Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 4

One day, three months ago or so, it's a Friday afternoon, and I'm eating a bowl of chili at my workstation. I'm reading some logs from the servers. I do this about every twenty-four hours. I wrote these little programs that pa.r.s.e the log messages only to send me things like errors, people doing inappropriate transactions on the network, or people trying to break in.

So I'm looking at these log messages and I see one that's really, really spooky. It's like someone is connecting to us and they're executing weird commands. Anonymously. I try it myself. I connect to the machine on the port that he connected and run the command that he ran. And I got a root sh.e.l.l.

Now, in a network like this, you have different levels of access to the system. The most privileged account is called "root." The root pa.s.sword is only given out to a couple of people. When you have root it's like being G.o.d. You can erase the hard disk, install software, add users, remove users, reboot the machine, shut down the machine-you can do everything.

Well, I knocked the lunch out of my lap. I mean, for someone unauthorized to get in there means total compromise of the system. It's like someone finding a secret janitor's door open in the back of the bank vault. He can leave the door ajar like with a foot stop and come back later, whenever he wants, and collect all the money.

I start looking into it, and I realize that he's done this to at least twenty machines. I'm just seeing it come up-okay, he got in here, he got it on here. And he's had this level of access for twelve hours. He basically has complete control over the system.

I continue testing the other machines and I find out that, oh, okay, about fifty machines are infected! And now I'm actually starting to flap my arms. I go and I tell my boss, "Someone has root! And I don't know who it is!"

I've had hackers get in and remove my account so then I can't log in. Usually they just do it to f.u.c.k with you. But as I start figuring out more and more what this guy's doing, I realize it's really serious. It's really bad. He's installed a packet sniffer. He's collecting packets. In each packet, he's got the user name, the pa.s.sword, where they logged in from, the commands they executed. He's sniffing the whole network and getting all the data off it.

I get the packet log, the log from his back doors and his packet sniffers, and they're about ten megs. That's huge. Think about it: one sheet of paper is 4K. There is 1,024K in one meg. So that's two hundred and fifty-six sheets of paper, and he has ten times that much information. How many pa.s.swords can you fit onto that many sheets of paper? You know?

What's at stake here, besides getting the pa.s.swords, is where the pa.s.swords lead to. If people log into here from AOL or whatever, and they type in their pa.s.sword, then they log onto, say, AT&T Research or Bell Labs without a secure method, the hacker gets a key to Bell Labs. When the first guy signs out, the hacker can sign in with his name and pa.s.sword. And no one will have any idea anything weird is going on. If a Ph.D. student comes here to meet up with some buds and go over homework, then logs onto his part-time job at American Express, uh-oh, now the hacker has access to all our financial records. If someone here telnets to Lawrence Berkeley Labs in California, which is where all the fusion and fission research projects are in the Department of Energy, whoops! Suddenly the implications start to get more serious.

And of course, if he wants, this guy can go onto his hacker BBS and say, "Yo! What's up, dudes? I just broke into a university and I've got five hundred pa.s.swords! Here, try 'em out, they all work!" I mean, I used to be a hacker so I know what they do. [Laughs] So now we're being attacked by dozens of hackers. It's really bad. Really bad. It's like that Breck hair commercial, "I told my friend and she told her friend," and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on.

So, okay, I move on in and kill a bunch of his programs, and I start to reboot machines, and suddenly he realizes that he's busted. And all of a sudden I see his propagation go from fifty machines to about a hundred. And he starts to lock us out of our own computers. I mean, we're totally compromised.

Now I'm full-scale panicking. Maybe he'll erase a hard drive- which would be a catastrophe. Maybe he's going to start removing software. I don't know what he's going to do. So I tell my boss, "We have to disconnect from the Internet right now so that he can't come back in and get his pa.s.swords!"

And then the wall of bureaucracy and politics. .h.i.ts. My boss is like, "Well, we've got to discuss the implications of us going off-line. We have got to contact my supervisor and he's got to talk to the department chair, he's got to talk to the director and then we have to talk to the networking people," yadda, yadda, yadda.

I go back to my office and physically unplug my own computer so nothing can happen to it. And I'm pacing. "What are we going to do, what are we going to do?" I mean, I know what we have to do. We have to disconnect right now. [Imitating boss] "Well, let's go and talk about it. Let's have a meeting." No! f.u.c.k the meeting! Let's f.u.c.kin' unplug the Internet right now!

