Passcode

Finally catching up with the 1990’s, my weekend job has decided to become a Wi-Fi hotspot. This is a big deal for them, because my weekend job is with this little non-profit organization that’s run by a dozen housewives and a handful of aged post-hippies. They all work out of an old mansion sitting on about 40 wooded acres in the middle of the frou-frou suburbs.

Turns out they fell into some money and used it to upgrade their computers, and install ridiculous military-grade super-amazing wonder things that make it so you’re able to pick up a rotary telephone and use Google just by wishing it.

Of course, this amazing technology is still in the hands of weirdoes, so they’ve decided not to give anyone the passcode.

The excuse is that the internet will distract the employees from their job. This is just referring to the employees like me – the people monitoring special events on the weekends. Even though I’ve been at the company, in one way or another, for 18 years, and have been monitoring special events for 15 of those years, I can’t be trusted with the Devil Internet.

Let’s paint the full picture: The old mansion sees about 300 special events – mostly weddings – a year. These are events where 100-200 people come and do whatever they’re going to do. Usually fill up the toilets with foul diarrhea, puke blood and whiskey on the carpet, tear apart furniture, and tumble down stairs.

Overseeing these events are the monitors – a not-so-crack team of six folks, including me, who are here to make sure the house is clean at the end of the night and troubleshoot any insane problems that come up during the event. From pulling tampons out of toilets to hoping the police arrive before the formerly institutionalized son of the lady who willed the house to the organization pulls the trigger. We’re abused by caterers and clients alike and, subsequently, all suffer from deep corruption and bitterness.

For those evening events, we’re the last ones out. All alone in this big old house, a mile from the nearest public transport (if it’s still running), in the early AM, after dragging ass all night being nattered at by idiots. We deserve equality! Rah, rah!

When your job is to, basically, make sure shit doesn’t fuck up, it goes without saying that there’s plenty of down time. The nature of our job is to respond to emergencies. Of course, the property has a groundskeeper who lives on the premises. So the house is always in good shape. I haven’t had a fuse blow in 10 years, and the toilets stopped backing up about four years ago. The emergency angle isn’t encountered too often. The secondary part of our job is to police the property and bathrooms throughout the event – amounting to maybe five minutes each hour, if you want to be anal about it. Officially, the guidelines say “check the bathrooms twice during the event.” That’s two bathrooms checked twice during a 10 hour shift.

At the end of the event, there’s about an hour of clean up – mainly following the caterers around to make sure they don’t do anything retarded (which they’ll do if you let them).

Got the times in your head now? A ten hour shift. Maybe 15 minutes setting up, an hour at the end. Maybe another 15 minutes during the event making sure there’s enough toilet paper. So that leaves eight and a half hours where the job involves…nothing. Sitting still and staring at the wall for eight hours is possible without shirking any of the work.

So what will Devil Internet distract us from? I’ll tell you what we do to fill that eight hours, and you can let me know if the internet is a distraction:

1) Watch movies. At one event, I watched the entire Mad Max trilogy. When I’m doing a shift a week in the spring and fall, I debate upping my Netflix to ten at a time.

2) Read books. When not watching movies, I average one full-length paperback a shift. One 12 hour shift, I plowed through three Dennis Lehane novels.

3) Personal work. One of my co-workers has almost completed her dissertation, with most of the work done during shifts.

I agree – the third point would be a problem if we had internet access. No longer could I spend a good, solid eight hours working on my never-to-be-published novel. And it would severely cut into my Netflix turnaround time. Let me tell you – I’m serious about getting the most out of Netflix.

The real root of the problem is that there has always been a divide between the special events and the rest of the staff. I’ve worked just about every job there is in the organization, so I’ve seen it from both sides. All those housewives hate the events. There’s no reason why. I think it’s jealousy. The organization does various things – from a bookstore (also treated like a stepchild) to environmental education programs for kids. Frequently, you’ll hear talk about how the education department is the most important because they make so much money. They also spend most of what they make. More, actually. The events make all the profit, and this has to bother them. Or maybe they all suffer from the delusion that I do: That the big old mansion belongs to them. That I understand, as I often spend time during the events daydreaming the same thing.

I had an ending here that jokingly pointed out how the internet is distracting me from my regular day job, but then a friend returned my call and told me how to get around the password. He’s a big fancy computer guy who knows this shit and I figured, hey, I can do some really illegal stuff now. Because, you see, I wrote this article while sitting here at the stupid party. Another Saturday night lost.

He just sighed and told me to use the LAN line from my boss’s computer. I’m a little disappointed that it was so easy. You can’t be a criminal in this world even when you try. Also, I hate typing anything lengthy on my laptop because, unlike my weekend job, I have not caught up with the 1990’s. And the DJ is playing the goddamned Macarena at top volume. The world is wrong.

Oh! A Something About Mary sing along was just announced.

Dear Internet: Please send whiskey!