I CAN'T SEE WHAT'S GOING ON
When I applied to work for leading rental-car agency Enterprise after being laid off from my full time job back in April, I figured unwisely that based on my 8+ years of customer service and sales management experience I would be offered a position in something like customer service, or say, maybe sales management. I was happy to hear back from them so shortly after I applied, with a phone call informing me that I was in luck: because my near-decade of experience was just shy of the required “no experience necessary, must be college graduate”, I qualified for the much sought-after position of “Service Specialist”.
Hot damn!, I thought. At the time I assumed that this meant that I was to be the person that checked the cars over with the customers, signed up their contracts maybe, and generally provided specialized service that wasn’t sales. Of course this was incorrect, and I was hired before the details of the position were made fully aware to me. A “service specialist”, it turns out, specializes in cleaning cars and taxiing customers. That’s it. And it’s terrible. I’ll forego the obvious cleaning cars is a disgusting and tedious business. There’s worse reasons. Including:
5. The Weather’s The Way It Is Because God Hates You
This is one of those BOOK OF JOB situations, isn't it?
One of the nice things about the position is that they graciously allow you to wear shorts (and dress semi-casually in general). If this was not the case, I may not be alive today. Those of you who have worked in stuffy, humid garages in 100+ degree heat with no air conditioning may already know that dehydration and heat exhaustion are expected, and you have to constantly fight against these hazardous conditions to merely stay on your feet. What tends to be a bit of a hindrance in this effort is the demand that you have to manually clean cars for hours on end.
I remember once when I worked in video retail a long time ago that the AC went out in our building. The heat index in our store was a bit over 100 and we all felt like we were going to die standing up. Fortunately we didn’t really have to do a whole lot outside of ring-out customers and answer the question “boy it’s hot in here, huh?” At the time I couldn’t imagine having to deal with this intense heat while actually doing physically demanding labor. There was actually a day when the heat index in the garage was 113 degrees, and the sales reps indoors (in the AC) were complaining how hot it was outside.
Not to mention the record-setting rain storm Chicago had this year that I had to work through, in which driving conditions were so bad that you witnessed an accident on the road every couple miles or so. I actually had to drive through the flooded Des Plaines River to pick up a customer, and the normally 30min drive stretched to well over two hours.
And this is just the summer; I can’t imagine the other extreme. If I had to try and make sure car after car was spotless in below-freezing weather, I don’t even know how I would manage. I’d like to assume, though, that the company would be smart enough to take this into consideration and graciously allow us to wear a jacket.
4. Water Is Actually Not Your Friend
Cats have actually known this for ages.
This may seem a bit like griping over nothing, but I was seriously not used to being soaked in hard water for six hours a day. What’s the problem with that? you may ask. Isn’t it just like working at a pool?
No, actually, it’s not for several reasons. First is that the first thing to get soaked-through is your socks and shoes, and they will stay this way for the duration of your shift. After walking around in soggy, squishy footwear for more than an hour it starts to get a bit uncomfortable. Next, inevitably because you’re using a garden hose in a small enclosure, your pants (or shorts if you’re lucky) and shirt will also be drenched. It offers little relief from the heat as the water is often room-temperature and stale to the point where if it gets on you, you can’t tell if it’s hard water or just sweat.
Of course after your shift you can go home and change out of your disgusting, dirt-water-sopped attire, but your shoes are still ruined. Even sitting out to dry until your next shift does little to dent the effect that’s been wrought. You just have to put them back on and deal with it as you start shift after shift. I haven’t worked there in almost a week, and I’m still anxiously awaiting the day in which they’ll be dry enough to wear without feeling the heavy weight of my soul sinking itself down into my bones in watery despair.
3. Exotic Wildlife
I don’t hate most bugs, actually. I’m one of the few people I know that doesn’t really mind spiders or giant ants or beetles or earwigs or millipedes. This helps, as there is an overabundance of all of these that live within their cozy home of the garage out of which I worked. No, the giant spiders and crawly bugs I didn’t mind as much as the flying insects. Because our garage building was constructed mainly from hard-water-soaked wood, we were home to a population of giant carpenter bees that had several nests in the area. They were a curious sort that just had to know everything going on with every car you cleaned.
