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Jobs I’ve almost had

To continue from last week’s ruminations on working at the cannery, here’s another half written job adventure from my past. In theory, I have better career options now…

    This is how I almost went deaf in one year: I walked into the Westin Bayshore approximately eight minutes too late to attend an info session and become a customer service rep for Alaska Airlines. The woman packing up the registration table told me there would be another in a few weeks; I thanked her and walked back out onto the Seattle streets, slick and gray with the ambient humidity so prevalent in the city.
    I’d been looking for a job for the last month and a half, and had racked up a pretty dismal record. Even the coffee shops didn’t bother to call me back.
    Since I was already downtown, I decided I might as well as try and find the office for Princess Cruises, where I had forgotten to go to an interview the day before, and offer my apologies for being a space cadet in person. A fifteen minute walk took me to Belltown, and an elevator took me to the fourth floor, where there happened to be an information session starting shortly. I chatted with a number of women hanging around to provide information, took a test to prove that I could type what I heard on a headset, and that I was able to competently use a calculator. A few days later, while I was on the phone with a my alma mater’s career resource center trying to figure out how to network myself into employment, I got another call, offering me a job. The next training class would start in two and a half weeks, just after I got back from visiting relatives for Thanksgiving. Happy to be able to pay rent, I said yes.

    Bright and early, at eight am on November thirtieth, I stepped off the elevator and joined my fellow trainees in a small conference room. The Seattle office, I’d been informed, was a smaller sattelite of the main Princess operation in Santa Clarita, California. They were Princess Cruises, we were to become a part of Princess Cruises & Tours, which handled the addition of land packages to the actual cruising. During the training period, if we were late more than twice, or if our average test score dropped below eighty-five percent, we could continue our employment search elsewhere. Here was the paperwork to fill out, and here was the employee handbook.
    The Princess dresscode dictates “business casual,” which means no logos, no t-shirts, no jeans, no facial piercings, and no sandals or sneakers. Jeans, t-shirts and sneakers may be permissible on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, which are designated “casual” days. On the occasion that a Seattle team may be playing, it is permissible to wear a team jersey for the Seattle teams. Jerseys for teams opposing Seattle shall be frowned upon.
    Lest you think this strict, the dresscode for Northwest Airlines customer service agents dictates the ways in which an agent is allowed to wear the different company issued pieces of the Northwest ensemble. The red sweater is not to be worn over the polo shirt. Except for skycaps working the curb, the sweater may not be worn with shorts. Skirts must be knee-length, no longer, no shorter. The red scarf is to be worn around the neck. It is not to be worn around the waist (see below for acceptable belts), nor is it to be worn in the hair. And let’s not even start on the regulations for footwear, which cover color and heel height.
    The training period was mainly memorization of codes. We started with airport codes. Hartford – BDL. Toronto – YYZ. Seattle – SEA. Portland – PDX. Washington-Dulles – IAD. Orlanda – MCO. Since the hurricanes, the code for New Orleans seemed ironically appropriate – MSY, messy. We remembered Louisville, SDF, as “southern deep fry.” After the first morning, we started at 7 am, and I called my boyfriend during our first break, when he was usually on his way to work. ‘What about Portland, Maine?’ he’d interject into conversation, picking random cities we hadn’t been tested on and I didn’t know.
    After the airports, it was the specs on the ships, each of which can be referred to by a two letter code, or by a single number or letter, which don’t neccessarily correspond to the two letter or the name of the ship. The Grand Princess, AP, or merely A. When searching for sailings, you put in AP. When you find it, the voyage number starts with A, as in A615. The 6 is for 2006, and the 15 for the fifteenth voyage the ship has made that year. A615, specifically, would be a seven-day itinerary in the Caribbean out of Galveston, Texas, but that part I only learned with later experience.
    The ships not only have reference codes, they have deck plans, and tonnage, and year when built. Random semi-famous person who was on hand to christen the ship. Even numbered cabins are on the port side, which is also the left side. Starboard is the opposite. Cabins are divided into four types. Insides have no windows. Outsides have windows, but there’s a difference between obstructed and unobstructed oceanview. Some cabins may have a lifeboat in front of the window. Balconies have balconies, and suites have sitting rooms.
    We progressed further, watched powerpoints on the destinations, and began to make practice bookings in the training version of the computer system. Various celebrities, friends and relatives were scheduled to go on the most exotic itineraries, and didn’t even know it. We ran out of made up names and booked Mr A Passenger, traveling with his wife Mrs B Passenger, or the Jetson family, the Bradies, the Simpsons… One girl, the trainer told us, had always booked herself travelling with Brad Pitt. I booked Che and Castro, Lenin and Stalin, Bush and Kerry, Bush and Blair. When we practiced removing passengers and adding new ones, Bill Clinton decided to travel with Monica instead of Hillary, and then Chelsea didn’t want to go at all. Since they were in an inside cabin on the bottom of the ship, I can’t blame her.

