the most unusual job a vagrant ever had

the most unusual job a vagrant ever had

fiction
edward w pritchard

Some time when I was in college, its confusing to remember now, I started on the punishment of holding somewhere between twenty five and thirty different and unrelated jobs and professions in the course of my so called career. It wasn't  exactly my fault that I developed no security in life or went beyond the novice stage in so many ways of earning a living, every time I applied for a job I got it, although usually I was totally unprepared for the actual work involved in the day to day routines, and then after a lot of stumbling around, and a cloud of mental confusion on my part, I was sort of loved out of that particular business, although I was never actually fired or given a bad reverence. the plain fact was I looked properly to be in business and I was polite and intelligent especially for the first twenty years or so of my time in the commercial world. Later I developed an attitude toward free enterprise, capitalism, and the class system in America because of my lack of progress up the corporate ladder, dearth of security, and later dearth of the rewards and fruits of a life well spent in America of my time and place. But I digress

The most unusual job a vagrant ever had was when I worked down in the basement in the old vault, the one with the twelve foot thick cement walls lined with steel and the electronic timer on the impregnable steel door, that no one from the outside, bosses or fellow employees could open after I entered at nine AM until the end of my eight hour shift and half hour for lunch each day Monday to Friday back in 1986 at the old Goodyear bank there on main street in our home town. I was in charge of the loan collateral in a one man department which included a plethora of unusual items that over six hundred loan officers had diligently acquired over a fifty year period just before our friendly small town bank that was spectacularly successful was acquired in merger with the large New York bank and ran into the ground at least when it came to customer service and efficiency .

I had a CD player down in my job in the vault and listened to two or more  complete CD's each day from the thousands we had as collateral, and used a very fine thick leather chair to sit on, also collateral from a bankrupt car dealers estate, and here's the good part, I smoked some of the marijuana that was additional collateral on the Briar's estate loans back before the concept of medical marijuana existed, that I deemed a good way to relieve the stress of a boring day. That job routine lasted day to day Monday to Friday for about fifteen glorious months until that awful day I opened a special letter from our company President who I met once or twice when receiving an award for a job well done down there in the vault, a letter which I tore in half as I read the eleven reasons why the upcoming merger with big New York  made sense to the employees and stockholders of our small town Bank. Well the jig was up and I was back in the job market again, older but no wiser.

Later in my careers I specialized in watching the children and things like that and eventually qualified for the Social Security pension system here in America but sadly never got a corporate pension as well because other than working for more than two years in a law office as a runner once I never accrued the mandatory thirty years in one assignment to receive a defined pension plan from a benevolent employer. Somehow I am happy with my lot and seldom blame the system, it's the system, for my own personal shortcomings having taken the philosophical position that no one owes anyone a living or their daily bread that I heard someone say once somewhere or the other.

that's about it: a little advice from one in the trenches, or one crying out in the old wilderness on occasion