The Hard Dollar

There are days like tonight where the money I make comes at quite a sacrifice of sanity. Every time a large sense of failure as well as ineptness seeps into my mind questioning the entire purpose of existing in the first place. Old grey hair weather beaten malnourished unkept discarded throwaway men circle the parking lot looking for parking space at the Las Vegas Convention Center dressed in the same clothing they have been wearing for the past thirty years. Their appear use to give me a great deal of laughter and thought in my younger days working as a laborer, now time has played its cruelest joke making one of them. This sense of humility and humbleness more than likely fuels my desire to return to such jobs where the gathering of people might resemble a typical weekend NASCAR crowd or line down at the local food bank. The style consits of beat up jean shorts, casino themed giveaway t-shirts, and non descript athletic shoes. However, one of the first things I hear a couple of fellow laborers talking about are the recent purchases of luxury sedans, hourly wage earners on a six hour call can afford seventy thousand dollar automobile when they give off a vibe of someone you might run into walking the AM streets in a meth stupor put me in a state of disbelief.

The crew of laborers outside of myself and my assigned partner had taken their own personal liberties to play the waiting game. A time oriented excursion of long walks, smoke breaks, and cell phone calls around the large multi-stadium sized building where anyone with enough skill and experience could find a hundred place to remain hidden amongst the biovauc of anonymous faced workers going about their business. Our supervisor was around yet almost seemed to be in on the relax nature of our endeavors. What did he care, slowly dole out the instructions, be vague, and offer little assistance, it was no wonder the overall process of getting things done in this trade slowly down to a near grinding halt. This entire scheme happened to be nothing more than a charade to extract as much money as possible from the hundreds of national and multi-national companies displaying their products for this particular tradeshow. All expenses looked to be built in from the high end technology media exhibits to the legions of street creatures lining up for battle at the perimeter of the labor check in tent.

There was the customery ra-ra speech from some employee of the month candidate foreman who praised the crowd of workers with large amount of bullshit psych gibberish that went completely over the gathering's heads, plenty of confused looks and silent faces until the finale where the supervisor grunted, screamed, and raised his arms in a hostile stance of victory as if the infidels had been crushed for the last time an indirect reference to a few vulgarities was all it took to get the people around me patting themselves on the back for another successful trade show. I felt cheated, misled, and soon to be regretting my decision to take this call. The work at this level is pretty dumbed down as my immediate supervisor raised up a two signs that our crew were to collect throughout the convention center. At first I thought he was joking, sort of giving the dumb dumbs a bit to chew on and the obsessive compulsives an incompletable task to drive them right back to the aslyums in which they had escaped earlier in the year. Either way, gathering up the signs turned out to be an exercise in looking busy while getting paid. A group of twelve wandered throughout the various halls spread out through the convention space collecting small signs that were folded then taped together and placed in small cardboard boxes. Well, at least it beat rolling up carpet which plenty of other laborers had drawn, one of the worst jobs ever, cause you always get paired with someone who does not give a shit, second, the rolls always come out on uneven provoking some supervisor to materalize out of then air and get all shitty in regards to how the carpets need to be rolled evenly so they fit on the metal lances placed upon the forklift. I never cared when drawing the carpet assignment, just kick those things up into a roll, then move on, those supers. would go apeshit after about twenty or thirty of them, getting out of his electric cart, which was something those types never did and giving us a clinic on how to properly roll a carpet, here I am standing around with convicts and killers, they certainly did not care, in fact I could see one or two of them making mental notes on seeking this fool out after work for a bit of a clinic in taking a knife to the bellying then being wrapped up in one of those carpets bound for the city dump. Still, the supervisors never appeared imitimated, merely frustrated and or confused at our overall lack of ability to grasp the concept of the carpet roll, there were no other jobs as dumb down as this, nowhere else for the supers to send us, except maybe pushing around crates, getting them to the proper booths, but even that required paperwork and an ability to read. It was nothing more than the fact all those around me at the time just did not give a fuck, never have, never will, content to eek out an existence on the fringe and if jail time was involved that just happen to be how shit went down at the moment. Personally, I felt like a retard for volunteering for such labor when earlier in the week I was working on a big budget entertainment show, but fortunately these gigs give me perspective, material, and a bit of reconnection with those days when such type of work was all that I had, nothing else, just life at the convention center with the masses, grinding out money to support a family and hopefully get drunk.