Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (57 page)

The meter readers is the bread of the whole company. Without these people being billed and having the money come into the gas company, the other employees wouldn’t get paid. You have to know how to read a meter,’cause if you make a mistake, it could be maybe the guy would pay another hundred dollars more. It’s kinda tricky. There’s four dials. The company gives you a high and a low. Let’s say 3000 for the low and 5000 for the high. It’s usually about 4000, right dead in the middle. You have to go there and make sure they’re using the middle. I can read a meter from twenty, thirty feet away.

There’s a guy been reading meters for eight or nine years now and he’s getting old. I can’t see doing it for eight years. I’d probably age incredibly. Because I’m bad with putting on weight anyway, and with this running I do. My wife bought me one of these walk-a-mile meters that you can put on your belt, little Japanese thing. I found out I walk about eight, ten miles a day. So I don’t have to worry about getting a heart attack for quite a long time. (Laughs.)

I usually start reading meters at nine o‘clock and with an eight-hour day I’m usually done by noon. I’m pretty quick. You learn to pace yourself. Usually if they keep you on a book long enough, you can tell if the people are home and which is a good home to miss, ’cause if the people give you a bad time, you say, “We’ll catch you in a couple of months.” If they took maybe a little too much time to peek through the window, I’m off. I’m rushed and they’re rushed.

My boss and the boss before him were meter readers and they would have the same book as I had. What was usually an eight-hour day took them four hours, so they’re not gonna rat on me. Five years ago, they were doing the same thing. It’s more or less going through the ranks. Like you’re a private, then private first class. You have to go up that way.

When I get home I’m usually calling out numbers to myself. Usually four numbers. Like the last house I read: 2652. I’ll be home and I’ll be going 2652, 2652, 2652. It’ll just be going through my mind: 2652. Like a song you hear too much.

 

“When I was a little kid I wanted to be a baseball pitcher. I went through Little League, Pony League, and went to college for a year and a half, when I got drafted. Baseball would have been nice. Good yearly sum.”
(
Laughs.
)

 

The gas company’s really been good with the pay. Out of every two weeks I’ll make about $250 clear after taxes—which isn’t bad. For being there a year, that’s real good—and working half a day. Every couple of months they’ll put in a nickel or a dime more. You don’t even have to ask ’em.

We’re starting to get young guys in now. The older you get, the more chance you have of being promoted. Over twenty-six we’ll say as being old. We have from eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They start flourishing at twenty, twenty-one. What they’re trying to do is get married people. They don’t want to hire eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds. Because they have a thing called curbing, where a guy could sit in his car and mark the numbers down themselves. Take an estimate reading. The computer would catch him, but it would maybe take three, four months. By that time, the guy would have six, eight hundred bucks and he’ll go work in a gas station or whatever. They just want somebody with responsibilities.

There’s big rumors going around that they’ll be able to call your phone number and it’ll divert to the gas meter, and the reading will come through on the telephone. I hope by that time I’ll be in a different field. But I like it for now.

Sometimes they’ll ask you if you want something to drink or a Coke. Then I’ll sit around and talk to the people, ’cause if they’re nice enough to offer me a cookie or a coke, I’ll say, “Sure” (laughs), and shoot the breeze for five or ten minutes. I wish it would happen more often. Then I’d probably get done at the normal time. I would probably take my time a bit more. Usually I have to go outside and get the hose going and sneak a drink of water that way. If they caught me, they’d wonder what I was doing. Most people are just preoccupied or overwhelmed with what they have to do, rather than bother with me. Maybe they have their laundry to do.

The big subject of conversation with us is dogs and women. “You shoulda seen this one in a bathing suit, real cute.” If you have a nice cute chicken, that kinda brightens up your whole day. If they’re younger women and they’re nice looking, we have a code we put on the card. We put a Q—that stands for cutie. Then the guy’ll stop and read the house for sure. But they’ve never gotten down to the nitty-gritty.