So my boss goes up to the meeting. It's about six o'clock. I go into our server room. And I'm pacing back and forth. Unplug the router, don't unplug the router. The router is, you know, it's the main backbone from us to the Internet. The main connection. And I'm like standing there [sighs]-and here I am-I'm really a peon here. A technical worker bee. And I'm sitting in this server room on my knees, almost about to cry. Finally, I'm like, "f.u.c.k it. Forget about discussing the implications and all that-I know what the right thing to do is." I yanked the plug. I shut the whole thing down.

About a half an hour later, my boss comes back down and he goes, "Don? We've decided it would be best to go off the Internet. Let's shut down." [Laughs]

At that point, he has to leave. Another guy that I work with leaves. You know, it's Friday night. Most of the people that work here are off at happy hour or they've gone home for the weekend. So I'm left at eight P.M. to start figuring out what happened, what was wrong, how did the hacker get in, start a.n.a.lyzing the program, start reinstalling machines, start cleaning up. We have tons of machines that are just dead in the water. Everything is f.u.c.ked.

I was at work that night until like two or three A.M. And the interesting thing-now that we're disconnected from the Internet-is the hacker's code, his back doors and stuff, they're all still running. On various machines, I'm watching his virus mutate and try to spread copies of itself over the network. Of course his programs are failing because he can't get in to modify them. But it was interesting to see all of his stuff running like in a petri dish, mindlessly collecting data. It's like you're sensing this other intelligence.

I just sat there wondering, "Who is this person? What does he look like? Is he a good programmer? Why did he do this? Did he do this to me?" Probably not-he probably didn't intend to totally f.u.c.k up my life. But he did. He caused me pain for what would ultimately be days and days of my life. So you just wonder, "Who is this guy? How did he come up with this exploit?"

What happened after that point is kind of mundane. I sat at this desk for between ten hours and twenty hours a day for the next seven days. Some days I actually just slept at my desk and then I would wake up and continue work. And the work was writing little teeny programs to do things like modify machines or to decompile binaries. And I'm freezing cold because the air conditioning in this building is insane to keep the machines cool.

The whole time, I'm trying to figure out who had done it. I knew it was a group, because they were logging in from lots of different places, from France, from Korea, from Jamaica, and from different ISPs in the States. And I contacted some of the administrators at those ISPs, saying, "We had a break-in originating from your domain. Can you help us track down such-and-such a user?" And they're just like totally unhelpful.

We could track them down by subpoenaing their ISP, but then you run into the bureaucracy again. To get to the legal department at this university, you'd have to go all the way up the food chain. It's like a full-time job just to handle that. It's ma.s.sive. I can't deal with it. So we never made any headway in tracking the hacker.

We cleaned up as well as we could, we went back on the network-and five days later he breaks right back in! And then again two weeks after that. Basically four more times. And each time, he does the same things. He executes the same loopholes. And then we close the loopholes. And he finds other ones. His modus operandi is more or less always the same. He breaks in, adds a user, adds a back door, starts packet sniffing, collecting pa.s.swords. Sort of childish, in a way. Every time he breaks in it's a Friday. Mid to late afternoon. And-it gets to be kind of depressing, you know, to find the same s.h.i.t over and over again. We could protect ourselves with a firewall, which is a security device, but the university won't get one because it would be a hundred thousand dollars.

It's upsetting. We have like several gigabytes of software. Maybe somewhere buried down in that software somewhere he's buried a time bomb. So it leaves you feeling sort of helpless and hopeless, really. And you don't know where and when he can come back.

One day I was walking through campus to my office, and there were FBI trucks pulled up in front of the medical school building. They had had the same profile break-in that we did. Probably the same cl.u.s.ter of hackers. But there, it went undetected for six months-and it turns out the medical school had its life support systems on-line. So a hacker could, in theory, get in there and just start pulling the plug on people. Like, zap, zap, zap. I think the FBI made them take that system off-line. The hacker was never caught.

This kind of thing makes me just totally-well, it's changed the way I feel about computer networks. I don't trust them anymore. And I've lost faith in the Internet, and this whole idea of all its bountiful uses and how it's going to be the bringer of all good things and, you know, the solution to all of our modern communication problems. I think it's a Pandora's box.

