I Used to do That for a Living; Landing and Leaving 108 Jobs Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 | Page 29

I Used to do that for a Living

You want me to do something, go find the foreman and tell him to ask me.” It’s easy to imagine
how the higher-ups would view such insubordination. I suspect that they counted it as part of
the bargain whereby they got an unskilled worker who was dependable, hard-working, physically strong, and willing to put in long hours. For
low pay. They may have found it in their interests to tolerate such an attitude, but they would
never reward it. Relations with his employer
were always acrimonious. He never expressed
the least loyalty to any of them, nor they to him.
Hubris inclined Jack to mistake utility for indispensability, a misconception that bosses were always glad to disabuse him of. He never grasped
the first rule of working for a living, which is,
your job is to keep your job.
Not long before Jack died at seventy-one he
told me that he never had a job he liked. When he
was younger he would’ve said that with pride, as
though it made manifest his resolve, his strength
of character. But at the biblical age of threescore years and ten, it could almost have been
an admission of defeat. He’d left the workforce
a decade earlier, after the on-the-job heart attack that put him in the coronary-care unit. He’d
had bypass surgery, gone on Social Security and
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