Alongside the bees were a multitude of moths, dragonflies, cicadas, and most of all mosquitoes. There was absolutely no way you could walk into that garage–even for a minute–without bug repellent and not come out with a dozen or so bites. This seems pretty obvious given all the standing water and the generally disgusting, swamp-like conditions, but there wasn’t a heck of a lot anyone could really do about it, other than spray on some screen and deal with it. Though, once, the other service agent I worked with decided it be a great idea to “wash down the walls” of the garage to get rid of them. I should clarify his plan, actually: use the goddam hose to coat the walls with hard-water. His plan had a few flaws, namely that mosquitoes liked water, but also that it really helped the mold dig in and spread. Also, the outlets he doused didn’t work for a few days, so we were without a radio (it’s okay, that radio was stolen a week or so later anyway).
2. No One Really Knows What The Hell’s Going On
Anyone can just TAKE 'em...
Renting a car is a confusing process. It’s kind of like the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry reserves a car rental, but when he arrives they don’t have any cars there for him to rent. If it seems ridiculous, it’s because it is, and it’s 100% absolutely how it actually is. The reason for this is that locations act as mere satellites for an overall stock of cars, and any location can rent out any car from anywhere, even if that car isn’t actually around because it’s being rented by someone else (theoretically it will be returned by that customer in time to rent it out to the person you’re now wanting to rent to). This isn’t always the case, and every day you have to drive to auto shops to pick up cars that were being worked on just so you can turn around and rent them right out.
There’s never a set schedule of things to do as a service agent because no one’s really sure what’s going on all the time. One sales rep may ask you to clean a minivan for a family that may want to rent it in a few hours, while another sales rep will ask you to go pick up a sedan at Car-X because they’re short on cars at the lot, and another rep may want you to go pick up some guy who’s been waiting at his house for a pick up for 3hrs. Which should you do? You should probably pick up the guy, right? There’s actually no right answer, because there’s no communication amongst the staff, and no one’s really sure what you should be doing. No one out-ranks anyone else so everybody’s right (or wrong) in their own special way. All they know is that if you don’t do what they asked you first, then you’re ruining their day and just blew their sale. It generally makes working chaotic and stressful, for obvious reasons. No I didn’t clean the Charger yet, I was plucking a stranded customer out of the Des Plaines River. You’re right though, it’s my fault, I’m sorry.
1. You Get Paid Less Than Everyone Else. Much Less.
This leash demeans us both.
All of this–all of it–might be worth it if you were paid adequately for the job performed. It’s manual labor in harsh conditions for hours on end, and I don’t think it’s all that outrageous to ask to be compensated properly for that. It’s hard, sometimes, to get mad at the reps because they have a different job and don’t have to deal with the dirt and the grime and the constant demand that our position entails. Rather, it would be hard to not get upset with the reps if there wasn’t the constant fact that they make over 3 times what a service specialist makes. Being talked down to by someone in these conditions is humiliating enough lest you forget that you’re making minimum wage.
You really need to make sure you clean ALL the bugs off the windows, or it makes ME look bad, someone with eight years less experience at their job says to you for something like an hour straight. When that happens, I typically don’t hear their suggestion as my mind is preoccupied with the fact that in that entire hour I made eight dollars and twenty-five cents. That and the fact that when you’re hired you’re told that you actually can’t move up in the company from you’re position, but should someday you graduate with that fancy degree, you can reapply for a different position. Maybe someday when you’re a real person we’ll let you print out the paper that lets the customer rent the car.
It’s also not a job for which you receive any sort of tips, as one might expect considering it’s a glorified car-porting job in which you’re literally taxiing people to and fro. The reason for this is that the customer’s are already getting gouged for the price to rent the car to begin with, and those driving them around should be thankful that the customers don’t regularly spit at them while driving.
I guess if you can read this list and think hey, you know, it’s still a job and I could do it, you absolutely can. It’s not a particularly complicated job, but after working there for a season there’s no two ways to interpret what this job is: bloody insufferable. Any one that can do it for any length of time and still have some sort of amount of dignity gets my utmost respect, if not my utter confusion.
Unless you're a Service Specialist, obviously.
The Glass City 