I’ve hated all of my jobs in adulthood except for one when I would deliver for restaurants when I was in college. That one was easy. We used walkie-talkies back then. The dispatcher would tell me to drive to a restaurant to pick up food, and I would deliver it, no problem. That job lasted all but a month.

Other than that, jobs have been hell. I was a substitute teacher for two years, and the kids wouldn’t sit in their seats after I’d told them to. They paid me eighty dollars a day to supervise the classrooms at those schools. I gave up hope of ever becoming a teacher. It took a certain person to do that.

I also applied through a temp agency when I was living with my parents right after college because no one was hiring. They set me up with the weirdest job. I had to file medical records in a trailer right out front of the hospital in the small town. They stuck me with a kid who was about nineteen years old. He was a thug. I was about twenty-three, twenty-four. I can’t remember.

The manila folders in which the papers were kept were so old that they were dry and sharp. I would get papercuts along the edges, and I would bleed on the folders. Not to mention the kid would try to fight me.

“What are you, a p****y?” he would say. “I’ll f***k you up.”

I would just keep my eyes on the medical records in that trailer and try not to engage with that punk. The job lasted for only two weeks before I turned that scumbag in to the temp agency, and I quit. I remember there were bandages on my fingertips after doing that miserable job. That was about as blue-collar as far it went.

When I moved to Los Angeles from the small town, I went with what I was good at and took up another restaurant delivery job. It was flexible, like most jobs in the service industry. I got to choose my hours, and I would write in my spare time (or attempt to write). It wasn’t easy driving through Los Angeles through all that traffic. I still get post-traumatic stress over the thoughts of some of those nights. Or maybe they were just bad memories. I don’t know.

There was one night when the transmission on my Honda Civic was failing, and I was at the edge of a cliff near Mulholland Drive after delivering sandwiches to some rich guy in Beverly Hills. When I released the parking brake and turned on the ignition, the car began rolling backwards towards the cliff, and I slammed the brakes. In order not to fall off, I had to punch the accelerator quickly enough, or I might’ve died. I closed my eyes, counted down from three and punched it just in time to where I could safely drive up the hill in that guy’s driveway. It still keeps me up at night.

Restaurants hated me when I came in to pick up food, especially the takeout people, because I didn’t tip them. Maybe I should’ve, but it was against company policy. But I dated some of those takeout women. It was unethical, but this was at a time when it was still socially acceptable. Now that that’s been taken away, I’m sure people are still doing it behind the scenes.

When I got good enough at my job, they promoted me to dispatcher. So then I was just a part-time delivery guy. I made more money delivering orders, but it was safer to sit in the office and listen to a guy singing loudly in the dispatch room. It was in the other room from the call center, which was all women with a man as the supervisor. They would take calls from angry customers and check the status of our drivers to see how close they were.

The call center was like a nursery, but the dispatch room was like a bar. Eighty percent of the dispatchers were high when they came in to dispatch. I wasn’t one of them. I always came in clean.

The guy who sang all the time was a movie buff who directed short films on the side. He’d spent over fifty grand on a short that lasted five minutes. Most of the money he’d spent was used on a crane to make a sweeping shot in one of the scenes.

The other dispatchers made fun of him behind his back. I felt sorry for him for spending all that money on such a wasted film.

But anyway, the dispatching job lasted for over ten years. People came and went obviously, and years went by too fast. Most of the drivers were either Brazilian or Bulgarian. They would speak in their native tongue to each other in the same room. I had no idea what they were saying. They were probably teasing us or saying bad things about us because we were forcing them to drive everywhere in town and not making them enough money. This was before the advent of cell phones as wallets. So, we drivers had to copy the customers’ credit cards using receipt paper and a mechanical object that I couldn’t name. Yes, those were different times before Steve Jobs took over the world.

Do I miss them? Well, I miss the partying or the self-medicating–depending on how you perceive the traumas I went through.

But one thing I do know. When people ask me, “How do you like it?” My job they were asking about. I would say, “It’s just a job.” In other words, I didn’t take it seriously, and it wasn’t who I really was.