Hey Kids, Pay Attention In School
A playlet from Instropection Theater
written by Bill on March 22, 2025

Hello, nice to meet you. Do I call you William, or Bill, or..?

Bill's fine, thank you.

Okay Bill, have a seat. Now what made you decide to come see a career counselor?

I don't have a career. And I need counselling.

What is it that you're looking for?

Oh, you know. Any job that doesn't involve lifting boxes will be fine.

..All right. Why don't you start out by telling me a little bit about yourself.

Right. Well, my favorite color is purple. I prefer plain M&M;'s. I own a copy of the original pressing of Final Fantasy Tactics, not that Greatest Hits rerelease with the shitty green edging. Also, I have never, this is true, I have never ridden a horse.

I meant more in terms of skills.

Oh. Okay. Well, I got all golds in Blast Corps. I only managed a couple platinums, but I think you'll agree, those things are pretty darn tough--

Skills that would apply to a job. Why don't you just tell me about your educational background.

Ah. Well.. I graduated high school.

What was your GPA?

Um.. I don't remember.

You don't remember.

Well, dammit, I didn't care about any of that stuff. I was in high school. My all-consuming goal was to not be in high school anymore. I didn't want to go to college, I didn't want to plan for my future, I just wanted to exist in a state of being that did not involve taking notes on the stamp tax. So I didn't pay any attention to my GPA and now my records are in a box in my parent's attic somewhere which is just as well because my grades weren't great because I didn't pay attention which is why I don't remember my GPA.

So what did you think you were going to be doing after high school?

Um.. I guess I figured I'd land a shit job temporarily while I prepared to do something more worthwhile.

And yet you're here because..

..I'm sick of my shit job and I can't find anything else worthwhile.

*cough*

Well it's not like I'm not doing anything else. I write, you know.

Oh, do you? Novels?

No..

Short stories?

No..

Columns?

No..

Instructional pamphlets?

No..

Why don't you just tell me what you write.

I write articles. On the.. ahem. On the Internet. Don't look at me like that. I write on the Internet and entertain people all across the globe.

Articles about what?

Well, my last one was about.. a man in a costume making suggestive gyrations with a large gun extending from his crotch. In front of children. Look, just forget I said anything about writing.

All right.. Let's focus on your work history then. Tell me about that. Start from the beginning.

The first job I ever had was in high school. My mom worked as a bookkeeper at a car dealership, and she suggested me to her boss when they were looking for a file clerk. I came in after school about three days a week, changed into a polo shirt and slacks in the bathroom, and worked until 6. Just taking a stack of papers and putting them into their respective folders, and trying not to slip in the trail of goo the car salesmen left behind.

And you were dissatisfied with this job?

I certainly didn't enjoy it, but I only worked about 10 hours a week, so I didn't mind it all that much. I'm not even sure if 10 hours a week qualifies as a job. It's like having a really boring hobby.

Do you feel that you gained any experience, or learned anything on this job?

One day Gallagher came in to buy a car. So I learned that Gallagher lives in Florida, I guess.

...

Or maybe it was his brother pretending to be him buying a car. You remember that?

When did you leave that job?

When I graduated. I moved away to Virginia. Once I was there for a while I got a job at Wal-Mart. Eventually.

Eventually?

It took some time. When they first showed up they had a big cattle call for everyone who was interested to come on down and get an application and be interviewed and all that. This is a little town in the rural south where the only thing more popular than NASCAR is being laid off from a manufacturing plant. Saying "hey does anyone want a job in the air conditioning where there is a low likelihood that your hand will be detatched via a bandsaw" is equivolent to walking into a boy's summer camp and asking if anyone's interested in a blowjob. There were more applicants than there are people living in the county. And in between Larry who's worked in a saw mill for 15 years and Joe who's got three kids to feed and helps out at his church is me, wandering in with a 10 hour a week filing job under my belt and hippie hair and a yankee accent. And then they ask me the question, you know that question. The worst Goddamn question in the world. The one I knew was coming and yet I still had no answer for it.

Why do you want to work at Wal-Mart?

Why in God's name does anyone want to work at Wal-Mart? They want money, dammit. I wanted money. I was too much of a pussy to say so, of course, so I had to come up with something fast. Something positive about a company I have no positive feelings about. I tried my best. My best wasn't very good.

What did you say?

I said I liked Wal-Mart.

What about them did you say you liked?

No, that's exactly what I said. Those exact words. "I like Wal-Mart." Like a fucking mental defective who responds to the question "How are you feeling?" with "I LIKE SOCKS." And that's all I could get out. That's all I could manage. I couldn't -- stop laughing, dammit -- I couldn't even come up with something to say after that to support my flimsy statement, partly because I had no reason to like Wal-Mart and partly because I had stunned myself into silence with the utter stupidity of what I had just allowed to escape my festering maw. I am not good in interviews. But I'll bet you know that already.

