I have cleaned toilets. I have swept and mopped floors. That's how I know that you're supposed to put Wet Floor signs away when the floor is dry and not leave them out all the time, misleading people about physical hazards when what you're really doing is making a disgusting joke and expressing your hatred of women.
I have cleared tables. I have washed dishes. I have served food.
I have answered the phone. I have operated cash registers. I have stocked shelves.
I have folded clothes that were thrown around by customers who decided not to buy them. I have said "Can I help you" more times throughout my working years than I could count.
Sorting garbage at a recycling plant was one of the worst jobs that I ever did. Even though you wear gloves and a face mask, by the end of 8 hours you are covered by dirt and particles of trash. It also gets into your lungs.
I have sung karaoke twice. The first time I sang on a week night in an almost empty bar, to an unusually nonjudgmental audience that also wasn't pained by what I sounded like. Encouraged by my success, I marched into the same bar a few days later, on a Saturday night when the place was full. I sang a much more difficult song, which had a much faster pace, larger range, and was sassily about unhealthy love from which you're having trouble detaching rather than the song I had sung before, which was an unthreatening song of farewell and best wishes. Also, I sang on the second night right after having worked at the recycling plant, when my lungs were full of garbage.
I had never meant to sing for money, and I didn't the first night or the second night. If I had continued to sing after my first song on the second night, it's possible that someone would have offered me money to stop.
Once you've been in a psychiatric unit, you're stigmatized for the rest of your life. No matter how smart you "were" or what you had achieved before you were a mental patient, all of it is considered the past and your identity as a mental patient is considered your new and permanent reality. That identity is indelible; it doesn't matter if you were in the hospital a year ago or ten years ago. The stigma is that you're stupid, untrustworthy, weak and, paradoxically, dangerous. That's not to mention dirty; every stigmatized person or group in the world is always called dirty.
The only jobs that I or most of the people closest to me thought I could do after I was in the hospital at 17 were service jobs and manual labor, as if that type of work is not stressful or demanding and requires no social skills to be successful at it. It's work that is low-paying and not prestigious, which is why people think it's all that someone with a psychiatric history should attempt.
That's the Web address of a 2007 article that I read online today. It's about work that Americans don't want to do, and why.
If corporate America were outsourcing thousands of the job of being a celebrity, politicians would have gotten a lot more voter feedback about it for a lot longer.
I don't know how to fix the economy. I do know that "bad" jobs are always hiring. I can't even get or keep those any more, because of what the conglomerate has done to me.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, January 3, 2016 @ 2:29 p.m.
