SCUTTLING ACROSS THE FLOOR

Dear Octopus Boss

I’m sorry I don’t have eight legs/arms

I realized midsummer I’d rather move rocks all day than report to a job.

My front yard is a sea of crunchy pea-gravel the color of a pearl gray sky, organized into sections lined with larger rocks.

The worst criminals were punished with hard rock labor, including Oscar Wilde who died after years toiling in a prison work yard.

I’d rather shovel 8 tons of gravel than clock in to a J-O-B, and this is an important clue.

Is it worth enduring poverty to be free?

I think a lot of people wish they could quit but food and housing force them to clock in anyway.

I’d prefer hauling a wheelbarrow up and down hills under a broiling sun than telling the boss one more time:

“That’s a good idea!”

After not working for several years, the contrast is stark and alarming now that I am two months in.

Waking Up Should Never Include Consciousness

The brutal reality of having to wake up at a certain time and leave the house at a certain time has landed in my lap with a thud reminiscent of a kitten being thrown against a wall.

The lies I have to tell myself to make the J-O-B tolerable are cheap approximations of bumper sticker wisdom.

I scan the horizon for a way out.

I play the lottery most days, partly because the liquor store is conveniently situated next to my workplace but mostly because I’m desperate.

I’m training for a 5K, but I haven’t told my spouse. I just want something of my own. I want the feeling I can participate without giving a thought to winning.

I crave feasible mediocrity, and I’m willing to pay the small fee up front.

The trouble with a J-O-B is I already know I won’t win, but they keep trying to talk me into the possibility. It feels like I’m running with the bulls wearing a flaming red poncho.

The workplace is a bleak landscape that reveals why The Karate Kid was a actually a fantasy movie.

The kid had a mentor, a training regimen, a philosophy, and a cool car to drive — and he conquered evil in the form of a blond rich kid who had all the breaks.

In my current job, I have the constant feeling that any mistake is life or death.

It’s true, I am working as a 9–1–1 dispatcher, so that doesn’t help.

Work is a hostile planet in which toxic myths and fables are constantly reinforced, the worst of which is that what you do is important.

You are rarely given a mentor, a cool car, a philosophical doctrine. The training is never as useful as wax on/wax off, and usually involves a dreary online test.

I’m surrounded by a variety of people who have mastered the art of working a J-O-B through flawless cynicism, masterful storytelling, decades of practice, and/or being better people.

Jaded Dragon, Crouching Cynic

Being jaded is helpful with most jobs, but when you work in government, public service, or education it’s non-negotiable.

Dealing with massive numbers of The Public causes most people to catapult from wide-eyed optimist to eye-rolling misanthrope.

Most of your attention gets deflected toward the Idiots.

You arrest the same dumbleton every other week, or hand detention slips to the same handful of the sons of anarchy.

The zoo animals need you to help them. Your J-O-B description may involve helping people, so you offer help and they resent you for it. Sometimes, they thank you — often enough to keep hope barely alive.

They return in various colors, shapes, sizes, and guises.

Meanwhile, the functional members of society fade into the woodwork like the adorable faces of raccoons in the night forest.

Yet you, jaded dragon, are safe behind an impenetrable wall and confident in your knowledge that nobody can disappoint you when you despise every living thing.

Lying Like a Rug

If I had a dollar for every co-worker whose said they feel the J-O-B is a calling, I’d have enough to quit and still afford health insurance.

I’m passionate about wanting to have a calling. I’d like to follow my bliss up a golden ladder into a ray of sunlight.

I’d like to find inner and out peace through my work.

Unfortunately, since my dream of naming paint colors has faded like the barn red sides of my house — currently being repainted Popsicle Island Azure — I remain uncalled.

So far, I’m a dismal failure at Finding My Destiny because I can’t get on board the Life Has an Answer Train.

I also think when we die, we’re dead. Then, depending on being set on fire or dumped into a pit in the ground, we become either dust or food for worms and ants.

