Working Girls

What Kind of Job Do You Want?

Service Work Edition

By Trixie and Katya

Are you a fierce fucking diva who lives to serve? Well, take a number, bitch, and welcome to the club, because we are, too. Most of the jobs we’ve worked have been in the service industry, which probably had something to do with the fact that we became such fierce divas who can’t stop serving. Before we run down the list of potential service work, how about you take a quick personal inventory to see if you’ve got what it takes to serve it like a big wet fucking diva, completely soaked to the bone with nasty, gushy, fierceness. Are your giant, oily hands peppered with patches of matted hair and thick, impenetrable calluses? Good. Does your glossy forty-eight-inch ponytail detach easily? Are your hooves so riddled with bunions that you can only shop for shoes at the Boot Barn? Got any teeth? Where the fuck is your aunt Trudy? These are all important questions, and while there may not be any important answers, let’s go ahead and secure our hairnets anyway. It’s time to serve, you fierce fucking fat* bitch!

*fat = fabulous and talented

Katya: Cleaner

Let’s face it, people are really fucking gross. We, as a species, are morally and socially compelled toward an unachievable state of cleanliness that is betrayed by our innately repulsive physiology. As a professional cleaner, you confront the harsh and undeniable evidence of humanity’s contempt for itself. Any previous subscription you may have had to a recognizable code of ethics has been long abandoned and replaced by the chaos of unbridled aggression, violence, and endless suffering. The sheets are soaked in blood. The walls are speckled with viscera. The stench of death is a fetid fog that follows you at all times, ubiquitous and unavoidable.

You were once a corporate lawyer who got into some questionable activities on an extended vacation in Mexico City, but now you’re a cleaner for the cartels. It all happened so quickly; during brief moments of peace you struggle to recall just how you got yourself mixed up in something so dangerous, so destructive, so . . . delectable. Ahh, there it is. That’s when you remember. It wasn’t just your cast-iron stomach and indifference toward dismemberment but your surprising newly awakened taste for fresh blood and meat.

Suddenly the pieces of the puzzle begin to line themselves up. When the other children would chase the ice cream truck through the neighborhood streets, you would slink away to the woods to rip the skin off rabbits and chew their innards. You didn’t just get mixed up with some bad guys or fall into the shadows by mistake. You are and always have been the pure, unadulterated essence of evil. Like a volcanic eruption straight from the bowels of Hell, you were spewed directly out of the mouth of the beast and into some innocent woman’s uterus, like those tubes they used to have at the bank drive-through. But you are not merely just evil; you are evil’s nefarious enabler. You remove the carnage of lowly grifters, criminals, and monsters to allow their hideousness to grow and spread into ever more indescribable viciousness.

And while all of that is objectionable, loathsome, and abhorrent, when push comes to shove and some dumb bitch spills her cabernet on my silk rug, you’d be the first person I’d call to save the day. On the off chance you happen to be, like, a regular house cleaner, you’d be the second person I would call, especially considering it’s just a matter of time before cleaner number one is tidily disposed of one day.

Trixie: Server

Serving in a restaurant is the hardest job there is. Go ahead and process that controversial yet brave proclamation . . . I’ll wait. The only people who don’t think servers have it hard are people who have never been a server themselves. In Los Angeles, there are a shocking number of people who do not tip and who believe that people who have menial positions such as servers have somehow “brought it on themselves.” Karma has apparently kissed them because they are deserving of love and light and their waitress should have taken night classes if she didn’t want to be a waitress. These are also typically people who have familial wealth and have never worked a job because they needed it. When the servers start poisoning the Coke Zero, these people will go first.

Serving is so much more than bringing food: knowing the menu, cleaning the tables, rolling silverware, processing payments, having full-on screaming matches with kitchen staff across a language barrier, and crying in the freezer are just a few of the lesser-known duties. The other less-mentioned trauma of this job is that each table has a different definition of what good service is. Some people want to be left alone almost entirely. They want to order, eat, and leave without even hearing your name or remembering you were there. Meanwhile, some people need fellatio, a personal anecdote, and a good cry before they can even think about appetizers. Reading the energy of a group means going full Sybil Dorsett from table to table and is an essential customer service skill.

On top of all that, you are dealing with food. Everyone’s preferences, diets, and allergies are being thrown into the nightly off-Broadway performance of Pretending to Care About People: The New Musical, and you are also expected to roll 350 silverware sets before the dinner rush. This is all done in the hope that the customer remembers that they are solely in control of your salary that day.

When all the customer service world agrees to participate in the Purge, servers will be at the head of the pack: Mad Max–style renegades who have been hardened into cold warriors by lunch specials and singing “Happy Birthday” to strangers. The next time you are seated in a restaurant and you insist on ten separate checks, remember that you could be incurring the wrath of a long-overdue revolution. Every waitress packs her apron with Braveheart face paint and a butterfly knife. Your food isn’t late; it’s done already, dehydrating under a heat lamp. Because you were just a rude bitch.

Katya: Nanny

There’s nothing quite like looking after rich folks’ kids. Whether you are a magical Englishwoman who rides an umbrella to work or a mouthy brunette with a love for pattern problems and teased hair, there’s no doubt about it—the nanny is where it’s at. Can you think of another job where you get to horse around with well-behaved children for a couple hours a day and in return, you get to wear the mom’s clothes and have all the sex you want with the dad? You also get to live rent-free in a beautiful nanny nook out back, where all the utilities are fully paid for.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: sounds boring. But what if I told you that being a nanny isn’t just about sex, money, and giggling? If you’re in the market for something a little more dangerous, there’s always The Hand That Rocks the Cradle school of childcare. This exciting nanny position requires no experience, although it does help if you’ve been recently pregnant and widowed. All you have to do is choose a fake name, infiltrate the loving home of a beautiful couple, and methodically destroy that home from the inside as the unsuspecting nanny. You also get to do fun side activities like killing the mom’s nosy best friend when she inevitably gets hip to your scheme. If all of the above sounded nice to you but you live abroad, guess what? You could be an au pair, which is basically just a nanny who wears a beret! Ooh la la!

Trixie: Retail

Time is a beast of absolute meter. An eight-hour shift at any job is eight hours—unless it’s a retail shift. In retail, time manspreads on the subway bench of life in a way that defies possibility. Even a three-hour shift at the wrong store in the wrong mall on the wrong day can creep by with impressive restraint. You check the clock after what you are sure has been twelve hours to find that you haven’t even made it to your fifteen-minute break. Sure that you are looped in some sort of time-space redundancy, you sprint to Health and Beauty, where you burn your inner thigh with a hot curling iron to reset reality. Time sadly doesn’t reset and you must limp over to the sale gondola and begin refolding the denim. Folding, refolding, and re-refolding are just a few of the dynamic tasks that retail offers.

Retail also offers the unique opportunity to be a conduit of undiluted hate. At least servers are needed. I think in most stores, customers wish that the employees didn’t exist. They’d rather thumb through used vinyl without you asking, “Looking for anything specific?” to which they must provide a banal “I’m just looking.” The phrase “I’m just looking” is Navajo for “Leave me alone, you fucking cunt.” Customers don’t really ever need help—and if they do, they’ll find you and scream at you like a rehomed parakeet. The customer values the part of shopping where they have to find their item. I once heard that at the Buckle, the employees are encouraged to interact with the customer three times before they leave the store. I would rather be hit by a car in the parking lot than be asked to open a store credit card.