The Internet is not the evil. The evil is in people. It's not in the network. But now, so much information is available to so many more people that anyone who simply has a bad day can get all this scary terrorist information. It gives the common nutcase access to information that only the super nutcases would usually bother to get. And anyone can get your credit card information, if they really want to. So I might as well face it, I can kill myself trying to keep the hackers out, but they're still going to get in.

You have to suspend your paranoia, I guess, at some point. Because all these bad things used to happen before computers, too. I could give my credit card to a waiter in a restaurant, and he could go into the back room and make long-distance calls or buy a new pair of shoes.

But even beyond that, the larger issue, I mean, has my quality of life gotten that much better because of all this stuff? Four or five summers ago, I would work until all hours of the night. I wouldn't leave except to go get food and then I would come right back and be on-line again. Then I would go home and I would go back on-line and I would sit in my apartment surrounded by little UNIX machines or Macintoshes with my TV on the side. And now-the whole thing is less fascinating, I guess.

And so I think I'm nearing an end to the interest level of my job. I mean, a lot of my job is just administrative-a lot of it is redundant tasks. Like catching a hacker again and again doing the same thing again and again. It's sort of like-I don't want to do this the rest of my life. I want to do interesting things. I want to go and, you know, do different things.

As far as I'm concerned, that hacker-he may be on the system now. I don't know. I stopped-I actually stopped looking because I don't care anymore. I'm like, well, okay, I could spend the rest of my life chasing this or I can do something else. I'm not going to be here forever. I'm not going to live that long in the grand scheme of things. My life is really a flash in the pan. So I should go out and hike those hills and I should go for those walks while I'm still young-while I can still do that kind of stuff-instead of just sitting here wasting away. I really should.

It's kind of like weaving baskets all night long.

KINKO'S CO-WORKER.

Natasha Werther.

I work at Kinko's. I'm a co-worker. That's what we're called. The slang term with the gang is "Kinkoid," but "Kinko's co-worker" is what it says on our papers. I've been doing it for nearly three years. Once upon a time, I had more prestigious jobs. Now I wear an ap.r.o.n.

The last job I had was teaching in Boston at this kinda c.r.a.ppy community college-type place. I was an instructor, which didn't pay well at all, and they were constantly s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around with me-canceling my cla.s.ses at the start of the semester or, you know, overenrolling them, or whatever. [Laughs] Basically, it just sucked. I hated it. Then my husband got into graduate school at this place in sort of eastern Ma.s.sachusetts. It's the middle of nowhere, really. Just a school and nothing else. But he got a full scholarship deal and his mom lives out here so we could live for free. So we came out and I was looking for a job to fill in the gaps. I picked Kinko's because [laughs] like, nothing is open late here and I really liked the idea of working at the only all-night place around, you know? I thought it would make me feel like I'm back in the city maybe. And it's just-I figured it wouldn't be a big deal. I figured it would be an easy job to get, an easy job to do. And I was right, sort of.

As it turns out you have to take all these psychological tests to make sure that you're not going to steal from them or go postal. And they were weird tests. I mean, just weird but kinda obvious questions. I actually think they're kind of standard. I think most big companies have them now. You do them over the phone. There's a phone call for you and you just have to hit keys. It's all automated: "Hit one for yes and two for no." There's a lot of stuff about anger. Like, "Do you think it's right if a co-worker gets loud with you in anger that you get loud back?" [Laughs] And you know the answer's no. You're supposed to say no, you know? "Would you ever raise a fist to another person?" If you even pause too long on that one I think they don't hire you. So they have you go through-G.o.d, more than a hundred of these questions. It was endless.

Then they train you and that's pretty weird, too. They say they're teaching you technical stuff about the equipment, but what they spend most of the time on is indoctrinating you into this Kinko's philosophy. So, mixed in with a little ten-minute discussion of the laminating machine, they'll slip in thirty minutes of stuff like giving one hundred and ten percent to the customer. Like how when you give more, Kinko's gives more back. And stuff like that. [Laughs] They kind of rally everybody together. I think they believe that you're less likely to rip them off or be irresponsible if you feel like you're in a family-type thing. So they get you in all these little ways. They give you grades. You're treated like a kid. Do you know what I mean? So by the end of this two-week period, you feel sort of beholden to Kinko's.