There’s been times when the little boy would let you in and say, “Go down in the basement.” I don’t do this no more. When I first started, I didn’t know any better. So I went down and the woman was doing her laundry nude. It shocked me as much as it shocked her. I had one woman answer the door nude. She told me later she thought it was her girl friend. I thought I was the electric meter man instead of the gas meter man when I opened the door. (Laughs.) Completely confused. Nothing’s happened physically yet. One of these days it will.

I do this one Jewish party in Skokie. The women there, I wouldn’t say they’re pretty wild, but they’re older and when they see a young man come in the house, wants to read their gas meter, you know. (Laughs.) It’s that kind of thing. It would depend on the women. I wouldn’t . . .

If you see a nice lady sitting there in a two-piece bathing suit—if you work it right and they’ll be laying on their stomach in the sun and they’ll have their top strap undone—if you go there and you scare ‘em good enough, they’ll jump up. To scare ’em where they jump up and you would be able to see them better, this takes time and it gives you something to do. It adds excitement to your day. If you startle ‘em they’ll say, “You could’ve said something earlier, rather than just jumping up behind me yelling, ’Gas man’!” You have to make excitement for yourself.

Usually women follow you downstairs to make sure that maybe you’re not gonna take nothin’. It definitely is a reflection. Of course, if she’s wearing a nice short skirt, you follow her back up the stairs. (Laughs.) It’s to occupy your day, you know? To pass the time of the day.

 

You have to be terribly subservient to people: “Ma’am, can I take your bag?” “Can I do this?” It was at a time when the grape strikers were passing out leaflets. They were very respectful. People’d come into the check stand, they’d say, “I just bought grapes for the first time because of those idiots outside.” I had to put their grapes in the bag and thank them for coming and take them outside to the car. Being subservient made me very resentful.

It’s one of a chain of supermarkets. They’re huge complexes with bakeries in them and canned music over those loud-speakers—Muzak. So people would relax while they stopped. They played selections from
Hair
. They’d play “Guantanamera,” the Cuban Revolution song. They had
Soul on Ice
, the Cleaver book, on sale. They had everything dressed up and
very nice
. People wouldn’t pay any attention to the music. They’d go shopping and hit their kids and talk about those idiots passing out anti-grape petitions.

Everything looks fresh and nice. You’re not aware that in the back room it stinks and there’s crates all over the place and the walls are messed up. There’s graffiti and people are swearing and yelling at each other. You walk through the door, the music starts playing, and everything is pretty. You talk in hushed tones and are very respectful.

You wear a badge with your name on it. I once met someone I knew years ago. I remembered his name and said, “Mr. Castle, how are you?” We talked about this and that. As he left, he said, “It was nice talking to you, Brett.” I felt great, he remembered me. Then I looked down at my name plate. Oh shit. He didn’t remember me at all, he just read the name plate. I wish I put “Irving” down on my name plate. If he’d have said, “Oh yes, Irving, how could I forget you . . . ?” I’d have been ready for him. There’s nothing personal here.

You have to be very respectful to everyone—the customers, to the manager, to the checkers. There’s a sign on the cash register that says: Smile at the customer. Say hello to the customer. It’s assumed if you’re a box boy, you’re really there ’cause you want to be a manager some day. So you learn all the little things you have absolutely no interest in learning.

The big things there is to be an assistant manager and eventually manager. The male checkers had dreams of being manager, too. It was like an internship. They enjoyed watching how the milk was packed. Each manager had his own domain. There was the ice cream manager, the grocery manager, the dairy case manager . . . They had a sign in the back: Be good to your job and your job will be good to you. So you take an overriding concern on how the ice cream is packed. You just die if something falls off a shelf. I saw so much crap there I just couldn’t take. There was a black boy, an Oriental box boy, and a kid who had a Texas drawl. They needed the job to subsist. I guess I had the luxury to hate it and quit.

When I first started there, the manager said, “Cut your hair. Come in a white shirt, black shoes, a tie. Be here on time.” You get there, but he isn’t there. I just didn’t know what to do. The checker turns around and says, “You new? What’s your name?” “Brett.” “I’m Peggy.” And that’s all they say and they keep throwing this down to you. They’ll say, “Don’t put it in that, put it in there.” But they wouldn’t help you.

