What does a Meter Maid say she does for a Living at a Party?

This is dedicated to a friend who asked me to write about what a meter-maid says she (or he) does for a living when people ask her at a party. You can't say you're a meter-maid; people would hate that. You basically ruin people's days so that the city can spend the money on offensive and/or stupid looking artwork or whatever bullshit thing they want to spend it on. I was thinking, Cops probably have the same problem buuuuttt... people are probably less likely to start shit with a Cop. Meter-maids are almost helpless; a Cop can throw you in jail for any one of millions of reasons but a meter-maid can give you a $50 ticket if she knows which one is your car and she can prove you were doing something wrong. So what could you do, avoid talking about your job? I'm unemployed and I can tell you that is almost the first thing people ask you after they introduce you. I hate telling people I'm unemployed, even though they don't come out and say it, how they really feel about usually boils to the surface eventually. I'd say if someone tells you they are unemployed you react one of two ways: 1. You think they are lazy and worthless 2. You get jealous that you have to work when they don't have to. So I know that they must face the same thing when they say they are meter-maids.

Obviously it's not just meter-maids; I've met people in all sorts of frowned upon professions and nearly everyone would bring it up in a different way. I actually had one like this (I'll get to that in a second) and I'd just try to change the subject and only tell them if they really persisted. Now that I think about it, really there was only one person I liked less after hearing what she did, and that was just because of the way she told me about it. She was some like credit card bill collector and she would tell me about all the things she lied to people about and how stupid people were for falling for that... I was one of those people who was stupid enough to fall for it; so the more she talked about it the madder I got. But I actually learned a lot from what she told me. She told me that they make threats like, "If you don't pay us we are going to have to escalate this, or turn this over." They don't have anyone to turn it over to because it's not a crime, in fact it's an unsecured loan. They can sue you for the money, which you don't want, but really they don't want to have to do that either. Likely what they will do is sell the loans to collection agencies, the harder you are to collect from, the less they sell it for so say I owe $500 on my merchant Visa card. I'm a real pain in the ass to deal with so they sell the loan to some other asshole for $100. They are going to try for a while to get $500 but after a while they might just want to get $200 or $300. So you settle for much less than you owe. This is very risky and the best policy is to just pay your bills on time as even if you can get away with it, your credit gets shredded.

I have met a bunch of people who handled the "What do you do for a living" question well. For instance I met a girl at a wedding and she was very shy, in fact I asked her to dance and she said, "No I'm not feeling good" and then her sister told me to just ask her again and then she came up to dance. This illustrates the point that I know more about Nuclear Fission Reactors than I do about women. Anyway after asking her what she did the necessary two times needed to get the information, I found out she repossesses houses and at first I was taken a back by that. But she said, "It's just a job and if I didn't do it someone else would." And I guess I never thought about it that way, no matter what you do for a living there will always be a meter-maid out there somewhere. If it's you, then that just sucks, but it needs to be done by somebody. It all just kind of goes back the thing that we think that people's jobs are who they are. Like I said that's almost the first thing we ask people when we meet them. I know I used to program computers but it said absolutely nothing about who I was. I didn't ever say, "I'm sorry, I was expecting a Boolean response to that question," or "Sorry bro that's not a valid operand for that thing you were just talking about." So why would I even think that that would even help to get to know people? Of course there are people who are exactly what their job is. I remember there was this one guy and his name was Johnny and he was a repo man. They say, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," but whatever Johnny did they came and got his ass, and as far as I know he's still doing a stretch down there. Johnny was the type of guy who was too proud to take $10 from you, but if he could steal or con you out of $5 he'd do it in a heartbeat. Jackin' people's shit was his bread and butter, the fact that he could do it and not have to go to jail for it probably only sweetened the deal.

I know for me I had a job like that, I used to work at a Catholic church at the time when all of the priest scandals were going on. At a party I couldn't tell anyone what I did, if I did I'd either get people rolling their eyes or people saying, "Well you know what I think about religion." As if for some reason I really needed to know what some idiot frat kid double-fisting Steel Reserves thought about religion. We would have people come in asking for money (for some reason it's common for people to ask for money from churches). Now it's one thing to have people come up to you on the street asking for change. It's a lot harder when they come into your office, not that I had any money to give them, not surprisingly we keep the money in the bank. Some people would get upset, some people would almost get violent, I've never been hurt but had a couple close calls. I had one guy who would come and stay in my office every day until I gave him money, I just ignored him and after a few hours he'd just leave. One time I got an unexpected Christmas bonus and a woman called me up in tears saying she needed money to buy her kids Christmas presents and to keep her power on. I gave in and said I'd drop the money by her house, she said she wouldn't be home but her son would. So I go to the bank and get cash and find the house, I knocked on the door and a man in his thirties answers the door while on the phone, grabs the money out of my hand and slams the door. I didn't get a thank you or anything and when I realized that her son (or whoever he was) was far past the throwing-a-temper-tantrum-because-he-didn't-get-a-Christmas-present age, it made me even sadder. Hey and since everyone goes there with me, why the fuck didn't this joker have a job? It wasn't like they weren't easy to get in 2002.

So despite everyone looking to us for money; they still hated us. When we didn't give any money we would get smart ass remarks like, "Oh yeah you need to pay off those kids that you molest." I didn't take it personally because I'm not a priest and I was in charge of the business side of things like getting bids for our finance council, scheduling repairs and inspections, getting people their stipends, and getting people their office supplies. But still that shit is really unsettling to hear, I wouldn't call Golf Pro Shop and call them adulterers or something. We would get prank calls and calls from people all the time; I even got a couple phone calls from a woman I now believe to be Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church. They are a quaint little hate group that goes around the U.S. protesting at gay people's funerals as well as soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Judging by their website they predominately hate homosexuals but they also seem to hate fallen soldiers, Jewish people, Catholics, churches that don't hate homosexuals, and even churches that do hate homosexuals but don't embrace Westboro Baptists. Apparently the Phelps family, that heads up the parish in Kansas, enjoy skiing when they aren't spreading whatever their convoluted hate message is. I recognized that woman's voice when I saw part of a documentary, The Most Hated Family in America as one of the people who would call up our church and harass us. Her trademark phrase is saying something to the effect of "Hell is going to split underneath you and suck you in" as if Hell is some sort of fissure that just lies dormant underneath us waiting for us to say, "Gays aren't so bad." They protested at a few of the churches around us while on ski trips, but ours wasn't big enough for them to actually visit, just call and tell us that we are going to hell. So any job where I can give away my whole Christmas bonus and still have people call me nearly every day and tell me that they hate me and I was going to hell, wasn't for me. So that's my job that I try not to talk about a whole lot.