Even after you start working, they're always kind of testing you and indoctrinating you. Like they have these mystery shoppers come in. There are companies that do this job for different corporations- they'll send these mystery shoppers into the store, they're people who pose as customers. What they'll do is they'll give you a very simple job. You know-"I need ten color copies, double-sided." Or whatever. And you go and you do that job, and they're making a report on how long it took you to acknowledge them. Or if the store looks neat and how the job was done. They take your name and everything. Because we have to wear name tags. And what they do is they make a report, and they send it to our store and then our manager posts it and we all read how each of us is doing. And there's this weird kind of store pride, or group pride, that forms. You know, they'll say, "Congratulations, Natasha," if a mystery shopper gave me good points and said nice things about my appearance or something. It locks people into this whole family mentality. You're afraid of being the bad kid, of being nasty to a customer. [Laughs] Because you know it will be posted that you screwed up. And the whole gang will know.

They also make you keep going back to take more courses. Every few months they've got you enrolled in a new course and you have to learn a new thing. It's always supposedly about color copiers or about the "point of sale system," which is just a fancy name for the cash register, but each time you go back, they reindoctrinate you. And I can't believe it, but it actually works. People jump around saying, "I got a ninety-five on my audit! I got a ninety-five!" Like fortyyear-olds in ap.r.o.ns [laughs] are jumping around saying, "I did it! I got the Hundred and Ten Percent quiz! I got them all right!"

I do it too sometimes. It really works-I think it's amazing. I feel goofy jumping around like that. I mean, I know they're just going for my enthusiasm. They don't really need to test me on the color copier, right? But it really works. It's just totally amazing how it really works. I mean, like there was this guy who stole from our store who got led out in handcuffs. He was a co-worker. I think people would have thrown rocks at him if they could have. Do you know what I mean? Like the sense of community is so built up. They still joke about that guy. There were jokes about him last night at work. It's a little extreme.

Anyway, here I am. [Laughs] I started part-time, moved to fulltime after a few months. My shift goes from ten at night until six- thirty in the morning. I do everything from dealing with customers to black and white copying and color copying, laminating, dry mounting of things onto poster board, computer printouts, putting people on the self-service computer stations and helping them out there. I do about fifty different jobs.

Mostly, of course, it's copying. [Laughs] I make a lot of copies. And because I work nights, I have to do a lot of the bigger jobs that they can't get to during the day shift. So I'll have to do really huge boring collating jobs, because if they get stopped in the middle with customers all the time during the day, they'll screw up their count. So I do an awful lot of-we call it monkey work-hours and hours of collating and binding projects and stuff like that. Thousands and thousands of books.

It's very, very dull. But that's kind of what I like about it. I really like the job because I have all these things in my private life that never have any resolution. You never know when you're done in a sense. And they're endless. Like your marriage or your family and friends and stuff-they're just all these little problems that are always in flux. Or like when I was a teacher, that's a very human thing, and the years end, but there's no resolution, you know? The students just disappear and you never know if you've accomplished anything. But this is something where you can see you made a thousand books that night. There's something actually very satisfying about that.

And then, you know, customers come in very occasionally and they're wackadoo because it's the middle of the night. They'll come in like, "I need this job done NOW!" [Laughs] And there's no way- like why on earth would they need it now? You know, there's nothing open. There's nothing to do. So they'll come in at three, four, or five in the morning like that. "I've got to get this now!" [Laughs] So I'll turn off my little Book on Tape, and stop my binding, and I'll go up and help them. It's kind of nice, because I can actually help them. And they really do need help.

I've dealt with a lot of customers in a lot of places, and people are remarkably odd here. Some of them stay at Kinko's all the time. It's like people who've got no other place to go. They just stay on our computers for as long as they can. They come in every night. They're regulars. And some of them are these very computer-literate entrepreneurs, small business people who seem to be doing very, very well, and we get a lot of students, but most of them are just generally-they're kind of sweet, very alone, sad people. They're constantly looking for jobs and making new resumes. [Laughs] They finish one resume, and then they have to make another bunch, you know? They're constant customers because they're nuts. We have one guy, I think he's been looking for a job the whole time I've been here-I mean, I don't want to make him feel bad if he ever reads this-but he was here the first day that I worked here, and he was in last night. He's forever printing out five hundred more resumes. He's just in all night long. He's one of these sort of big, fat guys with like a zit at the end of his nose and-you know what I mean? It's just tough.

