President Me (37 page)
Authors: Adam Carolla
As
we head into the final chapter in my campaign platform, also known as this book, I'm going to get a little extra-preachy. The problems with our work force and Department of Labor are something I feel uniquely qualified to rage about, and well equipped to fix. I was a laborer in the truest sense of the word. If you read my last book you know that my nearly twenty-year run of shitty jobsâcleaning carpets, digging ditches, installing closets, slinging hamburgers, and swinging hammersâis well documented.
As miserable as I was, I look back on that time as important. I learned a lot of life skills on those jobs, and I'm not talking about the proper operation and maintenance of a carpet wand. I'm talking about grit. Those jobs sucked. All working-class jobs break down into two categories. The first is mind-numbing. These are the jobs like being a night watchman. You're all alone, and besides a little talk radio, you've got nothing to stimulate you unless a junkie tries to break into whatever you're protecting and stab you. Then there are the punishment jobs. Jobs that make you think you must have been a really awful person in a past life and your karma has come due. I was talking to Josh Homme, the lead singer from Queens of the Stone Age, who if you don't know is a giant pale redhead. He spent some time as a roofer in Palm Springs. He must have been a serial rapist in his last life because that's a tough pull. Scraping hot, dusty tarpaper off a roof in cloudless 120-degree Palm Springs when you're seven feet tall and have the skin tone of Conan O'Brien is torture.
But I think jobs like that teach you grit. I don't want to hang out with someone who didn't have a shitty job. I like a guy who walked in front of the asphalt spreader with a rake in Mississippi. He stuck it out and now appreciates the job with the air-conditioning and ergonomically correct seat. In America today we have decided that repetitive manual labor is something that needs to be farmed out to other countries. But you can learn something from that kind of work. You can build up that emotional callus, learn to take criticism and how to tough shit out. These guys know what work is.
And in a strange way I think it makes people happier. I'm sure if a copy of this book is floating around a construction site, the two white guys who can read English are disagreeing with this. But honestly, I believe the happiest people in the world are the ones who have something to do with their hands. It used to just be that the sun came up and you went to work in a field or down to the mill. Now the only thing we have on our hands is too much time, and we're turning on ourselves. Our jobs involve too much of our brain and not enough of our brawn. Our mind is devouring itself because it doesn't have the distraction of sweating and toiling.
Nowadays everything is so technical and digital you never really know if someone is working or not. It's not like they're holding shovels and pickaxes, they've just got the laptop open. You can't tell if they're working on that spreadsheet you asked for or are on DraftKings checking their fantasy football league. And it's all done in air-conditioned offices with OSHA-certified chairs and desks. In my construction days the only reason to sit down was to pull a sixteen-penny sinker out of your Achilles with a pair of pliers. And even then the boss would call you a lazy pussy and say, “We've got a dime holding up a dollar.”
As much as I complain about show business, it's not real work. My hardest day on any of my entertainment-related projects was easier than my best day doing earthquake rehab on, and often underneath, government-subsidized apartments in downtown L.A.
And it wasn't until I got into show business that I met the self-entitled generation whose main job seems to be ruining our culture, economy, and my afternoon. This is the generation who was so consistently told they were all winners and that no one was better than them that they don't recognize that in the workplace there are winners and there
are
people better than them. Those people are called bosses. They're called superiors for a reason. They have more experience, prowess, or expertise than you and you should listen to them if you want to be them one day.
But not these kids. I have run into plenty of them in my time, from the intern on
The Man Show
who got shit-faced at the Christmas party and decided to tell me I wasn't funny to the “dump button” guy at my morning radio show who needed to settle my hash in the hallway when I argued with him about one of his innumerable bad calls on what needed to be bleeped out. I'm sorry, I forgot you had two months doing radio at your junior college. I'm only the guy who took over for Howard Stern.
The worst, and one of the first, was on
Loveline
âJunior Junior Junior Junior Junior Junior Junior Junior (deep inhale) Junior Junior Junior Producer Lauren.
I asked her during a commercial break what she had learned from watching me do the show for several years. She said without hesitation, “Well, you don't have to prepare. You don't have to be educated, you get to leave early, and you can never be fired.” Knowing she had another bitch bullet in her insult Gatling gun, I asked if there was anything else to add. There was. She said, “It's all about luck and who you know.”
The other mistake people make is only performing tasks that are interesting or have a payday. I saw this time and time again on all of my projects. If you assigned a guy a job that was no fun and had no glory for him at the end, guess which ball got dropped or what “fell through the cracks”? But if there was a job that gave him the chance to be on set with the Juggies or hang around the writers' room, he was on that shit like Letterman on an intern.
Unfortunately this sad fact haunts me outside of my work life too.
A couple years back I noticed a big scuff on the side of the very expensive car I lease for my wife. As you well know, I have hypervigilance and I'm a car guy, so I spotted it immediately. Not that I needed to be hypervigilant, it was a huge scuff. It looked like someone took a hockey puck and ran it along the side of her Jag. I told Lynette to get some rubbing compound and buff it out. (For you homos out there who don't know, this is not a big deal. A dollop of this stuff on a damp rag, a few swipes with your hand, and you're done. It's as complex and time-consuming as wiping down a counter. And by the way, rubbing compound is on my list of things that sound way better than they are. It sounds like a hand-job parlor. “I'm heading down to the Rubbing Compound.”)
Well, like all things I desire, it didn't happen. I saw that scuff for the next week, commenting on it each day. Then once a week for a month with ever-increasing frustration I asked her, “Why don't you just do this? You have a $70,000 car that I'm leasing for you and it looks like shit.” Eventually, with great effort, I let it go. Sometimes you've got to know when you're beat. It's her car (even though I'm paying for it), she can drive around with a shit streak across the side if she wants to. Moving on.