You had to keep your apron clean. You couldn’t lean back on the railings. You couldn’t talk to the checkers. You couldn’t accept tips. Okay, I’m outside and I put it in the car. For a lot of people, the natural reaction is to take out a quarter and give it to me. I’d say, “I’m sorry, I can’t.” They’d get offended. When you give someone a tip, you’re sort of suave. You take a quarter and you put it in their palm and you expect them to say, “Oh, thanks a lot.” When you say, “I’m sorry, I can’t,” they feel a little put down. They say, “No one will know.” And they put it in your pocket. You say, “I really can’t.” It gets to a point where you have to do physical violence to a person to avoid being tipped. It was not consistent with the store’s philosophy of being cordial. Accepting tips was a cordial thing and made the customer feel good. I just couldn’t understand the incongruity. One lady actually put it in my pocket, got in the car, and drove away. I would have had to throw the quarter at her or eaten it or something.

When it got slow, the checkers would talk about funny things that happened. About Us and Them. Us being the people who worked there, Them being the stupid fools who didn’t know where anything was—just came through and messed everything up and shopped. We serve them but we don’t like them. We know where everything is. We know what time the market closes and they don’t. We know what you do with coupons and they don’t. There was a camaraderie of sorts. It wasn’t healthy, though. It was a put-down of the others.

There was this one checker who was absolutely vicious. He took great delight in making every little problem into a major crisis from which he had to emerge victorious. A customer would give him a coupon. He’d say, “You were supposed to give me that at the beginning.” She’d say, “Oh, I’m sorry.” He’d say, “Now I gotta open the cash register and go through the whole thing. Madam, I don’t watch out for every customer. I can’t manage your life.” A put-down.

It never bothered me when I would put something in the bag wrong. In the general scheme of things, in the large questions of the universe, putting a can of dog food in the bag wrong is not of great consequence. For them it was.

There were a few checkers who were nice. There was one that was incredibly sad. She could be unpleasant at times, but she talked to everybody. She was one of the few people who genuinely wanted to talk to people. She was saying how she wanted to go to school and take courses so she could get teaching credit. Someone asked her, “Why don’t you?” She said, “I have to work here. My hours are wrong. I’d have to get my hours changed.” They said, “Why don’t you?” She’s worked there for years. She had seniority. She said, “Jim won’t let me.” Jim was the manager. He didn’t give a damn. She wanted to go to school, to teach, but she can’t because every day she’s got to go back to the supermarket and load groceries. Yet she wasn’t bitter. If she died a checker and never enriched her life, that was okay, because those were her hours.

She was extreme in her unpleasantness and her consideration. Once I dropped some grape juice and she was squawking like a bird. I came back and mopped it up. She kept saying to me, “Don’t worry about it. It happens to all of us.” She’d say to the customers, “If I had a dime for all the grape juice I dropped . . .”

Jim’s the boss. A fish-type handshake. He was balding and in his forties. A lot of managers are these young, clean-shaven, neatly cropped people in their twenties. So Jim would say things like “groovy.” You were supposed to get a ten-minute break every two hours. I lived for that break. You’d go outside, take your shoes off, and be human again. You had to request it. And when you took it, they’d make you feel guilty.

You’d go up and say, “Jim, can I have a break?” He’d say, “A break? You want a break? Make it a quick one, nine and a half minutes.” Ha ha ha. One time I asked the assistant manager, Henry. He was even older than Jim. “Do you think I can have a break?” He’d say, “You got a break when you were hired.” Ha ha ha. Even when they joked it was a put-down.

The guys who load the shelves are a step above the box boys. It’s like upperclassmen at an officer candidate’s school. They would make sure that you conformed to all the prescribed rules, because they were once box boys. They know what you’re going through, your anxieties. But instead of making it easier for you, they’d make it harder. It’s like a military institution.