I hear that the really hip Boston Kinko's and the L.A. Kinko's and the New York Kinko's now have these like hipster caffeinated kids that are there all night long. That it's almost chic and cool to be just hanging at Kinko's doing your work. Our Kinko's hasn't had quite that. These people, they just like to sit in front of the computers. I don't understand-it must cost them a fortune. I mean, it's like ten cents a minute, so to come in night after night for hours-my G.o.d. But they do it. I think part of it is that they just like to be around us. You know, where they almost-you know, everybody knows each other by name. I know each of these customers, the handful of customers that do this, by their first names. I know when one is going through a lawsuit. I know when the other has a job interview.

It's kind of like being a bartender in a way. They want very little attention, they just want you to be nice to them. You know what I mean? And when they do need attention, they're the kind of people who sort of expect an argument and when you don't give them one, they're so happy and they just keep coming back. It's so sweet. Unfortunately I also have some people hitting on me at night, which is a little unfortunate. But I wear my wedding ring. They don't hit on me directly. They just sort of come by and, you know, there's a bar next door and they'll ask me to go over for a drink or want to bring me back something. [Laughs] There's a lot of stuff like that. It's tolerable.

Actually Kinko's, I think, is my favorite job I've ever had. It's very low stakes. It's really not that hard, so you can be very helpful to customers. So you feel sort of competent and you get all this work done. And the management here seems very happy with me. I used to get all tense going in to different jobs. There would be things that could screw up and people were counting on me, blah, blah, blah. Now I just roll in, and it's kind of like weaving baskets all night long. You know, I like it.

The only bad thing is there's a definite sense of being watched all the time. Because there's fifteen cameras in our store-and they're all pointed at the workers. So clearly, you know, they say we're a family, but the biggest thing they're worried about at Kinko's is the workers in the stores, right? [Laughs] I mean, everybody knows the one place in the store where the cameras don't see is over by the self-serve printers. I was actually told by other co-workers when I started here, "The cameras don't go to where the self-serve printers are." So literally, if you want to eat in the store, there's a back area, but it's kind of disgusting, so you take your food and go to the self-serve printers. You eat or drink your coffee standing up over there, which is a little uncomfortable. Or you sit on the floor, which isn't so great, either. But you know that anyplace else, you're being watched.

And they let you know, too. I mean, I'll bet they only look at the tapes very occasionally, but it seems like whenever they do it, they mention to us what they saw, even if it's just a meaningless thing-just to give us this constant sense you're always being watched.

We rip them off anyway all the time. But we don't rip them off for money, that I know of. Except for that one guy who got arrested- who was actually taking money-the way people steal is just by constantly making posters for their kids and doing all that kind of stuff. It feels like a fringe benefit. Because it is a low-paying kind of endless job. So people do it all the time. Like just last night I made-oh, my gosh, maybe forty color copies of my mother-in-law's new grandchild. Which are a dollar twenty-nine apiece, you know?

There was this a.s.sistant manager once who told me that there's only two ways you can get fired from Kinko's-number one is you don't show up for a shift. You can be late for a shift. You can call in. You can be late all the time. But if you start missing shifts you're out. Number two is if you steal money. You can steal products, you can steal service. But if you steal money-that's it. It's funny because this guy was applying to lots of graduate schools and he took crazy advantage of the store. He was doing thousands of dollars of work every single week. Making color posters that would impress Harvard. Making catalogues, incredibly professional-looking stuff and spend- ing endless time on the computers and using every single bit of equipment. And they didn't fire him or have any trouble with him. Then he got into school and he missed two shifts and they fired him. Isn't that funny?

And all this stuff he was doing was right on camera, so they definitely knew, or sort of knew, what this guy was up to. But they're smart. What they want is for you not to abuse them. You know what I mean? They know it's not the greatest job in the world, so they sort of make it right in your head by being kind of smart and nice and all of this stuff. They sort of give you this stuff for free. Like I needed a lot of legal paperwork because of my student loans. It would be constantly faxed to me, and I would be faxing back stuff to these banks. I would get these embarra.s.sing forbearance notices because I don't have any money to pay my student loans. And they would put them in the back office for me and seal them in envelopes and give them to me by hand. [Laughs] Which I thought was really sweet. They would also never make me pay for the faxes.

