The Worst Job I Ever Had

For five months in 2002 I worked in the IT Help Desk department for a Japanese bank in New York City. Well, I didn’t work for the bank, but for an IT company that supplied us to various companies to help with their tech problems. I had just spent 18 months working for the IT department of a large hotel chain, and enjoyed myself enough to stay in the field after a geographic relocation. But supporting this bank -

It was the worst job I ever had.

Why?

Let me count the ways.

First of all, the man who hired me “ran” the help desk at the Japanese bank, despite the fact that he could barely turn on a PC. He was a nice guy, though, a retired cop who was doing this as sort of a second career, but he didn’t understand you if you had to escalate a problem to him. So, we didn’t. In fact, there was no one to “escalate” problems to. You had to fix it, or take the heat. That wasn’t so bad, except for the fact that there was no training. You had to learn by doing. This also isn’t so bad, except that you were required to know the ins and outs of two operating systems, over twenty-five banking software programs, two email systems, and any and all printing and networking issues. Hardware and software. It quickly got frustrating.

There was a language barrier to deal with, too. I’d estimate 75% of the employees were native Japanese who spoke no English. Some were nice, some not so. The other seven guys I worked with, whether they were as stressed as me or not, were the nastiest bunch of men I’ve ever worked with. When you take merciless b***-busting, spritz it with a cover-your-a** mentality and shake (not stir) in an every-man-for-himself environment, you find it’s not too palatable. I probably realized this at the end of my first week.

My hours rotated every month. The earliest were 7-4, the latest 10-7. Not too bad, but I was commuting from New Jersey into New York City, via NJ Transit trains. So the later I had to be in, the earlier, comparatively speaking, I had to leave to manage traffic. You could count on the trains: always late an average of once a week. And they break down, too, on an average of once every two weeks. I was on a train that actually derailed (thank God we were only going a few mph) and we had to wait forty-five minutes for a “rescue train” to get us in to the city. And crowded Penn Station, especially when the weather gets warmer, ain’t no picnic either.

Yeah, the boss of the IT company that I technically worked for had no idea who I was, and the pay was less than meager, and the help desk area itself was such a mess you wasted half the time on a service call looking for replacement equipment. But there was one thing that tipped me off right away that things were not quite right there. My manager, the ex-cop, told me that all of us at the desk had to “look busy” all the time. Don’t stay at your desk too long. We could even go out of the building for an hour at a time, and he recommended it. Apparently our Japanese overlords were thinking about cutting the Help Desk expense, so we had to make ourselves appear as critical to mission success as possible. Late in the summer I was let go, one of those last-man-in-first-man-out things.

Yet there were a few things I liked about the job. Not the job itself, but some fringe benefits you could say. For the first time I explored New York City, and really enjoyed it. I hunted out a couple of used book stores. I started going to daily mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I found a couple of really neat places to eat lunch. I saw the sights, learned my way around and gained a bit of confidence as I traveled about in trains and cabs. My wife would meet me occasionally for some very pleasant dinners. I also managed to read a lot of books on those trains, classics and SF and hard-science stuff. And I discovered that a cold beer in a paper bag on a Friday afternoon train is just about the closest thing to heaven we can experience down here on earth.

But no amount of city life, books, or beer will ever, ever make me want to go back.