[1256] Sample Size

Of the 30-ish small, part, or full-time jobs I’ve had in 23 years, handing out food samples isn’t one I thought I’d be writing about in a dedicated way. The first instinct is always to contextualize and list my previous jobs or accomplishments. There’s a “shame,” in a sense, that I would find myself, ever, doing something like standing in place for 6 hours, parsing chips, jerky, or cold brew coffee into little cups.

It’s all self-imposed. I know how to reframe on a dime. After all, I’m doing the noblest thing my sick and pathetic country pretends to respect. Working! I dressed the part, showed up on time, followed instructions, and await my $240 for 2 6-hour days doing something that also allowed me to power through a giant podcast backlog simultaneously. My coworkers were nice, customers inspiring in a way I will digress on shortly, and in comparison to the thousands of rocks I shoveled with my dad on a grave he was hired to maintain, I’ve certainly put myself through considerably more work for $100 recently. (He also took me out for a baller lunch steak, so, you know, my dad’s cooler than yours.)

My ADHD self is not equipped to stand/sit still. The first 2 times I’ve signed up to hand out samples, I didn’t have the podcasts in my ear. I got by chatting with coworkers, dancing out, play-boxing with the food around me, and finding “creative” ways to wipe down and clean the cart. As the bounds of my sanity get tested, I move towards crowd-work. Often, I get a smile or laugh. Awkwardly, I get zero acknowledgement at all. But there’s this sensitivity and fragility that presents itself in the moment sometimes.

Sam’s Club is like a family spot. There’s so many kids I don’t think I would have otherwise noticed except for their very different posture in the approach and/or ability to grab a sample. Then there’s the parents who almost insist their child take in whatever clearly unhealthy thing I’m pushing. I appreciate the ones who have internalized early that stopping and waiting and asking for permission. It’s nice to see. I seriously wonder about the parents who hand their child something they clearly have no capacity to even hold.

Then there’s the “let me touch every piece of food reaching for one cup in particular” type. These people are under the impression that food taken from a package at the same time as other food is actually fresher in the back. Invariably, they will have extremely dirty, like cartoonishly gross fingernails and/or open sores on their hands really emphasizing how much you can’t just let it go what they’ve touched along the way.

Mostly, though, it’s the weird oscillation between people insisting they say “hi” or nodding as they walk by, and those who don’t register you’re standing there at all. You’re in the flow of a thousand people’s weekend errands. Your status as the bringer of potentially tasty free noms is explicitly indicated well before they actually arrive at your booth. Your existence as a person altogether equally indicated.

It’s the definition of a job that could/should be taken over by a machine. The gig doesn’t even work for Sam’s. The handful of people asking me where things are in the store, and I’m like…I don’t even work for the company on my hat, technically. I remember as a kid being wildly excited about Sam’s Club samples. You can feel the institutional knowledge that has kept it a sizeable franchise for so long. You bet your ass my lunch every day I worked there was between $2 and $5 to get full from their cafeteria.

My supervisor really liked me. She was so thankful they didn’t have to really train or babysit me. She liked that I was polite and on time. She was relieved that I could read the instructions, operate a 3-bin sink, and innovatively served iced coffee, get this, on ice, layering the cups.

Because I’m back to normal broke, 3 shifts, 6 hours a day, 45 minutes away, technically, pays my monthly bills. It’s why I may continue to do it as a side job. I still don’t have running water, which is probably around $2,000 to get fixed unless I discover a magically cheap way to safely pull and repair my own well. I owe my dad about that much as well. I’d like to throw a few grand to a couple friends for work on my car and support in my business endeavors. The bear-minimum isn’t going to cut it.

Incidentally, I think I just got hired onto a new counseling job at 35/hr, independently contracted, in which the executive director already sent me the forms to fill out for direct deposit and logging into their billing system. If it’s not a raging dumpster fire, I could potentially make all the money I just talked about needing in a month of full-time. Full-time counseling, maybe casework, or maybe crafting the team she discussed wanting to build to help scale what sounds like a massive influx of cash they just got. I could work somewhat remotely. I can craft my own lesson plans and hours. It sounds like an improvement on the model of a similarly sized company I had to quit when they just kept hacking away at my paycheck and killing everything I built.

I talked with the executive director for an hour, and she both emailed and called me within a day or 2 of me filling out the application. This was already a good sign. I’ve had to beat on doors, proverbially, for weeks/months to get hired on at places allegedly desperate to hire. I’ve spent a week “on-boarding” because they couldn’t be bothered to send a pre-populated email with digital forms. The basics appear to be in place here already, and those in social work long enough know when like recognizes like when you’re talking expectation setting and drama navigating, so clicking on that level quickly did not register as superficial and going-through-motion-y.

