A bad day at work

They come out of nowhere, like a barbarian horde attacking from an unseen mountain pass. They burn the senses and drown the spirit in depressed exclamations of doubt. They remain in our souls and hearts long after their initial foray into our consciousness, causing prolonged bitterness and resentment at our perceived tormentors.

Ah, the dreaded bad days at our jobs. We all have them. I had a particularly bad one recently.

It all started innocently enough. It was a beautiful spring day, and as a manager of a golf course, I knew it was going to be busy. Washington had an unusually frigid and precipitation-filled February which bled into the beginning of March, balancing the September-esque December. Many days in the shortest month were in the teens, coupled with snow, sleet, freezing rain and other really cold stuff falling from the sky that defies precise description. The course remained covered in a casing of rock-hard frozen water – not exactly snow, not exactly ice, but some odd, impenetrable combination of the two – for several weeks. As a result, the golfing masses were itching to break free from hibernation as soon as temperatures permitted.

Perhaps you've seen the Fed-Ex commercial where a man, clad in argyle pants, v-neck sweater, golf spikes protruding from the bottoms of his shoes and a leather golf glove attached to his left hand, comes to his boss's door and announces that his daughter is sick and he needs to pick her up at school. The boss takes one look at him, and though he knows he's being deceived (I guess the golf glove was the dead giveaway), he releases his worker, who surely find the nearest set of links post-haste.

I'm pretty convinced that scenario actually did play itself out this past Tuesday, and the vast majority of the hooky-playing executives in the DC area decided to come to my course, because we were packed from the moment I walked in the door at 10:30 AM. There was absolutely no chance to get coffee and settle in to the day, as is my wont; no chance to sit down and read the paper for 10 minutes; no chance to make my way around the property and give the place the once over, making sure everything was kosher.

Nope – it was absolute bombardment from go. Never a good start to any work day. Immediately I had to put out several fires, then give a golf lesson, which took me away from the pro shop, where I was obviously needed more. My boss, the GM of the whole facility, was not pleased to have me gone for an hour, and though I had a perfectly reasonable explanation, it did not matter. The boss was in a mood and I could sense it, and having plenty of experience in bad work days, I just let him have his anger without getting defensive. "Stay out of his way today," I thought to myself.

Next, it being so early in the season, I had training to do. While training someone is a necessary evil, it's also kind of a pain in the rear. Explaining a computer system that is already second nature to me is not what I really want to do when I come in to work. So not only was I swamped with customers, I had to train someone as the same time. My nerve meter was inching toward "last."

It was about this time when relish-gate happened. You see, I accidentally mixed up some relish condiment packets with the chopped onion packets. Hey, they look exactly the same from the outside; a reasonable mistake. Unfortunately, my boss saw me do it. Apparently, he's had bad experiences with relish in the past, because this sent him over the edge.

"Dammit, Evan, that's relish! You're putting them in with the chopped onions! You need to get your head," points to head, "out of your ass!" points to ass.

If I were a little younger, I would have walked out of the place and never come back. They don't pay me enough. But these things happen, and so I proceeded to continue with my incredibly busy day as if nothing happened, which wasn't easy.

It was then that I discovered an excellent method for dealing with a bad day at work, and I am going to impart this method to you, the loyal reader, at no additional cost. All you need to do it think of the worst possible job you can, and imagine yourself doing it. Then imagine what your life would be like if you did that job every day, and you should begin to feel better and not so full of self pity.

For me, the worst possible job was revealed when I was watching a National Geographic special on the subcontinent of India. In India, there exists what is known as a caste system, meaning that there are established class levels in society, and if you are born into one particular class, that's where you stay. There's no moving up. There's no amount of entrepreneurial spirit that matters: if you are middle class, you stay middle class and that's that.

On the bottom rung of the Indian caste system lays the untouchables. No, there not butt-kicking, take no crap law enforcement agents tapped to wipe out organized rime; they are the most unfortunate folks who do the lowly, most disgusting jobs for the smallest amount of money.

And at the low-end of the untouchables are the sewer workers. Their job, seven days a week, 365.4 days a year, is to unclog Indian sewers.

With their hands.

It's true. Every day, some poor untouchable bastard crawls down into the bowels of the New Delhi sewers, and with his bare hands, reaches into smelly Delhi shit and moves it along, freeing millions of pounds of anal excrement from buildup. Again, he gets no tools for this; he does it with his bare hands! Now that's a shitty job!

So remember folks – bad days happen we all have ‘em, and bitching, whining and moaning does no good. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop crying. And if all else fails, think of that hideous reality of having to act as a human cesspool for foreign poop.

If that doesn't work, maybe it's time to go into business for yourself.

Evan Redmon is a manager of a public golf course in Washington, D.C. and writes a few things about stuff sometimes. Contact him at evanredmon@yahoo.com if you really want.