Seriously? You’re going to fire me over that?

Earlier, I blogged about working for Greenpeace in high school. There was one thing I didn’t mention because in that long-ago time of 2008 I was embarrassed by this. Recently, though, I’ve had a change of heart about this particular aspect of working for Greenpeace and as I have a captive audience in you I thought I’d share.

See, when I worked for Greenpeace I was proud of what I did. But the job sucked. As Douglas Adams wrote of a prison guard’s life in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The hours were good but the minutes were pretty terrible. You’re out there in the Michigan winter for four hours 2-3 nights a week. It’s dark. You’re in all elements but mostly it’s just fracking cold. You’re knocking on the doors of strangers asking them to sign petitions and give you money. And not many of them did. Duh.

And one night the manager of the place calls me into the office and tells me I’m not making my bar. See, to earn your keep at Greenpeace you had to average $100 a night. I was averaging $96 a night. And he was calling me out over it. Seriously? I asked, my heart pounding. You’re going to fire me? I was quaking in my soaked boots. Yes, he replied, unless you can get your average over $100. Well, I’m much too much of an over-achiever to get myself fired over $4, but it occurred to me recently that Greenpeace can take it’s 4-dollars-from-bar “talks” and shove them where the sun don’t shine. The next time I’m putting out the kind of effort I put out for Greenpeace and someone threatens to get rid of me I’m going to take them up on the invitation on the spot.

If you haven’t read the link at the top of the page yet, let me tell you that I found working the front counter of a downtown Burger King through an Ann Arbor Art Fair preferable to working the following summer at Greenpeace. It’s not that I don’t know how to work, and it’s certainly not that I don’t work hard. It’s that I’m done feeling threatened by nonsense, even in retrospect. You want $4? Go knock on that door over there and see if you can get it from them.