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    A Job for Joe
    A Job for Joe
    A Job for Joe
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    A Job for Joe

    By Joe Paris Lee

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A Job For Joe is an enigma wrapped in a phenomenon and topped off with nice hair. A side-splitting CV and a riotous resume, it's awash with agonizing alliteration. You'll laugh until you cry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 25, 2013
    ISBN9781626754447
    A Job for Joe

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      Book preview

      A Job for Joe - Joe Paris Lee

      9781626754447

      56 Jobs in 60 Years

      56 jobs in 60 years. That means if you take out the first 18 years spent being born, learning to walk and talk and smoke and drink and lie about sex, I’ve had more than one job for every year of my life. And mixed in there are a few times when I needed a break from all that working, so I was either unemployed or went to university … a fine line.

      So it seems I am the proud owner of a book-length resume, albeit a short book. Actually, it’s more like an extended essay. Or it could be a novella if it was fiction, which it’s not, although I have given the truth a tweak here and there.

      Also, I have a feeling that the list in front of me is not complete. In fact, I know that as I begin to tell the story of each job the more forgettable or short-lived ones are going to want their miserable little tales told too.

      There’s a chance that previous employers might read this and know that the three-page CV I gave them was shrinking the facts a bit. Okay, a lot. I’d like to apologise now for, well, not so much lying as being guilty of the sin of omission. But let’s face it, I wouldn’t have got the job otherwise and, more importantly, they wouldn’t have had the pleasure of my company for ?? hours/days/months/years.

      So I’d like to dedicate this tiny tome to the unemployed. If you’re lucky like me—planning has nothing to do with it—before long you’ll have so many jobs you’ll have a job trying to remember them all.

      Mowing The World

      I really cut my employment teeth at home in the years before I finished school and was pushed kicking and screaming into the world. In fact, I probably had more than 56 jobs in that period alone. They made me the prolific job-holder I am today.

      My father believed that while Sunday morning should be spent in the service of God—kids at Sunday School, father a swim at the beach—Saturday morning owed its existence to the great god, Work, what the ancient Greeks called Chores. And we, his children, were its unwilling disciples.

      Many of these chores took the form of an initiation into the dirtiest work that human beings can ever be asked to perform. Cleaning the kitchen grease-trap was one particularly nasty example: a fetid well filled with everything the kitchen sink couldn’t stomach. Firstly you needed rubber gloves, which were totally ineffective because your arm always ended up sinking below the level, thus filling the glove with the evil brew. And to sink to that level you had to lie beside the stinking maw so you could reach the vomit, because that’s what it smelled like. My father called it character-building.

      Could it get any worse? Well, the next chore carries a warning: it contains scenes that may cause nausea, dizziness or utter disbelief. I’ll say the words ‘Septic Tank’ ¹ and that should give any sensitive souls time to leave the room.

      For those of you left, I need to give you a physical picture of myself, because that is what qualified me for the task of unblocking the septic tank. Or perhaps I should really give you the picture of myself that my father saw when he realised the septic tank was blocked; a skinny, hairless toilet brush is what he saw. In fact, I’m surprised he didn’t pick me up by my feet and shove me into the tank and scrub me around in there. But that would have been verging on cruelty.

      No, it was much kinder just to have me stand in the tank—no grease-trap-like descriptions needed here—and reach down and grope around with my little sticks of arms. But my head was still poking out into relatively fresh air, and you can’t get much more compassionate than that.

      Not all chores, however, involved retching. There was lawn mowing, the great suburban pastime. Which brings me to the title—Mowing the World—chosen because it’s only a slight exaggeration. It was actually one of my mates who first used it when he was asked what I was doing: ‘Oh Joe, he’s mowing the world.’

      Our house sat on about 1/4 of a hectare of rocky hilltop and the lawns were so positioned that you would mow a section, then turn the mower off and lift it up or down onto another section and continue in this vein for about two hours until all the various levels were done. But there was one perk: no raking and no catcher. Paul, my friend next door had to rake AND mow, although it was only Europe and most of Asia.

      Now we come to a chore that gave me my first experience of someone resigning from a job. It was the annual family bindi² hunt. It was a simple exercise really, and extremely character-building according to father. We would line up and advance slowly across the lawn, ripping the painful little prickles out with our bare fingers and dropping them, already breathing their last, into the communal bindi bucket. Seen from the air it must have looked like a police line searching for evidence of a murder. It was painstaking work and felt like it took all day, whereas it was really only a couple of hours of backbreaking slog. But that was still too much for Ollie, my sister’s boyfriend, who had joined the hunt to impress my father. He only lasted about ten minutes and then he raised himself up to his full height—he was a big man—and stormed off, muttering loud enough for us all to hear: ‘Bloody ridiculous!’

      We all looked at each other and then quickly looked away, not wanting to see in each other’s eyes the realisation that maybe Ollie was right. And none of us dared glance at our father because we all knew the story of the emperor and his new clothes. In fact he’d told it to us.

      And now we come to the final bizarre assignment in this catalogue of chores: The Great Possum Push. My father developed a lifelong obsession with possums, so much so that in his retirement years you could call at any time and Nancy, my stepmother, would say, ‘He can’t come to the phone right now. He’s up on the roof, trying to get rid of the possums.’ And it all started with a cry in the night from my sister, Cathie.

      Later she was to tell us the story in all its terrifying detail. How she was lying in bed, unable to sleep for thoughts of the latest cute, long-haired musician (and he’s from England!) swirling through her teenage brain when a scratching noise came from the ceiling. Cathie looked up to see a clawed furry paw waving at her. She let out her best Beatles concert scream, which brought our father rushing into the room just in time to see the offending paw disappear. Then there was the sound of much scurrying above while the possum found his way out of the roof space and across the aluminium roof of the extension room recently added to the house.

      After calming his daughter, my father began hatching his fiendishly clever plan to protect his brood from this ring-tailed invasion. First he found the possums’ front door that they used to enter their new digs. Then he set up a hose pointing at the spot, after which he got me to stand in the room below while he stood at the tap. Then came the master stroke: I would stand there, listening for furry footsteps on the roof above. (It felt like I was standing there all day but it was probably only a couple of hours.) And at that fateful sound, I would call out, ‘Now!’ Or maybe it was ‘Fire!’

      At this, my father would turn the tap. There would be the sound of water squirting, a squeal or two and then the pitter-patter of possum beating a hasty retreat. And we only had to do

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