So you didn't get the job?

No, I didn't. Presumably I lost out to someone who loved Wal-Mart. Maybe I would've gotten in if I had applied to be a cashier instead of only cart pusher or unloader, but given this history of public relations I'd be afraid that I'd see someone come up with a cart full of groceries and shout "HEY ARE YOU BUYING FOOD" then open the register and start eating pennies.

So I applied again later. I got interviewed again, and was actually all set to go until I had to provide ID. I don't drive, so I didn't have a license, and I'd never bothered to get a state ID, so it degenerated into a debate over whether I could use my student ID from high school as verification of identity.

I don't think that works.

Well of course it doesn't. It's a piece of laminated paper with my name and address in Florida on it in my own damned hand writing. But that should make it the most authentic ID in the world, shouldn't it? I mean, if I wanted to fake an ID, why would I create something so shoddy?

So you didn't get the job again?

Yeah, I think she found a replacement for me by the time I got back to her about the ID thing. So I waited some more. Finally someone I knew who worked there got me another interview a few months down the line and I finally got in as an unloader.

So.. Twice thus far you've had to have someone on the inside get your job for you?

..What are you implying?

Nothing. So what does an unloader do?

Takes shit off the truck, stacks it on pallets, takes the pallets out to the floor. Some of the dumbest hicks in the building stacking tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise haphazardly on planks of wood and then yanking them at 30 miles per hour down narrow aisles packed with customers. Ever wanted to know what a paint can does going around a corner at high speed? It ruins my damn shoes, that's what.

I take it you found the job unsatisfactory.

Throwing boxes around is dull, but that wasn't really the problem. Everything else was the problem. Co-workers were the problem. Managers were the problem.

What was wrong with your co-workers?

The truck was an important factor in our jobs, as you can imagine. The bigger the truck, the more stuff on it, the more work we have to do. So it became a routine to clamber up over the boxes to look out over the tops to see if you could see where the back of the truck was, and how many loose packages were back there. I usually did it because, hey, I'll admit, I'm not exactly a commanding presence. I probably don't weigh as much as some of the boxes on that truck. But there was this one guy, let's call him Dickface, who wanted to be the one who gets to announce to everyone how much is on the truck. Because clearly if he's just given the chance, everyone will be so impressed with how he did it that a Hollywood agent will pop out of the dairy cooler and say "That was beautiful! I'm gonna make you a star! And this milk is out of date!" Now, Mr. Dickface is about 6'4" and about 300 pounds. He starts his ascent by delicately and deliberately choosing the smallest and weakest boxes to step on, and eventually gets up to a long, thin box laid out flat. He, of course, jumps on it, and it makes a delightful crunching sound. He gets off and lifts the box up to the light to see.. ah, what does that say.. "GE Flourescent Tubes." Well, nothing to worry about then. He then giggles like a little girl and throws the damn box on the conveyor belt that we use to roll boxes out of the truck, and when it lands a cloud of God knows what puffs out and all over us. What's in those things, anyway? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to inhale it, though.

Always try to keep that in mind whenever you're shopping at a big retail outlet. Look at whatever you're considering buying, and remind yourself that a 300 pound amateur wrestler jumped on this. And possibly rubbed his bare ass on it as a joke.

What was wrong with your managers?

Dickface was never fired for any of his shit. In fact, he still works there.

Well that can't be the only--

One of the unloaders who used to open bottles of fruit punch and drink out of them, he wasn't fired either. He was in his 40s and he was always leering at 15 year old girls. I should've dropped a box on him.

The guy in sporting goods who shot a crossbow bolt out of his department, through hardware and into a shelf in domestics while demonstrating it for a customer, he wasn't fired. He also claimed he was an ex-Hell's Angel and Secret Service agent. Because when you want to protect the president, you pick the biker who beats the shit out of people with chains. And you know how many former goverment agents are demonstrating weapons in discount retail outlets. Incorrectly.

The one unloader who knew what he was doing, who had a decent head on his shoulders, he loaned his employee discount card to his brother. He was fired on the spot.

I see. But you didn't mind the job itself?

The job I was hired for, no. I'll lift some boxes, I'll pull pallets. Fine. Unfortunately that accounted for about 4 hours of our day. Inexplicably, unloaders are required to work 40 hours a week without exception. So the rest of our time was spent stocking. They were cutting everyone else's hours because payroll was too high, and they even had a sign over the time clock that said "NOT ONE SECOND OF OVERTIME OR I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL KILL YOU," but I'm putting rolls of Charmin on the shelf at midnight waiting for the last hour of my shift to drag by.

And you know what they tell you if you finish stocking a department? If you've just finished doing the work that is supposed to be done by the full fucking crew of overnight stockers they hired specifically for the purpose? "Go zone." You know what zoning is?

Can't say I do.