I’m not ashamed to do gigs. I’m ashamed of the country I live in where someone as educated, motivated, and capable as me is often finding himself wholly adrift, feeling behind, and lost in ambivalent woods. I know what that means for people less capable than me. I know what that means for those who don’t have a dad who will offer a spot to help him with his extra income job, then feed them robustly without hesitation.

I knew, somewhere, sometime, a job like this one was incoming. My temporarily embarrassed, slightly impoverished or inconvenienced state is, in the righteous telling, a choice about what I won’t do for money. It’s significantly moreso a choice than it is a story of my irresponsibility, disregard, or laziness. I’ve had plenty high-enough-ish paying jobs to keep pulling in funds if I was willing to explicitly destroy what I value about myself or how I learned to care about other people.

Knowing it’s a choice to gig, and knowing how I get there, is an important step-by-step story of agency and the salience of consequences. If I don’t feel like I’m “doing the right thing,” I get very, dangerously, angry. I get self-destructive. Manipulation tips from “tempting” to “practical.” I don’t ultimately really want to be here or alive if I push the conclusions all the way through. I’m erasing myself. I’m lying. I’m so inconsistent so as not to be able to recognize myself. That’s a terrifying and dark place to be.

My “energy” or “awareness” is born of a certain through-line you might identify through everything I write, job I work, and goal I set. I don’t get to just pop in and out of being like the littlest particle. I need to exist somewhere in the noise the whole time, or I seek annihilation. I may not have the whole picture of the many levels on which I can exist, but I can certainly recognize when I’m under attack. Better stated, I’m always under attack, and I can tell when fighting the wrong fight is destined to lose.

This is why I maintain my sense of self relative to time, my relationships, and my interests more than my job or money. This is why I turn inward and contemplative when I recognize I can talk to a dozen people that day, and none of them will be capable of hitting that “real” place without seriously destabilizing their mental health or self-conception. They didn’t come that day to discuss the precarity of gig work, and I’m not offering them the revolution.

It’s “normal” to come to a giant warehouse and pick up a box of crackers that will feed you for months. It’s normal to be tickled pink by the silly joke over the flavor of the latest Dorito. I’ve been in Terre Haute. I’ve seen More U.S.A. and gun t-shirts and hats than anyone should ever have to. It’s normal for these folks to think nothing of what the government they voted for is doing in the background to kill hundreds of thousands overseas as they walk their 75“ TV out on a pallet cart. You could be accused of being in your sober and sound mind just carrying on like it’s a normal Sunday after church milling about the food library in your nicer clothes.

The control that capital has to put us under a spell is amazing. I’m not in that store unless I need money. Many overheard conversations are about the money saved by buying in bulk. It’s a wonder if those who hesitate and question whether they can really take the free sample, are they so caked in capital dynamics, they feel wrong or scared if it doesn’t cost something? Somewhere inside, they just can’t believe it!

And they’re right. You gotta be a member. You might be denied by the flimsy authority bestowed upon me by my hat and apron. What a curious thing it is to witness a dozen people eyeball the treasure on the tray as they slowly creep on by. Then, as if by licensing hoard, to swarm behind an emboldened sampler who heard about how these Doritos are healthy and they’ve been meaning to try them! I sold something like 40 bags, if you think millions spent on bliss points of flavor don’t sell themselves. Audible expressions of joy and the sentiments about the deliciousness did abound.

Simple food for simple folk. Simple consumer role to occupy. Simple jobs. Simple asks. Bound up in infinitely complex power and need dynamics, but if you value new chips, it does a lot of the heavy lifting and cuts through the noise.

[1174] Work Sucks, I Know

Before I let the day get away from me, I very much need to write.

For about a month, I’ve done a handful of gigs from Instawork. They’ve involved being “event staff” for Taylor Swift concerts and, last night, Bands of America, where I dutifully manned an escalator for 7 break-less hours.I also broke down and loaded equipment after an international food-cooking and awards event. The displayed hours you’re supposed to work haven’t matched up once. The job descriptions are woefully incomplete or misleading. The pay is never higher than $18/hr, but more likely $14-$16. I live at least an hour away from the companies utilizing the app.

At the event breakdown, we were initially tasked with wiping down greasy, milk-spoiled heater rack containers, outside in the cold, with a handful of rags and sanitary wipes, and no running water. So, those didn’t really get clean. We mostly moved things like tables, boxes, mats, banners and poles, and cheap furniture from one side of the convention space to the other. There’s no formal leadership structure, so an emotionally unwell obnoxious guy who can’t help but to drag from his cherry cigar every few minutes might be “in charge” because he’s familiar to the client.