They're actually a really decent company to work for. They have a health plan. They have a very lame 401(k) plan, but it's there. They match your funds, you know. So even though they're kind of like a McDonald's chain, they're trying very hard to be a corporation that their people love. They've said they're gonna give us stock and like, Fortune Magazine, or some magazine said they're one of the best hundred companies to work for in America. And it's kind of true.

I mean, they're a nasty old corporation, but there are a lot of advantages to working for a corporation. You can get lost in the corporation, and I kind of like that. You know what I mean? And you can save yourself from a lot of bad s.h.i.t. I mean, I'm thirty-six years old. I've seen the world. I've been a waitress, I've worked around schools a lot, I've been a teacher, I've worked at a lot of stores for owners-not retail chains-just stores that belonged to people. And the thing is that people in their own small business can be nutty and dysfunctional. But if people are nutty and dysfunctional and they're managing a store for a corporation, they get the boot. You know what I mean? They can't be that zany. They can't throw stuff at you. They can't have tantrums. They can't be obviously racist. So the same corporate Big Brothery thing that kinda takes all the personality out of everything can also be a good thing.

It's like, I think that in part people are kept from becoming their dysfunctional selves by working for a corporation. Do you know what I mean? Because the corporation has so much to lose if their people are wack jobs. They can get sued and lose a big chunk of change. This store has had several s.e.xual discrimination suits or threats of suits against a couple of the daytime managers-guys who weren't promoting women-and Kinko's took those things very seriously. They have to fire the wack jobs. They have to figure them out right away and not let them have management positions. So, like basically, I think the legal system keeps corporations in line. I mean I don't think corporations are in line as far as pollution and taxes and whatnot. I think the corporations obviously get away with murder. But as far as how they have to treat their people, I think it's basically good and I'm all for corporations.

Well, actually, I guess that isn't true. There are terrible corporations. Kinko's is just okay. Like, they do not recycle at my store. But I think it's corporate policy to recycle. And I do believe that other stores recycle. However, the town that I'm in charges a chunk of money for a recycling bin. So our store doesn't pay for it, and we throw out a dumpster of paper every week-a huge dumpster of paper every week. And that just sort of breaks my heart. It f.u.c.king sucks. But I don't think that's a Kinko's thing. I know people who work at two other Kinko's stores and they both recycle. So I think this is just this store.

I mean, I don't know. It is very corporate. That's just what it is. And so things are the way they are. You know. Like this weekend, all the managers and a.s.sistant managers are at a company picnic-they're playing golf someplace. They do these little jaunts. They'll come back and be all like rah-rah-rah! And they'll pull the co-workers together and have a very jargony talk with us about how any business the store gets is shown in our paycheck. That it's not just for the company, it's for us. And it all feels very false. [Laughs] But they aren't bad people, you know? And this is the first job I've ever had where I don't get all b.u.mmed that I'm going to it. I remember when I was teaching, I would just get so b.u.mmed every morning. I'd cry sometimes on the way in. And I am not sad at all about coming into work now. I am happy to see everybody. It's just-you know-I can't argue with a job where I go in, I do my little thing, maybe I work hard, but it's no problem. And the people are totally nice. You know what I mean? [Laughs] It's really hard to be nasty about that. I mean, even if I think it is a little silly.

People are in emotional duress when

they show up, that's a general rule.

There's something wrong with their

car and most of them don't know c.r.a.p

about cars.

AUTOMOBILE PARTS SPECIALIST.

John Dove.

I sell Honda auto parts. That's my job, and I've been working with automobiles in one way or another for twenty years, but I don't consider it my life. Not by a long shot. It keeps me alive, keeps my family fed, but it interferes with what I'd like to be doing, which is painting, drawing, sculpting, making little airplanes.

I wanted to be an artist. And I did pursue that for a while, but I became disillusioned with it in college. I was trying to follow a more traditional pathway, and I used to get into fights with my professors about that. I went to North Texas. There was a professor up there who did "sound painting." He ran around with a tape recorder, taping various noises. Set it up in the auditorium and you'd listen to all these sounds. His philosophy was, the more outrageous the better. Kinda, try to break the boundaries of tradition. Meanwhile, I'm doing these landscape paintings, you know? Trying to be the next Van Gogh. [Laughs] We'd get in awful fights. Then I saw other people who were doing well-and this one guy's project was shaving a baby pig and then tattooing it. He got an A for that. There's another guy who went around killing blackbirds, and he would snip off their wings and their feet and glue them onto a canvas. He was getting A's for this, and I was going, what the h.e.l.l am I doing here? Why am I doing this?

