My First Bosses

I do more writing than can be considered healthy, and while writing on another website the thought came into my mind about the bosses I've had during my part-time employment opportunities I've had in my life.

The first boss I had was Bill. He was the head greenskeeper at the country club in our community and my mom somehow got me an interview there and I got the job. The job paid $3.35/hour and it pretty much involved cutting grass, raking sand traps and making sure the tees and greens were up to snuff.

Anyway, Bill was the full-time boss of assorted characters who lived in tents or did drugs or got kicked out of the military. What's scary is me and my friends did the grunt work for these guys. Bill never got any of our names right, but he was generally close. Hal (occasional commenter on this blog) was "Howell." I was "Brett." Craig was "Greg." Bo was always "This man right here." Jimmy was "Timmy." A morning would start out with, "Brett, I want you and Howell to take This Man Right Here and fix the tee boxes and sand traps. Timmy, you take Greg and get all the trash cans." He would come out to find us working, and while he was giving us instructions...no kidding...he would just start peeing while talking to us. He was infamous for sayings like, "Howell, if that's a straight line my ass is a Chinese typewriter." Needless to say, we imitated him and his sayings constantly...even if we hadn't ever seen a Chinese typewriter to know if an ass looks like one. He also painted the greens green to make them look good and used us to get money under-the-table by doing personal work for country club members.

After that, I got a job at a movie theatre...the Hoover Square Six (which was a larger theatre at the time). My first boss was Mary. She was a lesbian who wore Harley-Davidson stuff, a chain smoker, and trusted 16-year-olds with $35,000 worth of cash on the weekends. In addition, she wrote erotic short-stories for publication in pornographic magazines and would read them to us. She was cool as far as letting us break the company rules regarding tickets/popcorn for friends and she'd let us stay late and watch movies before they came out. Needless to say, reading pornography and leaving the office to hang out with the Rocky Horror late-night crowd while the kids balanced the books got her fired in pretty short order.

My next boss there was somebody who got promoted from our ranks, Jeff. He was in his last year of college and a business major who immediately started to apply what he was learning in his new role. The problem was two-fold: First, he was "one of us" before his promotion and used to break the rules as much as we did. Second, he was an effiminate guy, which made it hard for us to take him seriously when he'd get mad at us and really YELL things like, "I don't care if you are about to set the record on Galaga (there was a gameroom in our theatre), you have to go clean up theatre five...A Christmas Story just let out!" Lisp the "S's" and then try to keep a straight face. Later on, he wouldn't hire me back during Christmas breaks because I was notorious for letting people in free and one of the "secret" evaluators was a friend of mine and I let him in free. Ooops.

My last one was Bob, and this was a job at a sports memorabilia store I had to help put myself through seminary. He only came in late in the day to check on sales, but he called about every hour to find out, "What're we up to now?" He said things like, "The customer is NOT always right. Most of our customers are idiots...why else would anyone pay $350 for an autographed poster of Ray "Boom-Boom" Mancini?" Also, be wary of any autographed item you buy because, while we purchased autographed items only from reputable distributors, occasionally the Certificate of Authenticity would get lost. In such cases, he had his own certificates of authenticity, which I wondered why I couldn't just sign stuff ourselves and then authenticate it. My favorite story was when he called me one night late and said, "Brent, I just heard from a friend of mine at the hospital that Mickey Mantle is going to die in the next day or two...get on the distributor Net and buy up to $2,000 worth of autographed balls and photos and anything else you can get. We can make some fast cash if we work this right." He also sucked his teeth constantly.

So, I thought it'd be fun to share some of YOUR first-boss stories...