How I Lost My Last Job

I have been meaning to write about this for some time.  Today seemed like as good a day as any other.

My last job I worked housekeeping in a hospital.  Working in housekeeping is bad enough but in a hospital.  Everyday you have to deal with blood and shit.  And I literally mean human blood and human shit.  Technically the housekeeping staff is not supposed to have to deal with human fluids because most of them are not certified to but it happens anyway.  I was actually one of the few people on staff who was biohazard certified.

I spent most of my days at the hospital hauling garbage to the compactor and collecting laundry.  A few times I was assinged to clean up in the ER.  The ER was not too bad.  Half the time there was nothing to do because the place was either mostly quiet or so busy we had to stay out of the way.

Anyway on to the day I lost my job.
It was the fourth of July.  I had just got off work.  The local Ribfest was within walking distance and I was going to meet my parents there.  I was barely fifty feet out of the hospital doors when my cell phone in my pocket rang.  I answered it because it was my supervisor.
She asked me if I knew that I was not supposed to come into work the next day.  Of course I did not know that, why would I not come into work the next day when I was scheduled to work that day?
The reason I was not supposed to come into work the next day was because today was my last day at this job.  This was news to me.  I was being let go but no one remembered to tell me about it until after I had left for the day.

So that is how I lost my last job.

I Remember Working: Wal-Mart

I remember working at Wal-Mart.
I remember standing at a cash register for hours at a time. When I went on break I would just sit. I would just spend fifteen minutes sitting and resting my feet.

Every Wal-Mart has a number of different departments within the store that are always staffed. They have people in clothing. There is someone in the toy section. They have people in electronics and sports and the pharmacy. The store I worked at was the same.
Every Wal-Mart has a housewares department. The Wal-Mart I worked at was wierd because our housewares department existed in a sort of limbo. No one was ever available in housewares and no one was sure if anyone actually worked there.
If you asked people would say, "of course we have people who work in housewares." But no one could actually name anyone assigned housewares. Logically we would think there must be someone working there but we did not know who.
If you called housewares you got no answer. If you paged housewares no one ever called back. If you actually walked over to the housewares section you could not find any Wal-Mart employees there.

I imagine that this must happen in other Wal-Mart's and other stores. Maybe every store has at least one limbo department. The department that never seems to have anyone working in it because no one actaully knows who works there.