So I gave it up and moved to Dallas, came here and got married. This was in the mid-seventies. The only experience I had was cooking-working in restaurants and bars-which landed me a job at Howard Johnson's. It was just awful. [Laughs] No money, weird hours, just h.e.l.l on your domestic life. I was like, "I need to find something else to do!" [Laughs] I didn't care what. I had a friend here who worked for Continental Cars. He said it was lucrative and that was interesting to me, so he helped fix me up as a warranty clerk at a dealer for the British-Leyland Company, which made MGs, Triumphs, Jaguars, and so on.

I had no idea what a warranty clerk was. Turns out it was basically a paperwork job. When your car's under warranty, you take it to your dealer, they fix it for free, and then they get reimbursed by the mother company for performing that work. The warranty clerk is the guy who files the claims to the mother company so the dealer can get paid back.

It seemed pretty straightforward, but when I got to this particular dealer, they hadn't had a warranty clerk for six months, and they had a stack of claims representing probably fifty thousand dollars' worth of money that needed to be reimbursed. And it states clearly on each claim, "Not valid after twenty-eight days." So I had to learn how to falsify claims, big time.

I falsified the whole stack. It took about a year and a half. What I did was, we figured it would be safest to file as few fake claims as possible, so I consolidated stuff. Say we had a bunch of claims, like eight hundred bucks of little widgets and things-axle seals and oil leaks and so on-well, I'd write a claim for eight hundred bucks of major engine work on a TR6. They always blew head gaskets. And I'd file this one fake claim and get the money for the dealership. And then I'd just take this big pile of little claims and throw it in the garbage. This was before everything was computerized and it was surprisingly easy to get these fake claims paid. I did it gradually, and I don't remember British-Leyland ever even challenging one dot on anything I sent them. They just paid up.

It was weird, though. You know, it made me nervous. I was just trying to have a decent job, I didn't want any trouble of any kind. And those sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes at my dealership set up a special account that that money went into. Because this was all done on the sly, you know, and the accountants couldn't find out about it. I even had two ledgers. I had the ledger that we showed the mother company and I had the ledger that was the real one. And the money that came in, the guys who ran the place were basically just pocketing it. They were buying cameras and all kinds of stuff. It was screwy.

One guy there one time introduced me to a customer by saying I had a license to steal from the company. I didn't appreciate that. I smiled nicely at the customer and got him his warranty work, then I went over and got in that guy's face and said, "If you ever say that again I'm going to take you out." I was p.i.s.sed, but it was basically true-I was stealing, or helping those guys steal. And I became very disillusioned after a few years. I just couldn't take it.

So I left. I went to work selling tires and shock absorbers for an independent shop. I liked that a good bit better, but then they forced me to join the Retail Clerks Union of America-which has like the lowest pay structure of any union ever. It's just a little above minimum wage. So I went back to, strangely enough, the same company, British-Leyland, but a different dealer and this time I was in the parts department. And that was fairly straightforward. I was selling parts and there's nothing really [laughs] questionable about that. I liked it fine, and I've stuck to parts ever since. I moved over to this Honda dealership about twelve years ago to be the parts specialist.

What I do is I sit behind a counter and I sell parts, just Honda parts for Honda cars. I get a salary and a little commission on each sale. The customers fall into two types-I sell over the front counter to people who are do-it-yourselfers and I sell over the back counter to the technicians in our repair shop. If you bring your car in here to get it serviced, the technicians will have a look at it, and any parts that it needs, they'll come to me for them and I'll bill you. If your warranty covers it, that's great. If not, you pay me.

It's mostly a memory job. You know, memory of part numbers, prices, and so on. After that, it's all dealing with people, which can be kinda stressful. People are in emotional duress when they show up, that's a general rule. There's something wrong with their car and most of them don't know c.r.a.p about cars. That's why they're in the service department. I can understand their situation and their being so upset, but quite frankly, I don't like dealing with the public much. It's not my strength. Some customers get pretty angry. I spend a lot of days on the phone getting hara.s.sed. "Is it done? Why isn't it done? When will it be done?" All day. It wears me down sometimes. I have exploded on occasion. Not often, but once in a while. As a general rule, I try not to argue with them. If I'm in a situation where a customer is getting into a heated discussion or something, I'll just pa.s.s it right on to my manager. I try to avoid conflicts whenever possible.

