Put on an happy face

Some jobs are just outright unremarkable. This was one of them. Unremarkable jobs are dangerous for your health. They kill the soul more than even a bad job. See, it's like this: a bad job will show you what not to do in the future, or at the very least provide a sense of liberation via the I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude one can have at them.

An unremarkable job, however, does nothing but devour your life as if the time never existed. I mean, sure, smoking shortens your life span, but Christ, an unremarkable job puts an eight hour blank right where life could have been something at least notable. Eight hours a day. Six days a week. Fifty-two weeks a year. Do the math. Its truly horrible. Years can disappear into these jobs unnoticed because if you continue to notice, you drive yourself completely insane by the gruelling, unflinchingly repetitious nature of them. The only things an unremarkable job is good for is a paycheque, learning patience, and how to refine the most minute of actions.

In addition to being unremarkable, this was also a 'face' job. A 'face' job is any job at which you have to don another persona in order to work that job. All public service jobs are 'face' jobs. The 'face' is a terrible accessory for any being that is concerned with growth, pursuit of truth, or ethics. It requires that you put a layer of foam-rubber between your humanity and your reality so that you can function using a secondary reaction-set to given circumstances.

This is why you will often notice that public service employees will occasionally take an inordinate amount of time, or effort to do one particular thing--give them credit, they are functioning in a persona that only exists 40 hours per week, and it is not as good as their preferred one. The 'face' will also insidiously cause one to see the clientele as meat, simple units to be dealt with in x-prescribed manner, which is just as bad as clientele looking at the workers as just a means to an end.

'Face' jobs will make you look at people the same way an exterminator looks at roaches: an unfortunate necessity to making the daily bread. The worst thing about the 'face' is that it will teach you how to don a persona like a set of clothes which, though I admit can allow for deeper understanding, is generally used to sharpen deception skills. The 'face' is the sweetest poison you'll ever thank and the most distorting mask you can wear.

Yuppie would come in the Juice Shop, and Yuppie would go and I would work toward fluidity with each moment, but the 'face' kept my growth slow. By putting on that happy mask I'd become something that was more brick than being, more stone than soul. In order to tolerate the endless stream of customers, and the brutal monotony my soul would, for those few hours, close down by degrees and by other degrees transform... so, what am I saying?

Well, I suppose that the juice job has pretty much completely left me leaving only behind one skill: I can chop veggies for hours like a pro', and one snapshot little memory of a guy I worked with getting honestly angry at me when I said that I really despised Celine Dion.

He actually yelled, "Celine was singing when I met my WIFE, MAN! NOBODY DISSES CELINE AROUND ME!!"

Uh, okay...

And that’s all I really recall about the place. I was only there for three months, but Hell’s bells more should have been left than that!

I ended up leaving them suddenly to work making coffee drinks in a hippie dive which is, ultimately, for the better because any job that not only requires the 'face' but is also unremarkable can do nothing but damage to the soul.

If you find yourself in one, I strongly urge that you quit it immediately. Your life will be bettered. Not to say that making coffee drinks in the hippie dive was all that great, but at least I remember doing it.