I got into a pretty big knock down drag out verbal fight with Dan last night re who’s had the tougher childhood and adulthood. What a self-righteous dick. He’s not even thirty yet, I’m fourty-four and listening to him tell about his childhood and working life I’ve got his ass beat on ‘poor, pitiful me’ a thousand times over.

He was telling me about delivering papers with his father as a child, throwing up in the car because of the smell of newsprint and his father’s smoking. I countered with the newspaper delivery dispatch van I had to drive with the fat, overweight chain-smoker that bathed perhaps once a month. In addition to the ‘newsprint smell’.

He talked about having to do construction work. I countered with doing construction work, hauling carpet up several flights of stairs to the point where I was getting regular nosebleeds because the weight of these things put such a strain on one’s body. Then there was hauling the 90 pound bags of flour at the French bakery with the explosive French baker. That one cause me a herniated disc that I still suffer from, and always will. Then there was working as a janitor in an office complex where you had to move so fast so consistently that the first month of the job you finish off at the point of passing out because the aerobic workout was so intense. To say nothing of the strain it puts on one’s ankles, feet and back. I developed bone spurs on my feet, one of which is inoperable. So much for hiking in my beloved mountains anymore because of that one.

That was such a depressing job that towards the end it became an actual physical effort just to breathe. Imagine that. A job so depressing where you have to consciously make an effort to breathe in and out. That wasn’t the only job I’ve had like that.

Oh, and there was the seafood processing job. Fifty pound bricks of frozen fish thrown into a chopping machine, then once that was processed, working on a conveyor belt where you had to not only lift a fifty pound basket of processed fish, then you had to squat, move under the conveyor, stand up, and stack it on the opposite side, then squat, move back under the conveyor and do it all over again. Rinse, repeat for eight hours, sometimes ten. The back problem I had from lifting the flour sacks came back because of that.

Then there was working in a call center. Oh, that sounds nice, sit-down job, no heavy lifting, no aerobic workout that causes you to nearly pass out. Until you talk to person after person after person who wants you to die, die, die and wishes sincerely they could leap through the phone receiver just so they could personally rip your friggin’ guts out. On top of that are all the threats to ‘get you fired’. “I will be sure to do everything in my power to make sure you never work again.” “Do you know who I am?” So you go to your supervisor for support. Hah! Support! “Oh, you better do what the customer wants.” Then you do that. Then a few weeks later is your evaluation. “Oh, you did too much of what the customer wanted and cost the company money! So then, like so many other of your fellow employees you go to a doctor who prescribes anti-depressants just so you can cope with the constant yelling and threats and duplicity. It does nothing but mask the problem, it doesn’t fix it.

The best Dan can come up with is doing some moving jobs, doing some construction jobs, and how, he’s unemployed, doing the minimal work he can to get by, and getting rent money from his mother. I’m unemployed now and tried getting money from my mother last month. The only thing she could come up with was sixty dollars. Sixty friggin’ dollars . . . Pansy whining shite.
Oh, and in addition the bastard gets to go to *college*. Bastard. Doesn't have to work unless he really, really *wants* too, has his brother provide the money for college, has his mother pay for rent, has his 'pretend girlfriend' for . . . whatever. Self-Righteous Dickhead times a million.