A lot of the customers think they're getting fleeced. Most are just angry people. Paranoids, you know. But I hate to say it, but a few of 'em are right-they are getting fleeced. But the fleecing is not due to malicious intent, it's due to incompetence by the technicians. They're overworked and some of 'em are just incompetent. I mean, I'll have a technician come up to me and say, for instance, "I need an interior fan motor." So I give him the part and I bill it out on the customer's repair order. And then, an hour later, the technician'll come back to me and say, "Uh, I need a twenty amp fuse-could you charge it to the shop." And I give him the fuse and charge it to the shop.

So, in effect, the customer gets charged for a hefty fan motor and it was really just the cheap fuse. But like I say, this is an example of incompetence. Of fleecing through incompetence. It's not crooked. We could go take the new fan motor out of the car, put the old one back in, doubling the time that it takes, but we wouldn't get paid for that time, so we don't. My boss would kill us if we did that. We just charge them for that motor. It ain't fair, but it doesn't happen all that often and the majority of everything that happens is on the up and up. I sleep well.

It's a good job. There's problems, but it's not a perfect world. There's problems with everything. I've done enough different things to know what works for me. And what's good about this job is, first of all, I make a good income. Second, it's honest-I know my parts and I know Honda makes 'em well. They're the best, I think. And third-and this is very important to me-I have a lot of downtime, lots of slow time that I can devote to my projects-just little things to keep my creativity alive. Lately, I've been making little airplanes. I make the wings out of the plastic from warranty bags, and I buy sticks at Hobby Lobby for the frames, and I get these little plastic propellers from model airplane kits. I build 'em, then take 'em home, and put 'em up on the cabinets and around the house. It's a lot of fun.

I have a box in my desk full of this airplane stuff. When I first showed up, my boss was like, "What do you need a box for?" I told him it was to keep my notes in and he said okay. Of course, my box has about two notes in it, and the rest is full of little toys, b.a.l.l.s, propellers, little things to make things out of, basically. It's my little creativity box.

My boss figured out a good while ago what I'm up to and he has, on occasion, said he doesn't like it. There've been several times where he told me that he wanted me to quit it, but he didn't have a good reason, so I didn't quit. [Laughs] Thing is, my boss has got a deep knowledge in racing and engines, but that's about all. That's the best I can say for him. He has an eighth-grade education and he's had several debilitating injuries from motorcycle crashes and he misses a lot of work because his back goes out and he has these other injuries. And there's no way that he could ever live up to the standards he expects of us. I mean, there's just a basic hypocrisy to that man. He's a real stickler for being on time, but he calls out a lot. So there you go. And he's always leaving early, he's always getting in late, he's always breaking all his own rules. But these are things I've grown to accept.

We've reached a point where he doesn't usually bother me as long as I do everything I'm supposed to do, all my duties. Then I'll go work on my projects and what's he going to say? He's sitting there filling out a crossword puzzle and the other guys are sitting around reading the paper, talking about just total c.r.a.p, just total bulls.h.i.t, you know? I'm just making myself happy, I'm not s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up. I read the paper at four-thirty this morning, thanks. I've already read it. People got killed, okay? We bombed some more. The paper is just-it's real good, it p.i.s.ses me off.

Making the airplanes and drawings pleases me. That's all there is to it. But that's a lot. It's important to be happy with yourself. I don't regret anything. What's to regret? I tried art, it wasn't for me. There's no money in it. I decided that I wanted to live with Jane. I wanted to marry her, and she told me right up front: "I will not starve with you. I love you, but I won't starve with you." And we don't starve. I get a good income from this, good insurance benefits, profitsharing benefits. Jane works too, and between both of us, we are doing very well. And we have a lovely daughter, Lilly. She's twelve.

There was a time when I was younger, when I first got into cars and decided I was gonna make a career out of this, I thought that going up in management was going to be the way to go. But I changed my mind. I don't like the stress. I'd just as soon stay out of everything and sell my parts and just stay as invisible as I can, just be invisible. You don't need to work yourself to death to be happy. I've got a good retirement package. I'm looking forward to that. I'll have more free time to do my projects and be myself. It'll be sweet.

It's not complicated. It's not dangerous.