The Chicago parking lot blues: Sour economy brings memories of worst job

Everyone’s had their worst job.
With the economy still in peril, any job is hard to come by for young and old Americans alike. Whenever I read stories about companies shedding positions at alarming rates and see pictures of new fresh-faced graduates looking helpless with their resumes in their hands, I think back to my own post-college situation, which inevitably led to my worst job.
With spring graduation just around the corner, I thought I’d share my story as a precautionary tale.
I was fresh out of college in 2001 with a mostly useless English degree. I could pontificate about the symbolism in Keats and Kafka, but that’s not exactly an applicable skill for a real world job.
I moved to Chicago the August after graduation with a little money saved up and no job, hell-bent on showing the world what I could do. My resumes went out into the cold world, fizzled and died. Again, this was in 2001. By the time the planes hit the World Trade Center a month later, the only work I had found was as a telemarketer at the Chicago Opera Theater, calling people to see if they were interested, perhaps, in tickets to Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte.”
A quick note, the only thing I know about opera is Alfalfa singing the “Barber of Seville” while sharpening a straight razor on a strop.
We even had to cold call potential opera lovers on Sept. 12, 2001. Most folks sighed and hung up. Others became justifiably angry. “Are you serious?” they asked. “Don’t you watch the news? Why are you calling?”
Oddly enough, this was not my worst job. Not even close.
I stayed on at the opera another month or so, long enough for our nation, which had completely shutdown, to awake from the mayhem and sadness of the attacks.
Not exactly a promising time to be job-hunting.
Nonetheless, I soon found work as a parking lot attendant across the street from a Southside nightclub called Strictly Business. Most of the people who frequented the nightspot were at least ten years older than me and African American. I had hired on to a valet company, but didn’t know how to drive a stick shift, so, until I learned, I was relegated to watching this particular lot from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. The name of the company was actually quite lofty, Valet Descartes, named after the French philosopher Renee Descartes, who’s most famous quip was, “I think, therefore I am.” Our company motto was, of course, “We park, therefore we are.”
In real life, the gig was anything but lofty.
It was soon winter and very cold to be standing around a parking lot at Michigan Avenue and 16th Street, whipping winds from the lake rattling my bones. I didn’t have one of those heated booths to sit in and, since I also didn’t have a car and took the El to the lot each night, there was no refuge. By February, the snow was piled up in mounds taller than the trucks filled with party people I shepherded in each night. I’d sometimes see little blurs scurrying in and out of holes in the white snow hills. These were my lot mates -- rats. When it got into the wee hours of the night and the lot emptied expect for a few cars, I’d start talking to them out of boredom. I even gave a few of them names.
But still, this was not the worst part of the job.
While the majority of Strictly Business’s clientele and I got along famously -- many of them left hefty tips for watching their cars -- some of them did not want to pay the seven bucks it cost to park. Some would haggle with me, trying to talk down the price. Other times, during the chaos between 11 p.m. and midnight, when most cars arrived and the 100-car lot quickly filled up, those who didn’t want to pay would try sneaking in through a back driveway and park for free. If I was too swamped, they succeeded.
My boss, who was even younger than me and was known to be the quickest valet in the business, would drive by each night and check in on me. Well, not so much on me, but on the lot. Every car had to have a ticket in the front window. At the end of the night, the money I handed in had to match the ripped tickets.
So, my young boss shows up one night, sees a car with no ticket on the dash and calls the tow company to haul it away. When it was gone, my boss took off, leaving me to deal with the guy who had parked illegally in the lot the same way several times already.
I never bothered to get it towed, though. My life was worth more than seven bucks.
It was around 3 a.m. when the guy stumbled out of the nightclub, saw that his car was missing and attacked me. It was a bitterly cold night out, and I had arranged to borrow a car for the evening, a friend’s brand new Ford Escape. I was getting warm in the front seat when the man picked up the V part of a wooden DPW barricade that was in the street and charged the Escape.
He raised it over his head, threatening to bash in the hood.
“Where’s my car!” he screamed.
I tried to reason with him. I told him he was parked illegally and that my boss had called the towing company. It wasn’t me, I said.
“I want my car!” was his response.
By this time, I had gotten out of Escape and was pleading with him to put the thing down and not smash my friend’s new car. He flung the barricade, then tried fighting me with his fists, which didn’t work out to his advantage because he was so sloppy. Then, he attempted to retrieve the barricade, which he doubtless intended to use on my head.
While his back was turned, I quickly hopped in the Escape, put it in reverse, tore through the alley and never went back.
I quit the job on the spot. There had to be a better way of making a living than that.
And, hopefully, those prowling on the job hunt now or in the near future will get a better gig than that.