You are instructed to walk up and down the aisle, adjusting packages so the labels face forward and they are all even on the shelf. It's the intangible concept of futility granted physical form. The same friend who got me this job is freaking out because she's being yelled at for not getting all her work done, because she isn't scheduled enough time in which to do it all, and I'm standing in paper goods at 12:30 in the morning adjusting paper towels by one micron so when 6 rolls around the first mound of pork rinds and beer shaped into a mocking imitation of a human being to ooze out of their trailer can knock them all down again by the sheer force with which waves of stench emminate from their pores. And then their mutant spawnlings can snatch the rolls off the floor and pretend they're bongos until they get bored and toss them back on the floor again somewhere in the automotive department.

I hate Wal-Mart.

..So.. What do you think you learned from this job?

The people above you have nothing to do with you. I thought I'd learned it, finally, in my last years of school, skipping classes and shirking work and seeing my grades and even my attendance record be entirely unaffected. But I guess I still held on to the primitive notion that your supervisors may at some point take time to actually examine what it is you do. Instead, it became increasingly clear that the work you perform has absolutely no bearing on your bosses' perception of you. I could've gone out onto the floor, found an old woman, beat her to death, cut off her head, shoved my hand up her neck into her mouth, and used it as a clamp to haul the bigger boxes around and all my manager would have in his notes would be how many boxes I moved. And he'd probably mark me down in my evaluation for being slow because I took the time to remove her tongue.

People say the public school system is in shambles. It's a world in which people of low to moderate ability can manipulate and charm their way through while those who work tirelessly are laid as the foundation for the roads the aforementioned charmers walk on. I can't think of a more accurate simulation of real-world experience. Not that I'm claiming to be one of those workers, I know I'm not that dilligent. Nor am I really a charmer, though. I guess I'm the guy on the side of the road shouting "I LIKE ROADS" until I eventually wander too far in and get hit by a car.

So what came next?

Next is the job I have now, the job I'm contemplating quitting, which is why I'm here. I'm an inserter.

Which is..

I put the ads into the newspaper. By hand. Standing all day.

And what, besides the obvious, don't you like about this job?

They say it's a part time job with "variable hours." Just a note for the future, variable hours means "whenever the fuck we feel like letting you go." Last night we worked from 1 PM to 3 AM. Variable hours means you can be working a part time job that gets you 5 hours of overtime on bad weeks. It's one of those things with inherent negative spirals, where more work means longer hours which means more people quit which means even longer hours for those who are left which means even more people quit..

I don't think anyone would blame you for wanting to leave a job like that.

Wouldn't they? I'm not so sure. I have a horrible guilt complex about this sort of thing. I mean, I'm writing a whole article about it, aren't I?

Shit, my fourth wall just fell down, be right back.

After all, that's the whole point of this. Am I the bad guy? Am I lazy? Am I an ungrateful little brat for hating the jobs I take when there are people all around me in this town who have to work 60 hour weeks in saw mill or a coal mine? I mean for Christ's sake, it's a part time job where you can have a 13 hour shift. That sounds bad. I've been there 8 months and I want out. Yet there are people who have been there for 10 years. 10 Goddamn years of putting papers into other papers. How can I feel right complaining when there are people who take all this shit year after year?

Or is it their fault? Do they deserve what they get? Are they the goldfish with 12-second memories, realizing the bowl is closing in on them right before they forget they're in a bowl at all? They could leave at any time too.. or can they? Does their willingness to suffer negate my own problems? Do my feet ache any less because someone else decided this is their zenith of their professional lives? Or is my own suffering simply an amplification of minor concerns to fill the void left by lack of any "real" problems? I don't have a family to feed, I don't have debts to pay.. But are such things required to justify unhappiness?

That's deep, man.

I'm not trying to be deep. And I honestly don't want to sound like a 14 year-old angsting in his Livejournal.

Too late for that.

But the question just keeps coming up in my mind.

I know why I hate my jobs. I didn't at first, but I've learned. I hate them for the same reasons I take them. I'm afraid to do anything I'm not sure I can do. I'm scared to death that I'll be standing in front of a customer or a boss or anybody and I won't have the answer any reasonable person in my position should have. So I take jobs that are so far beneath my ability that I could have a fence post lodged in my brain and still manage to perform my duties so long as I could find an appropriately dapper hat. Then the tedium and the uselessness of my job grate on me enough that after a few months I'm in a desperate panic to get out so I can start the whole process over again. That's what makes me feel guilty in the first place. It's not that I can't do it, it's that I don't want to do it. But hey, life isn't fair, there are starving children in China, etcetera, etcetera.

So what is it you're looking for?

...Someone to give me a weak justification for something I'm arguing about whether I need to justify to begin with so I can feel better superficially. You really don't make this easy for me. And you're me.

Fine. So there isn't an answer. Some help you are. I'm going back to writing.

Try instructional pamphlets.