Working For Satan

As promised, today begins what I hope to become a long and painful journey of writing in this little blog daily. Just like a J O B, I'm taking weekends off.  I don't care if you have a great job now or not, Monday is not your favorite day of the week. If you say it is, you are a liar or a millionaire. Or both. Mondays will be dedicated to that wonderful place most of call work. Where you sell your soul to make enough money to support the IRS and the deadbeats who eat better than you do. Where you meet people who scare the hell out of you and make you wonder whether or not you locked all your doors at home. I sure as hell hope you did.
I worked for Satan once. He didn't look the way I had always imagined Satan would, but it was painfully obvious after my first day on the job that he was indeed from Purgatory. I won't go into detail about where or when this job took place because I prefer not to be slapped with a defamation of character lawsuit, but rest assured this is all true and this person does exist. Unless he was hit by a bus or tragically poisoned. By tragically, I mean purposely.  You have probably worked for his evil cousin or long lost brother.
I was newly engaged and had just moved back to my home state after a year of wanting to jump off a building every afternoon. I had lived in Vegas. It was time to find new employment and I fell back on what I had done before I was rubbing naked bodies in a spa off the Strip. It sounds sleazy, but rest assured that job was nothing compared to shit I saw living in that festering shit hole of a town. I went back to working a front desk. Answering phones, greeting customers, making coffee for dickheads who were better than me because they drove a $50,000 car and showed up to work at 11 am.
My duties seemed pretty straight forward as I was trained by one of the other "employees", who I found out later was Satan's daughter.  The training  menu took an awkward turn when Mr. S came in and asked if I had been shown everything. He proceeded to take me to the kitchen and direct me on the how to's of coffee preparation, which I had indicated previously I was more than capable of doing. Apparently my OCD was not as pronounced as Satan's, so training began. I was to grind the coffee beans, place them in the paper basket filter, pour in the filtered water, start the machine and then deep clean the grinder. Yes, my friends, the grinder was to be taken apart every morning and disinfected from top to bottom. This was no industrial grinder or fancy Williams Sonoma contraption. It was a cheap fucking grinder that anyone and their broke ass nephew can afford from Target. I had a hunch Mr. S may just be a control freak.
Morning meetings consisted of having each person who had made a mistake during the previous week, stand up and be berated by Mr. S. Not as a collective group, but one by one. He would then point out to everyone what you had done and make sure each employee understood how grave the situation was. I was lucky enough to be picked during my first month of employment to stand up and get bullied about a typo that I had missed in an ad that was printed. Had I not been the butt of jokes for my entire high school career, it may have bothered me.
This was the job that I dreaded every morning when my eyes opened to a world full of unicorn possibilities. I would drive slowly down the road and read every billboard along my path, in hopes one would give me an immediate job offer or inform me of my lottery win. I then picked up my daily latte and would hot box my car with Marlboro's, while planning my side business of being a hit man. I knew who would be first on my list.
My breaking point came when I had been put in charge of turning off the alarm and being the first to enter the building. Mr. S changed the password weekly because he didn't trust anyone as far as he could torture them. I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. S put me in charge of this duty so that he could really find out how much one person could take. It was a Monday and I had been informed Friday of the new code, however being the fucking idiot that he counted on me being, I had forgotten to tattoo it on my arm. I tried every number combo I could think of and then the phone rang while simultaneously the alarm shook my brain and shot strobes through my cornea. I assured the alarm company of my right to be there and suddenly I felt burning eyes through the back of my jacket. Mr. S was waiting in the wings for me to fail. He calmly punched in the correct code, took the phone from me and made small talk with the alarm lady. He then proceeded to let me know what an incompetent idiot I was. How hard was my job? Had I ever had any responsibility? Could I not be trusted with the smallest detail without ruining everything? I block out a lot of painful moments in my life and this one is no exception. I can't specifically recall each word or how his face looked but I remember thinking, This is not how normal people manage other people.
A few weeks later, I found a new job and a great boss. Telling Mr S. I was quitting felt like losing 50 pounds and being let out of the State Pen with 20 bucks and a bus pass. The hard part was having to take him off my hit list.