During the Great Depression, like most men in his hometown of Carroltown, Pennsylvania, my grandpa was a coal miner. There were a few other jobs in town at the public school, the auto garage or the meat market. The rest of the community had to scrounge for whatever work they could find. Scrounged work was a legitimate type of employment and working class people were proud to do it. It was listed often in the 1930 U.S. census records. The work was called 'odd jobs'.
When you ask people today what they do for work you do not hear the expression 'odd jobs'. Some say, “I am a freelance consultant” of one sort or another. I once tried that myself. I was a financial consultant. I never did get much work. I guess people didn't think much of a financial consultant who spent her days writing poetry and playing the guitar. Now when people say, “I work freelance” I think what that really means is they are unemployed but they're ashamed to admit it. Today I am not unemployed nor am I a freelance consultant. I do odd jobs.
I've always done odd jobs. But in this new depression, like many people, I have come to rely on odd jobs. Odd jobs are not strange jobs, unusual jobs, peculiar jobs or eccentric jobs. An odd job is the job that is left over. It' s the job that remains after all the other jobs are taken. It's a job that needs doing that cannot be outsourced to another place but many people do not want it.
These jobs are often manual labor or only come around once in a while for a day or two here and there. Odd jobs I' ve had include picking apples, driving a blind piano tuner, working 18 hours on election day, working the 4 am shift in a department store at Christmas time, cleaning up a building site after a construction job, painting an apartment when a tenant moves out, and providing home care for an incontinent elder. These are the jobs where your whole body aches, your nose bleeds, your lungs wheeze and your eyes burn for days afterwards.
My most recent odd job was as an enumerator, collecting data for the 2010 U.S. census in San Francisco, California. The job required that we be on call seven days a week twenty-four hours a day, but no work was guaranteed. If work became available our crew leader sent us an email to show up a few hours later at a designated location. Any worker who didn't show up was dropped permanently from the work roster. We were required to complete our first assignment in order to qualify for future work assignments.
Our first assignment was called 'targeted non-sheltered outdoor locations', known as TNSOL for short. These are specific places where people experiencing homelessness live alone or in encampments, places like alleys, under bridges and in parks. Also included are people living in cars and RVs parked on city streets or parking lots. In order to accurately count this population data collection occurs between 2 am and sunrise. Our TNSOL assignment was Golden Gate Park.
Golden Gate Park has been a San Francisco outdoor living quarters for decades. Many if its inhabitants look as if they may have been living in the Haight Ashbury since the 1960's but many younger people live there as well. Some keep dogs, as companions or protectors and the dogs are often a guard dog breed like pit bulls. These dogs were a bit of a concern and several team members said they were afraid of the dogs.
Our job was to search every bush and every clearing for sleeping bodies or encampments. When day broke we were to move on to count the people sleeping in parked vehicles. It was important to complete the count before the sun was up because the cars drive off when the daytime parking regulations go into effect.
We arrived at the park at 1:30 am and our crew leader gave us each a flashlight and reflective vest and then divided us into teams. We fanned out in groups and headed out into the bushes. We were all city dwellers and most of us were dressed in our usual clothing and not prepared for the terrain. There was a slow and steady rain that night and the ground was well saturated. We were in a section of Golden Gate Park where the terrain is uneven and the tree trunks begin their growth horizontally along the ground and snake along in the underbrush entwined with trumpet vines and other foliage. We lost workers within the first hour to twisted ankles, soaked clothing, freezing bodies and one headfirst tumble down a ravine. But there were no negative encounters with dogs.
We successfully completed the 2010 census collection in Golden Gate Park. For our sector the count was thirty-one outside and seven in cars. Where people were awake, both they and their dogs were friendly to us. In one encampment a man proudly exclaimed, “and we are card carrying registered voters in San Francisco too!” When the sun rose we headed home, another job well done with promises from our crew leader of more work to follow.
In the end, very little additional work was assigned to my 2010 U.S. census team. We received only about fifteen hours more work. It turned out that the government had over hired its workforce. There were many more applicants this time than in decades past and they hired us all. So there was a lot less work for a lot more people.
I got a notice in the mail from the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census. It said I was eligible to file for unemployment insurance for Federal workers. I don't think I need to be doing that because I am not unemployed. I do odd jobs and we odd job workers have a 'come day, go day' attitude about work. There is always an odd job to be done, a toilet to clean, a wall to paint, a window to wash. But in this new depression it' s nice to know I have options.
© 2010 Margaret Cooley