The odd job

Okay, so the first thing I have to say today is this: I now have $78! This is absolutely terrific news and I could not be more excited about this. Whatever. Anyway, I lied in my last post. I’m going to postpone telling you about how I’ve lived out of my car and instead tell you about what I did last night. I made $60 clipping flyers to apartment doors. I found the job on craigslist and figured, hell, what better way is there to spend a Friday night. Whatever. The guy I was supposed to work for spoke on the phone like the job was some really important business. He told me it would take 30 minutes to get to the meeting place but I easily got there in 10.

So, I end up having to wait over 30 minutes just to get started with the job because he was late to the meeting place. This guy seemed like a scumbag right from the start. He dressed like he had money and I’m sure he probably did. He had one of those unnatural crushing handshakes that you could tell had been taught to him by some business partner or something. Once he explained the specifics of the job to me, he started walking over to his car. I followed him without question. Is it a little bit strange that it was implied of me to get in his car without question? I’m a sucker I guess, but hey, I’m still here to tell of it and I needed the goddamn money too, did I mention that? A two mile Range Rover ride later and I’m at the first apartment complex. He was looking at me a certain way before I got started with the job. It was as if he had something else he wanted to say to me but decided against it. I rolled that thought around in my head as I went from apartment to apartment clipping these “Own your own home!” flyers to apartment doors.

I felt like such an asshole performing this job because of the encounters I kept having with the residents. I wanted to avoid them completely, but it was impossible. Some of them gave me looks that clearly said “Really, you’re doing this job on a Friday night?” I felt pathetic and a nuisance to the residents. An hour and 300 apartments later, I’m finished clipping flyers on all the doors of the first complex. I get in the guy’s car and off we go to the next apartment complex. We’re at a red light and he gets a phone call. The ring tone on his cell phone was the weirdest one ever. The light turns green and he doesn’t accelerate right away. This phone call had to be some important one because his voice changed instantly to a more fake sensitive one. It was his ex girlfriend. He proceeds to tell all about his personal life. He met this girl on an online dating site and told me they had broken up 3 weeks ago and that he wasn’t expecting to hear from her. This dude was such a fake; it was so obvious. I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the car with this guy as he continued to tell me about how he felt about this girl. He used the words crazy, spoiled, and mean to describe her. That’s right, he used the word mean. He kept presenting these relationship situations to me that had such obvious answers. Clearly, I was only hearing what he wanted me to hear so that maybe I would take his side or something. “Once you’re fucking somebody, it becomes hard to break it off you know?” he said. “The sex becomes easy and you start making compromises, you know. Plus I’m 45, so you know, it’s hard to move on from someone when you might not meet someone for awhile.” No you weird manipulator, I don’t know, I thought to myself.

Even though I didn’t like the guy, I sort of sympathized with him somehow. It wasn’t because of his situation with this girl, which he obviously skewed in his favor, but because he was unhappy. People that are unhappy have a certain appeal to me. 3 hours and 1000 apartments later and I had become $60 richer. Because I had to climb multiple flights of stairs, sleeping in the back seat of my car felt more refreshing than usual.