I received a box in the mail a couple days ago. It was filled to the brim with copies of The Best Software Writing I. Since “brim” is not a standard metric, I’ll be more specific: the box contained five (5) copies of the book. You may henceforth use the phrase “filled to the brim” to mean that a particular container with the capacity to hold five (5) copies of The Best Software Writing I is full of something. I give this to you. It is my gift.

You’re welcome.

I pulled a copy of the book out of the box that was filled to the brim and flipped through it. The first thing I did, of course, was go straight to my chapter and delight in seeing one of my comics in print. Talk about nifty.

Next, I marched over to my neighbor’s apartment, a guy I’ve never met outside arguments at 3:00 AM about whether or not it’s appropriate to be blasting the disco remix of Cher’s “Do You Believe in Life After Love” well after most decent people had gone to bed (or at any time, really – it’s an awful song), pounded on his door, and, when he opened it, thrust the book, open to the chapter with my comic, in his face, and yelled, “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO F!#$ WITH THE RODAWGG ANYMORE, BUD – I’M SOMEBODY NOW.”

He didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about, and proceeded to punch out the numbers 911 on the keypad of his phone. I took this as an invitation to come back at a better time, returned to my apartment, and thought that I might just try reading the book before using my newfound fame and glory as leverage with which to break the souls of my enemies.

I plopped down on the mattress, my only piece of furniture (unless you count the exercise bike, kitchen sink, and toilet), and opened the book. I didn’t know what I’d find, but I could relate to Groucho Marx when he said “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” I expected articles on the caliber of my own, but instead found a book full of well thought out posts with correct grammar and coherent points.

One of my favorites was a post called EA: The Human Story. It’s by the wife of a guy who works at Electronic Arts, and it’s all about the insane working conditions. 85 hour weeks, no overtime pay, no comp time, no this, no that – just a whole lot of Suck it Up and Deal. Terrible.

It got me thinking about some of the crappiest jobs I’ve ever had. Having worked quite a few, it was tough to pluck the brightest jewel from the crown, but I think it might have been a job I had for about six months at the one and only Hollywood Video warehouse. Although Hollywood Video, or Hollywood Entertainment as it’s now known, is currently a super gigantic corporation, there was a time in the early 90s when it was fairly small, and it was during this time that I worked my bad mojo for them.

For $6.50 an hour. Oh, yeah.

My job? I arrived to work at some ungodly hour, usually before the sun had risen, chugged as much coffee as I could get into my body as a counter to the depression that hung on my muscles like bags of sand, and then got started…

…alphabetizing.

My job consisted of other physically strenuous duties, but alphabetization was the most challenging aspect of my short Hollywood Video career.

When a new Hollywood Video store opened, it sent an order in to the warehouse with a list of videos it wanted to stock. For this to work quickly, we needed to have a collection of organized videos waiting to be “pulled” and shipped to these stores. My job was to take thousands of videos from large incoming shipments and place them on twenty foot high shelves in the warehouse where they would rest until pulled and shipped to a new store. The area of the warehouse where I worked looked like a Hollywood Video built for giants.

And that was it.

The process:

– Grab a cart

– Start loading it up with videos from an incoming shipment

– Alphabetize the videos on the cart

– Wander around the aisles for the next few hours, placing videos where they belonged on the shelves

– Lather, rinse, repeat

Every bloody day. Nine to ten hours a day.

I dreamt regularly of the alphabet. I saw letters flying through my consciousness. Forwards. Backwards. In new directions you never knew letters could fly.

What was hard about the job was that it wasn’t very hard. It was just mind numbing. Four billion years of evolution, the most impressive computer in the universe lodged in each of our noggins, and the best use to which it could be put at the time was alphabetizing and shelving copies of Barbarella.

Sure, there was some prestige associated with the job. Back when the numbers of Hollywood Video stores were small, there was a good chance that I had personally touched every video in every store that had been opened in the first half of 1995. That was kind of cool.

But then there were the days when I got chewed out for five minutes because I was one minute late from lunch. People act on principle and do things that they think “fit” with whatever role they’re playing. My boss at the time, for example, had zero (0) perspective and thought that five minutes of yelling was an appropriate response to one minute of lateness. That, he thought, was what bosses do. They yell when people are late from lunch without regard to turning one minute of wasted company time into six minutes of wasted company time.

There were other demeaning aspects to the job. There was a period during which videos were not being placed on the shelf in anything resembling alphabetical order, and this led to a crackdown. One morning, my team was assembled for a test on alphabetization. We were each given forty videos and told to arrange them on the ground in the appropriate order.

It’s one thing to be a 17 year old high school dropout doing this and to be getting it right. It’s another to watch someone twice your age struggle for several hours to figure out where the letter “J” belongs in the sequence. It’s even worse when you show up to work the next day, see that your team is short one person, and to know that some forty year old was fired because he couldn’t perform a task that most seven-year olds could get right.

For $6.50 an hour.

The final straw came when I tried to get a 25 cent an hour raise. For two months I brought it up with my screaming boss, and for two months he told me that he was working on it. After two months passed, my patience ran out, and I was looking for an excuse to leave anyway. I made my excuse the 25 cents an hour that Hollywood Entertainment wouldn’t give me.

And then I left. And Hollywood Entertainment lost the only person they had who could reliably alphabetize videos.

The truly sad thing is that, as far as bad jobs go, this one isn’t even anywhere near the bottom of the pile.

So… do tell.