job. Rejection and me are bad bed fellows, so it's important for my absurd existence that I pick a bed to lie in that is replete with rejection. Urrrrrrr.

I worked the Hollywood Death Cab Tour on Saturday and that was healthy. I got my first tip ("Try Food Service as a Career!" Cymbol Crash!). Nah, it was a nice five dollar tip, from a nice lady. Since it was found money, I put four of it on the lottery. That's another new one for me. Playing the lottery. All my life, being raised by pragmatic realists and mathematical folks, I knew that winning the lottery was akin to me guessing the phone number of a distance relative. Even spotted the area code, I couldn't do it (my mom did this to me once to show the futility of the lottery). In my younger days, I felt assured that I would make my own fortune. Now, I don't believe in myself, so I happen to believe in a lucky draw a little more. Yikes, that's sad.

Our giant robot on the Hollywood Death Cab Tour, Big Bear, was not working properly on Saturday. We have a deal with Worldwide Studios, to go on their lot, for part of our tour. Inside one of their soundstages, they have a leftover creature from a kid's TV show of the late 1980 -- Big Bear. Big Bear's breath is supposed to smell like honey when you go by (I always make a comment about this: who wants graham crackers?), but there was no honey. I like to put my head out the windows and face his angry mewl on the tour. We're inside a soundstage at this point, it's dark, no one can see, but I just like to do it. What's up Big Bear?

The Wall didn't work either. We have what an attraction on the tour called "The Wall," and it didn't tumble down on cue when we approached it. You set up those jokes, that you do over and over, and when the attraction doesn't trigger, it can catch you by surprise. Sometimes you have a great ad-lib, other times you say clever things like "well, I guess the wall didn't fall down today."

It was fun in the Hollywood Death Cab break room. That's easily one of the perks of the job. A bunch of entertainers sitting around entertaining each other. Sometimes it can be too much, you have the I'm-funny guy, who will try to suck the wind out of the room for anyone but him being funny, or the political pontificator. But for the most part it's just the crew waiting to get a Cab and go do the Tour. We all hooted and hollared as the Dodgers won the pennant on Saturday with a grand slam homerun.

Everyone hopes they don't have to do too many tours in a day. It can be grueling to do five. Usually 3 is just about right. The tour takes from an hour to an hour and one half. So that's a decent amount of jabbering you have to do. You spin to get your place on the day's schedule, you spin once you are there to get the amount of tours. More lottery fun, reminding me of Fortuna's Wheel and my place on it. It's a weird vibe to do what we do. We are paid McWages, and yet most of us have college degrees and are fairly bright. It's the ultimate fun job, and yet it's the ultimate un-fun wages they pay. The pay is abysmal, because supposedly we make it up in tips. Meanwhile, we are supposed to turn down tips as the guest have already paid a sizeable amount to take the Hollywood Death Cab. Totally disingenuous and accounts for a lot of the bad vibes in the air that no amount of cutesy-poo management distractions will abate. The saddest one they did was making the people who load the Death Cabs do a "Trash Olympics." Pick up Trash and be just like the people in the Olympics! It seems like an exercise from the back of a Scouting manual for 12 year olds. Added on to a McJob with McWages, it's really insulting. I know I have a shitty job, but do you have to emphasize this with rah-rah management exercises? Employee Core value: Have Fun! Corporate Core Value: Don't Pay Them!

And yet, despite all this, the people who actually have wages that allow them to have lives, our Union drivers, usually have the worst attitudes. Not all of them, but that sense of entitlement does pervade quite a few. If it's near quittin' time, rest assured that Tour Car will fly around the park in a NASCAR minute. Some hide their nametags, so you can't have a conversation with them, others won't talk to you, period. All their pay has not bought them job satisfaction.