Now, you can be on your feet the entire shift, 8-12 hours. You can have no idea when/if you’re getting a break or be on break longer if they can’t proceed with something, say, because the union members need to complete a task first. You might have 5 to 10 not-really bosses who will pop up and question what you’re doing in any moment, like I did when, “I can’t have you sitting here on your phone” guy clashed with the girl who literally told me 2 minutes ago to go on break 2 hours into my shift. They might ask for volunteers for a position and then find out, because of the population they’re employing, 2 got fired an hour in, 1 is too high to work, and a family emergency pulled a supervisor back home, so can you shift over to another thing instead? Thank you for your help. (As though you’re not getting paid.)

I don’t know how other people feel, but I feel like trash. I feel like the left-overs that a company is trying to collect off plates and call a meal. It’s an entitled class-based feeling. The things I observe in these environments are typical of low-income work. It’s a tense, brooding, barely-contained chaos at all times. The expectation is to repeat, “It is what it is” and, “I give it up to God” ten thousand times until your shift is over.

As I was putting down a set of tables, a shelf edge hit the bridge of my nose. As I was walking with a large box, I shin-kicked a big black electrical device. I mangled my shins on a few other things during the warehouse gig. I wore callouses into my pinky toes and had sore feet for days after walking around in my only black shoes well past their expiration. I had an old-man hunch reminiscent of my grandfather when he used to go on walks.

Part of what informs feeling like trash is the lack of communication or clear expectations. When I first arrived at the Taylor concerts, they had us standing around for up to an hour after when we were supposed to clock in. That means you show up early enough to park 15 minutes away, walk to get there early, wait around for an hour, and then think you’re not getting paid. Yesterday, the clock-in supervisor explained she clocks everyone in at the shift-start time regardless of when we actually get out and start working. The missing clarity on this foments frustrated comments from others waiting and contributes to the overall poor-person angst.

The next is the details like being given a jacket you're not convinced was washed after last shift. It's them providing a hole-in-the-wall “break room” that’s a pass-through storage and large-equipment moving space, which, last night was left open to the cold so band equipment could be moved through.There’s one elementary-school seating table, the ones with the 8 circle attached seats that fold and roll, and maybe 15 people will be on break, so you can sit on the concrete, stand more, or chance an electrical box is sturdy. It's finding your own jacket on the floor after your shift because you had to leave it on a rack of everyone else's who can't be bothered to care or pick it up when they knocked it off.

You can feel each supervisor’s general exhaustion. The largest one had a conversation with someone that went like this,

“Are you already checked in? Why do you have a uniform on if you’re not checked in?”

::mumbles, silence, blank stare::

”Were you here earlier? Did you take your uniform home?“

::Points in the distance, mumbles something about someone who checked him in::

”Okay, but how do you have a uniform?“ ”Are you from the first shift?“

::Mumbles::

”Were you working earlier today?“

”Yes.“

”Okay, we need to get you checked out, go down there and turn stuff in.“

It was longer than that and the questions were asked several more times.

Then, like far too many things in modern life, you’re constantly being rated. If you show up early, do everything asked of you, but slip in any way or just rub someone the wrong way, you might open your app after an exhausting shift to find out you got a ”1-star“ rating, mocking you in the face of your otherwise 5-stars. You don’t know who it came from, why, but it’s an invitation to micro-analyze your every interaction with coworker and supervisor alike. It’s also a not-so-subtle suggestion that your job is eat shit, like it, and ask for more, not have any reasonable human expression about the conditions or chaos. To what extent these ratings have any real impact on whether a shift is offered to you or an employer is willing to hire is unclear, but you have no reason to assume the best.

Gig work is akin to “scabbing” to me. Each shift you’re undermining how your culture might otherwise approach labor, time, or what to do if you break your nose or ankle working for someone. You’re essentially constantly begging for mercy. You hope the tipper is in a good mood. You hope the spot you’d otherwise stand in for 8 hours has a chair. You hope you don’t get too hurt or looked at like a “problem” who can’t hang and deal. You hope that ambiguous 1-star rating won’t haunt you indefinitely. As such, you look for little reprieves.

The first day of the cooking competitions and awards, they were still taping while we were tearing things down around them. You, broke, having driven an hour and 20 minutes for maybe* $120, get to scrub spoiled-milk smelling containers, then pass by the scent of the best-smelling food all day. On day two, when filming is done and the cooking competitors are wrapping up their make-shift kitchen areas, if one passes you a world-class brisket, you’re going to eat it, and in my view, deservedly so. Of course, you’re then going to illicit a shitty comment about the “time crunch” (mysteriously absent until now) we’re under, and, “You’ve already had breaks,” from the also-gigging guy pretending to be in charge. What would the under-class be without petty internal squabbles about who is or isn’t really working* as they resent that you took 2 minutes to enjoy the luck of your cold scraps?