    Then training receded into an impenetrable blur of worksheets and early mornings, followed by the first heart-stopping afternoon on the phones. They moved us all down onto the floor, set us up in two “pods” worth of cubicles. The phones were agonizingly slow. We waited, headsets adjusted and readjusted, sweaty palms gripping pens. For five, ten, fifteen agonizing minutes no calls reached my pod. Talk was hushed, as we waited to see who would get the first call. ‘Beep beep,’ the warning prompt in your ear, and suddenly a live travel agent on the other end, assuming that you would have the answers to her questions. Suddenly they were upon us. First one voice broke off conversation, then another, echoing each other like a corporate version of ‘row, row, row your boat.’
    ‘Hello and thank you for calling Princess Cruises and Tours, this is Hello and thank you for calling Princess and Hello and thank you for calling Princess may I help you today? help you with today? today?’

My first salmon job

Another half written essay while I’m doing NaNoWriMo.

I started working at the cannery the summer after I turned 16. My parents insisted that I find a job, and I tried hard. I hated talking on the telephone, but I made a list of all the places in town I thought would be decent to work at, and called them all. Plant nurseries, book stores… The woman who owned the bookstore hired me briefly to touch up the paint on the outside of the building. From menstrual blood red, she’d painted it pumpkin orange. Or maybe the other way round–in any case it started out a wild color, and ended up another wild color, and no job inside the building was offered. In retrospect, it was probably for the best — if I couldn’t handle calling people on the phone, how would I deal with customers? For all my love of reading, I didn’t know enough to recommend anyone anything.

Off to the cannery I went, over my parents’ protests. Well, I suppose my mother didn’t protest; she was glad I’d be occupied. My father, however, didn’t understand why I would stoop to such a job. When he moved to Juneau in the seventies, he told me, he had pledged to himself that no matter how bad it was, he would never work in a cannery. For me, I had made my own promise to never ever work at a fast food restaurant.

To become a fish processor, the main qualification is being a warm body, at least to begin with. Standing in water and handling mostly frozen fish, you didn’t stay warm very long. I got a parental release, filled out my very first IRS forms and joined the day shift. The foreman was named Jeannie Day, appropriately enough. She was a middle aged woman who was motherly enough to look at me, still painfully shy and awkward, and set me to an appropriate task: roe.

Another young worker ferried me in sky blue plastic baskets, covered in blood and slime, filled with fish guts. I stood at a table covered with a huge white block of plastic, like the cutting boards we had at home, only five feet long and three or four feet wide and sorted salmon roe from the rest of the guts. A basket full of just roe was rinsed in a big vat of salt water brine, drained, and measured into five gallon buckets. A bucket containing forty pounds of roe got a lid, and then went onto a pallet, and the pallet went away with a forklift to a truck and then to a larger plant, where Japanese technicians did something else to it. I didn’t know what, but one of the forklift drivers quoted me an outrageous per pound price that roe was sold for at a Japanese holiday. I counted buckets one day, and estimated that, during a twelve hour shift, I handled enough roe to pay for a house.

I was paid $6.25 an hour, which seemed like a lot, but also pitiful compared to the value of the roe. Later, I learned that the roe was what made the money – often processing the salmon flesh was done at a loss. If there were too many fish waiting, male fish would be the first to be discarded.

I learned a lot about fish that summer, mostly about their insides. The roe, called ikura in Japan, was beautiful, and I learned to tell the different species apart from the variation of the eggs. A salmon is not simply a salmon–there are five species of Pacific salmon, each with two names. The biggest are kings, or chinooks, which never came through the line. Reds, or sockeye, have a tight skein of eggs, in a red color which matches the flesh of the fish. Silvers, or coho, are very similar to reds, though the eggs are perhaps a little paler in color. Pink salmon, also known as humpies for their distorted spawned out bodies, have roe of an almost yellow cast. Where the skeins of the reds were compact, the pinks’ skeins were loose and voluptuous, with colors that shimmered even under the fluorescent lights. They are the most highly prized, along with the roe of chum, or dog, salmon. Chum roe was opalescent like pink roe, but bigger, and orange and would be the most beautiful if chum salmon didn’t seem to have more parasites than any of the other species of salmon. Because of the parasites, or because of a tendency towards grayish flesh, chum salmon are the least appealing to the Alaskan palate. As the moniker dog salmon implies, they are often used to feed sled dog teams.

My second summer at the cannery, I started to branch out a little from the roe, and spent some time as a grader — looking at filets of salmon as deciding if it was an “A,” “B,” or “musher” as quickly as possible. Oh, and weighing them as well. If the line was backed up and the fish had gotten warm waiting for attention, they would get red splotches on their white stomachs, a phenomenon referred to as “belly burn.” This affected the quality, or at least the saleability of the fish. Bite marks and bruises from run-ins with seals or other predatory marine life also affected the appearance of a fish. An obvious bite mark, and that’s a musher.

Jeannie Day was gone, the whole operation had moved to a different plant, rented from another company which was contracting, and the night foreman had become the only foreman. With only one shift working, we weren’t limited to a twelve hour work day. During the high point of the salmon run, in July, there was a week of two of fifteen hour days. This produced conflicting feelings in me — a fifteen hour day was better than a ten or twelve hour day, because it meant more hours of overtime paid at 150% of my normal hourly rate, but it also mean longer time standing, elbow deep in slime and blood, watching fish go by, pulling roe from intestines.