together, realizing potentials

i needed a job really bad at the beginning of this summer. i found one with a company called CollegePro, which is a residential exterior painting company, and whose motto is the title of this post. they hire college students to paint houses during the summer and, according to Cory Johnson , "make some good money this summer!"

you can tell a lot about Cory Johnson by sitting and talking with him for a while. for one, he's young and wants his franchise of CollegePro to do well and make him money. that's all fine and good. also, he's got the body type where you can tell he's lost in excess of 75 pounds, the kind of thin but droopy body that you see on people like Jared from Subway, or other people who have had stomach stapling or something like that. another thing is that Cory is very sophomoric. he's pretty straightforward with his business ethic, but still wears his cap backwards and gives a shiteating smile a little too often for him to be trusted. oh, and his dorky haircut.

during the interview this man told me that i'd be making at least 8.50 an hour, but probably somewhere around 15-16. yay for this. i take the job, show up all ready-roo at 8:30 the next morning. turns out, they made me work 12 hours my first day on the job. i asked to leave early and went home to wash all the nasty ass banana-cream colored latex paint off my filthy body, and they looked at me like i had lobsters crawling out of my ears. i came home, dehydrated and hypoglycemic, and my brother told me that this job sucked and i deserved better. being optimistic, i assumed things would get better.

the next week we started work on a woman's house just doing the trim and gutters, that kind of thing. she had beautiful little gardens all around her house, which were all in pretty close proximity since she lives in the city and properties are in close quarters. she took a lot of pride in them, and we fucking destroyed them. she was nearly in tears after what we had done. we dug our shit ladders all in them, and crushed them with dropcloths. we broke the gutters, and formed a mudpit in the back. we spilled paint from the trim all over the actual sides of the house, then tried to rub it out before anyone would notice, thereby making it look even worse. we ruined this poor woman's house. i was the only person who seemed to care.

everyone else just wanted to 'beat the budget', which is an exclusively CollegePro term. this means that if you finish a job in less time than allotted, you get extra money. this is ALL the people talk/care about. neither of the jobs i helped to complete were even finished in the time they allotted, so no extra money was made. shit.

on top of this, Cory wanted us to go 'cold-calling' once a week, in which we went knocking on doors for a couple of hours, trying to get people to get free estimates to get their house painted. we had to do this until we got one then we could go home. nobody mentioned this in the job description so i was pretty goddamned pissed when told i had to do this. i hate bothering people, it's like telemarketing but face to face. blechh.

one person treated worse than me was a guy named Pete. according to Pete, Cory had walked up to him on the street and said "Do you like making money?", to which pete said, "Yeah!"
Pete was made to do the worst jobs at the most nauseating heights, and was always looked down upon by the others. pete wasn't a particularly smart fellow, but work work work he did. he's just like Boxer from Animal Farm, with Cory as Napoleon and me as the badass who flips everyone one off as he drives away.

so as we finished up the second job, i told my supervisor Ken (who is just as feminine looking as his name implies, and who had earlier told me that this job was indeed not a good way to make money but more of a way to prove something to yourself which is totally fucking gay) that i got another offer which was more flexible and better for my MCAT studying needs. i told him how well it pays, etc., and he seemed a little hurt because of what poor decisions he had made, as did all of the other guys whose job was to screw over college students. may they burn.

a couple of days ago, i finally got my paycheck from CollegePro. for getting sunburnt, clogging my drains with latex paint (from the brushes they made us take home to clean out), nearly falling 20 feet off a shit ladder, and listening to more 50-cent than one man can handle, i got paid the minimum allowed by federal law: $5.15 an hour.

with this check came the CollegePro newsletter, just one way that CollegePro tries to form lasting relationships between painters and make lifelong friends out of the CollegePro family! Sounds like propaganda, no?

inside i found success stories of awesome painters and jobs, including one crew who went above and beyond the call of CollegePro duty:


"...As they were working on the home, they noticed that there were multiple bird houses on the property, and the birds kept "dive-bombing" the crew while they were working! While some may have found this frustrating, it gave this crew an idea...They decided that the birdhouses could use a little makeover! The crew bought a quart of paint and repainted the birdhouses for the homeowner. Great idea!"


what kind of Nazi-youth are these people? what wonderful kind of meth are they taking to get through their day, getting shit on by starlings for low pay? is it the paint fumes, or is it the lead paint chips? there must be some kind of underground railroad to get people out of CollegePro, and this newsletter must be code for escape routes, much like those songs were for slaves back in the day.

the conclusion here is that CollegePro is for CollegeSchmoes. i have a much better job now that pays four times as much as that one. i work for Chet who is cool as shit, and who gives a damn as to whether i like my job. hooray.