Shoveling Shit and Killing Critters
So after the disillusionment of a short career in middle management as a Food Manager at the University of Wisconsin, I decided to take a job as kennel worker at the Humane Society next door to the Oscar Mayer hot dog factory which lent the area a fragrance of feral flatulence. The dog pound, every other day or so, fired up its Incinerator and burned the cats and dogs, kittens and puppies which Mike, our manager, had dispatched with an injection of phenobarbital, adding burnt hair and searing meat to the olfactory mix. We had ourselves an animal Auschwitz.
I had gone to the Pound to look for a pet, see if they had a little guy whose beseeching eyes thawed my wintry heart enough to adopt. I found a wiener dog, appropriately enough, a dachshund, and by the time I’d put the little fellow on a leash, I’d seen the sign Kennel Worker Wanted, applied for and been accepted as their new employee, start next day.
There were three of us on the crew working the pens and the outdoor runs. Larry sprayed down the pens, I was the puppy room guy and Mary Jean handled the cats. All day I cleaned the poop and piss, laid down fresh newspapers and talked to prospective adopters. My partner Larry had just gotten out of prison, served 16 months for selling LSD to a federal undercover narcotics agent, and this job was the only one he’d found where an ex-felon could get hired. Mary Jean had terminal cancer, she told us one day at lunch break, but she didn’t. She just liked the idea, I guess, of an early and tragic demise. Maybe too much soap opera in her teens.
I told myself shoveling shit was no worse — and maybe the same — as my last job, just slightly more literal. And maybe that was true. But I never killed anyone or anything at my dining hall or my grill or my ice cream parlor. Even though I did poison a few dozen folks with my toxic potato salad warmed to a microbial paradise under the heating lamps. But that, I told the cuisine cops who finally discovered the source for the rash of food poisonings, was accidental, the result of ignorance. Personally, I always like my potato salad a little on the warm side.
I lasted three months at the kennel. You can only kill so many dogs and cats before the toll on your psyche weighs on you with the tonnage of guilt no rationalization can lighten. To lighten the burden, I ended up adopting three dogs, maybe a bit too much atonement for a one bedroom upstairs apartment over a TV repair shop. But of course, that’s another story. One, for the time being, I’ll spare you.
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Tags: Dog Pound Blues, Humane Society, Minimum Wage Jobs, My Career Trajectory