Each shift, I find talkers. I generally get people talking, so I’m willing to believe it’s a me thing, but each person comes with a large backstory, opinions, and way in which it really sinks in why this is the kind of work they are doing. There’s sometimes a baseline class-indicated short temper and aggression. It’s stories told through crooked or moldy teeth and bad breath. It’s lengthy theories and explanations for “the system” which, you know they haven't spent any real time or effort building a case for, but is on the back of personal experience, rumors, and cultural truisms.

I’ve been told cancer isn’t a real thing, been schooled on vaccines by someone who was adamant about their capacity to google. I learned of a gentleman’s chronic strained testicle situation that the military offered to pay to fix, but he was wavering because of how much he enjoyed smoking weed. I think I got him to understand how scary and consequential chronic pain can be though, so he might actually choose wisely after our talk. I heard a story of someone raped, ignored, abused and labeled, and forced to engage with her attacker every day for years afterwards. She now plots revenge and finds the strength to barely keep it together. There’s the guy who was retired from administrative work who just likes interacting with people and doesn’t want to sit at home. There’s the guy with, allegedly, 20 properties across Indiana and Ohio, some worth more than homes in Carmel, but for reasons I can’t discern was stuck, just like me, waiting for the endlessly self-congratulatory Avon marching band to get the fuck off the field and go home.

The handful of women, in particular, who could see the less-than enthused look on my face as the night dragged on who said something like, “Thank you for being here! I know it’s a long night!” I think this is what pissed soldiers off who get “Thank you for your service” lol. If you cared, you’d be polite and leave. If “The system” cared, it’d have me off at the stated time. If “society” cared, I wouldn’t resent having my time bled because I’d be getting paid enough and live close enough to where I work that I wouldn’t be getting home at nearly 3 AM. I would have had a break and snack in a basically acceptable space and not been left adrift indefinitely on no information. If you’re the kind of person to thank the tired or grumpy gig-worker after you’ve overstayed your welcome, you’re rubbing salt in the wound.

I’ve referenced several people with what I would consider debilitating conditions, in one form or another, from which I don’t suffer. I’m not sick. I’m not proud of what I don’t know or understand. Teeth aren’t rotting out of my mouth. I haven’t been raped, labeled an addict, and treated with naivety or ambivalence for years as I beg for help while my abuser mocks me in real time. I’m not even, necessarily, married to the nature of a gig style or environment, as I start back in towards my white-collar 40-hour space early tomorrow.

My goal, is never, to merely complain or lose perspective. If sitting around and waiting or driving late as though I don’t prefer to stay up all night, is the worst thing that happens to me for $150, no one’s crying for me. Therefore, my goal is to hopefully paint a picture of the nature of our cultural narrative disparities. The people at the bottom of the income, neighborhood, options, or general capacity to be much beyond frustrated meat to be shuffled around occupy an entirely different universe of expectations, language, and ultimately values that guide their decision-making.

If you ever presume to be “well-meaning” or a “problem-solver” or from a place, like Avon, where your band has more spent on it in a week than the person who helped you to your seat will make in a year, where would we even begin to bridge that gap? You don’t “fight for $15,” you demand $30. When you’re auditing, well first you bother to audit, where tax dollars are going, you’re investing in schools and healthcare. When you’re organizing, you start local with simultaneous lines into a broader federal or cultural vision. Then, you stay on that message and effort for decades.

I’ve been offered a dozen opportunities to view myself through the lens of the culture which breeds gig work. I’d be reasonable in walking away with a conclusion that my time doesn’t matter. What I know or whether I’m competent at my role is secondary to occupying the space in service to a performative agenda. Regardless of who I’m working with or where they are coming from, I will need to accept their “rating” and live in fear of unfair scrutiny and punishment if I get out of line. And the way to cope? Chronically engage in it, like you’re addicted, until you normalize the self-abuse. Silence and shit-eating become wise moral virtues. Criticism, not genuine criticism of an operation or “the system,” but of yourself, your others in your small ilk, becomes the self-corrective.

It doesn’t take some mastermind evil cabal to orchestrate things this way. Attention is limited in every human brain. Rich people are doing rich-people shit, not slaving away over how to cut you 1,001 times when 2 or 3 normative language strokes or business practices will set you to task cutting yourself indefinitely. It’s the same reasons and forces that find normative balance which undermine my faith that people will change or fight or better account wholesale. Trump got elected. People want to blow shit up. But Trump isn’t going to blow up the systems that keep them oppressed, just more of the extremely fragile things that barely contribute to keeping them going. Fuck, maybe ironically this is what provokes a proper revolution? I doubt it, but one can dream.