About four months later she came up to me and asked, “What was that stuff I need to wipe off that scuff on the car? Where is that?” I didn't think, “Great, finally,” and I didn't say, “It's down in the garage on the shelf.” I asked, “Why?” She said, “No reason.” I'm not wired to accept that as an answer. I knew something was up. Why after more than a month of me asking her to fix that swipe, and me quietly resenting her for not doing so, has she chosen on a random Sunday afternoon to clean it up? So I asked again. She tossed off a casual “Nothing, just wanna take care of it.” I told her it was in the garage on the shelf, it said “3M” on it, and to just get a rag and rub it out. A little while later I saw her leaving and asked where she was going. She said she was driving to LAX. I didn't know about any travel plans, so I asked why she was making an airport run. She told me she was picking up Nils Lofgren, who was doing the podcast.
It all snapped into place. She had looked me in the eye and acted as if she finally got the message and took care of the scuff for the sake of doing so or because it was clearly frustrating to me. Nope. It was because a member of her beloved E Street Band was in town and needed to be personally chauffeured. That streak was on her car for more than a month of my complaining, stayed there for another four months of my quietly simmering resentment but was gone in five minutes as soon as she had a reason to do the job. Apparently her husband, the breadwinner and car leaser, going slowly insane was not enough to spark her interest.
Back to the kids. The problem in today's workplace is that these kids have had, since birth, an overinflated sense of self-importance. And they bring that mind-set with them into the office. They think the fucking building will fall down without them. The question they need to, but won't, ask themselves is “What happens when I don't show up on Friday?” If the answer is nothing, then make sure to show up Monday with doughnuts.
These people act as if the world owes them just for existing. You can really see this in action when their birthday rolls around. Not only do I think people shouldn't take a day off work for their birthday (another thing that will be illegal in my administration), I know people who take a couple days off. I'll see employees who take Friday off work because their birthday is on Saturday and then they'll take Monday off too. They treat it like Ramadan.
There's this one. The staffer's birthday will be on a Sunday, so the office will throw them a party in the break room on Friday.
Not on my watch. You only get the shitty sheet cake and halfhearted, out-of-tune rendition of “Happy Birthday” if you are at work on your actual birthday.
Here's the thing about birthdays. Your dad didn't pull out. You didn't do shit. You didn't earn anything. I'll tell you who else has or had birthday celebrations each year: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, Jeremy Piven, and Ted Bundy. All the people you hate in life, all the pedophiles, all the murderers, all the IRS auditors have birthdays. I don't think we should celebrate Idi Amin's birthday and I don't think we should celebrate yours either.
Here's a major culture shift that is going to begin in my administration. We will phase out the birthday and incorporate the “worthday.” This is a day of achievement that you celebrate annually. That would be more satisfying. It will add an element of drive. The day you got your Ph.D. or bought your first house will be your standing worthday until you beat it.
This will also encourage competition. You'll be at your neighbor's or relative's worthday party thinking, “He passed the bar and I've got a GED, I've got to buckle down and earn a better worthday.” Think about it, one man's worthday is winning a Pulitzer Prize, and another's is finishing the Pig's Trough at Farrell's.
Now, I don't want to be cruel. It wouldn't be fair to put this on kids and rob them of the simple joy of a birthday party. So henceforward, thirteen is your last birthday; after that, it's worthdays. Unless you're Mexican, then you get up to the Quinceañera.
This “just showing up makes me a winner” bullshit was at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is as symbolic of the current shitty generation as Woodstock was to the hippies. It said everything you needed to know about an entire age group. Occupy Wall Street is the participation trophy generation in a nutshell.
For twenty years those kids were getting “You're #1” stickers for every #2 they produced. Now they're adults entering the work force and they can't take the real world. They've been shamed by life because they haven't been prepared for it. They've had so much smoke blown up their collective asses their minds are clouded and they can't figure out why everyone doesn't think they're as special and precious as Mommy said. They can't handle the fact that they're not the unique snowflake everyone insisted they were, that they're now just peon #27 who's putting in an application like every other schnook. So they don't get hired. But the plan is not to get more education or brush up on the job interview skills, it's to get a brick and throw it through the window of the business. And by that I mean a metaphoric brick in the form of a negative Yelp review. A real brick would be too active for these assholes.
But like their hippie ancestors, they drop out and start bitching about The Man keeping them down. Enough of them get together on the Internet and decide to head down to Wall Street, set up a pup tent, rip a couple bong loads, bang a couple bongos, and blame their fate on vague notions of corruption and “the one percent.”
I'm also convinced half the guys there were just trying to get laid. “Yeah, the Koch brothers
are
evil. Wanna head to my tent and lose that hemp tank top?” I'm positive if there were no attractive young college chicks at those events it would have wrapped up in one afternoon. As soon as Occupy Wall Street became a sausage fest, the tents literally would have been folded up. None of those guys cared about any of that shit, they were just trying to occupy some pussy.
Or
they wanted to meet celebrities because Kanye West, Russell Simmons, and a couple other millionaires headed down there to make an appearance as if they weren't in the same tax bracket as the fat cats these assholes were complaining about. They went down there in solidarity then walked a couple blocks back to their Maybachs and drove to their eight-thousand-square-foot penthouses. Somehow it gets conveniently forgotten that these guys are rich too, because they dress down. Everyone is deathly afraid of being labeled a one-percenter. Why do you think millionaire Michael Moore is forced to dress like an unemployed lesbian trucker?
Eventually OWS just became a cool place to hang out and not work, which is what they wanted to do in the first place. If all of their demands were magically met and the system did change, that would mean they'd have to start occupying a cubicle and work, which would seriously cut into their tweeting and blogging about how corrupt corporations are.