I don’t believe there’s a god and resent the implication that he would be a man, an old man, a human being, and/or a mammal.

I have written an entire, published book and I have zero doubts I’m not a gifted storyteller.

It’s like the lyrics of Lodi, a song written by John Fogerty in which he recounts wishing he didn’t have to sing for a bunch of ungrateful drunks, and now he’s stuck in a redneck No Cal bar wishing he had train fare home.

I usually feel like I’m stuck in Lodi. Sometimes, I believe Lodi is my default setting.

Decades of Sweat

People who’ve worked the same J-O-B for 20 years are like Chinese puzzles to me. Sidenote: is that racist?

I think they get into a groove. At some point, maybe around year 10 — a benchmark I have never reached — it’s easier to go to work than stay home.

They’ve mastered tolerating their J-O-B and due to all the time they’ve put in — accompanied by daily, sometimes hourly, pep talks — like their jobs.

They’ve gathered moss they can now chew on for sustenance, telling themselves Moss Salad is nutritious.

Some part of me keeps asking the same stupid question: is moss even edible?

Some part of me folds its arms tight and shakes its head and plants its feet.

No amount of money motivates this employee, although I’ve never made than $45K a year, so maybe a colossal salary would be the salad dressing I need.

They Are Better than Me

The trouble with zero storytelling skills is you recognize reality. It hits you like a giant, runaway snowball, and you can usually see it hurtling down the slope.

As the blue sky turns a sickly shade of cold white, a familiar echo bounces around in your skull:

“She’s better than me.”

Don’t cry for me. I have skills. I’m awesome at Scrabble, parallel parking, and telemarketing. Last month, I found a prehistoric rock tool in my yard. I don’t know if that’s a skill, but I feel damn good about it.

I lack the kinds of skills you develop slowly, with layers. I’m good at things you pick up in about 20 minutes, like that rock.

The reason I know a sizable fraction of the populace outguns me is because of my college friend, who we’ll call Celeste because that is her real name.

Upon graduating, I took a job in a retail store where Celeste — who could sing, dance, act, write, and do higher math and is probably the smartest person I’ve ever known — had formerly worked.

She’d taken on a higher position as a manager at another branch. I didn’t immediately grok that I would be filling her giant, diamond-studded stiletto heels.

Because she was my friend, the manager believed I would be another Celeste. Fortunately, there were no auditions. Unfortunately, I kept letting the manager down.

I swam through viscous river of this manager’s constant disappointment. There would be no downstream, lifeguard, or raft.

Her face developed a permanent droop.

In my boundless hope and youth I threw myself into doing whatever I could accomplish. I organized the chaotic storeroom. I looked busy. I was cheerful.

I parallel parked like a champ in front of the store and tried not to let anyone hear me sobbing in the tiny washroom.

Trying harder accomplished one thing: it amplified and aggravated the disappointment, because I still wasn’t Celeste. The lines of the manager’s face grew and eventually, without knowing why, I quit.

Wanting It to Be Over

I don’t want to experience life with a numb awareness of wanting it to be over, yet whenever I wake up in the morning I realize I have a J-O-B, I want it to be already over.

I’d rather admit I’m the exact right person who will live up to the ideal, the prior candidate, some current whiz kid, or lately — AI.

I don’t want to be the misshapen puzzle piece that keeps falling off the table and getting lost in the carpet, then eaten by the dog.

Something about rubbing elbows with other jobsters makes me feel like I must measure up all the time, even when I’m not at the J-O-B.

I am an octopus with six arms, and I have looked in the mirror.

I’m acting a part I don’t want but I keep counting and re-counting my appendages, hoping maybe I was mistaken.

Despite my missing arms, I can commit fully to moving tons of gravel to landscape my yard.

I just suck at mowing other people’s lawns, despite my perfectly functional six appendages.

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years and recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress.