Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 5

MERCHANDISE HANDLER.

Janice Lejeune (Sign language interpreted by Glenda Langlinais).

I work in the stockroom at J.C. Penney's in Lafayette, Louisiana. I'm a merchandise-handler-slash-prep a.s.sociate. Which means I do a couple of different things. I use the price gun to add the price tags to clothing. I hang up clothes. And I do something-it's a little bit like doing the price tag but you don't use a gun. It's a different thing. I'm not really sure what it's called. I put on the security tags to prevent people from stealing the clothing. I sort some of the clothing onto the shelves. I work with getting more cartons. And then I bring the empty cartons to be cut up.

I'm forty-eight years old. I was born deaf. And I have a condition called Usher's Syndrome. Most people who have it are born with normal vision and then later on in their lives they develop tunnel vision and their vision starts to get smaller and smaller. When I was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight, my vision started to get a lot smaller, and it started to become blurrier until it just faded away. So right now I have no vision whatsoever-well, I can see if somebody might turn on a light maybe. But that's it. So to communicate I'm using tactile signing where I'm actually having to hold on to people's hands when they sign to me. So I can feel them making the signs.

I've been working here for two and a half years. It's the first real job I've ever had in my life. Before this, I was a housewife. Things didn't work out with my husband and I-and I was really sad that we got divorced. We had been married for twenty-one years. After he divorced me I was living on Social Security money. I didn't like that. My children were getting older, they'd gone off to college. I was by myself. I felt very lonely. I couldn't really afford to pay my bills plus food, transportation.

So I was living in Baton Rouge, and I decided to go through a training program for disabled people. I went to Little Rock, Arkansas, for an evaluation, and then I went up to New York and got some training and I worked a little bit in a cigar box factory in an evaluation program, and then I came here to Lafayette to the Affiliated Blind of Louisiana. They trained me to be more independent. I learned better communications skills, transportation skills, and whatnot.

After my training, I was going to go back to Baton Rouge and start working there. But I decided to settle in Lafayette instead because Lafayette, I felt like-not catered-but was much more accessible to people with deaf-blindness. There's a lot of people here who have the same kind of condition that I do. I felt like that would be a good support system for me.

So I stayed, but then I went to different places for eleven months, looking for a job with no luck. I was very nervous because I had never worked before and I thought I would never find anything. In the end, J.C. Penney hired me because the personnel director, her cousin-actually two of her cousins-have the same type of blindness that I have. They're both deaf and going blind just like I am. So she knew that people with deaf-blindness could work. And that was a great advantage. And I was hired on.

I really enjoy my job. I like it because it's something that I can do with my hands. It's easy for someone like me to do, and I can do it continuously. It's not complicated. It's not dangerous. I stay in an immediate area. I'm not having to walk from this point to that point to that point. I know where to go and I don't have to get lost or be afraid that there might be danger. It's very smooth.

And the people here are so nice. When I first started, there was one time I got lost, and I was wandering all over the place for a long time, and I kind of yelled out loud and someone came, a salesgirl, and she was able to guide me to where I was going, you know, and I was safe. It wasn't a big problem. Now, if there's a complication or a problem or things are mixed up, I just holler out and then someone will come and help me. Like say the price tags on top of a box need to be changed to go with a particular item and I don't have the vision to do that, somebody might come and change those tags for me and maybe tell me, "This goes here and this goes there."

It's not like I have a lot of problems at work, though. I'm not saying that. Most of the time, I'm very organized-everything has a place and I'm used to things being in their place. But it's just nice the way they treat me. They're caring. They're very caring. They seem to be very sensitive to my needs. They'll come to me, and they might show me things or touch my hand, you know? And I'll smile and say hi and they'll say hi and we might print on palm for a little bit. Generally, I can identify people by the jewelry that they wear; say it's a ring that they wear, I can tell that. So they come by just very short-we might do very short, simple gesturing-it's nice. And then I go on with my job.

I'm always motivated to work. J.C. Penney's is a wonderful place to work at. It never gets old and boring for me. I feel that I am ambitious at my job. And I'm very focused. I really feel other people, you know, might work at a slower pace than I do. They like to talk. My boss said that those people are always taking their time and talking. But, of course, I can't sit there and gossip and talk to my neighbors or whatever so I'm more focused on what I'm doing at hand. So I am quick on my job. My boss says that he likes me and wants me to stay working here.

The only thing is, I'm disappointed it's only part-time. It's twenty hours a week, sometimes with overtime. I'd like full-time. I'd like benefits. I get no benefits whatsoever. I've been talking with my boss and my supervisor, saying, you know, I would really love to have benefits. Can you increase my hours just a little bit? And they say no, maybe later on. Maybe later on. Maybe in the future. But J.C. Penney's, it's their policy not to give the workers full-time. So I don't know. I'm studying to get my GED degree. When I'm finished, I'd like to get an advanced job maybe, or a promotion. I will work full-time somewhere. That's what I'm really looking for. I want to work. I think having a job is good for people-especially someone with a disability. It gives you a goal, something to get up and look forward to in the mornings and it gives you things to do. Without anything to do, I think you get more closed-minded. You feel more and more like there's not anything you can do. It hurts your self-esteem. Working is wonderful for your self-esteem.

My condition, I know that it's hard, but I've grown up knowing that this is what I've had. It wasn't like a whole new situation that I didn't know what to do in. And you know I couldn't say, oh, well, I don't want to accept this. I had to say, okay, I can do this, I can use a cane, I can use tactile signing and just accept the way I am in my life with this.

Now I'm getting used to it more, and I'm adapting more to it. It's still hard, but I feel successful. Which is just a very nice way to feel. Because, you know, like I said, I hadn't worked all that time before this. Then I came here, and those people were looking at me, to see what I could do, how I would work out. I was like a representation of deaf-blind people. And I've been showing them what we can do.

When you humanize a corporation,

everyone benefits.

CORPORATE IDENt.i.tY CONSULTANT.

Jonathan Chajet.

After college, I went straight into direct response advertising, which was like 800-numbers and junk mail and things. Did that for a while and then I went back to school, got my M.B.A. and joined a management consulting firm. I was helping companies figure out what their management strategy was and then how to execute it through like cost-cutting, re-engineering, quality management. Stuff like that. Interesting, but not tremendously satisfying work. It wasn't creative enough for me. In a way, I missed the junk mail. [Laughs] So I went back into advertising, and from there I got into the corporate ident.i.ty business. And that was a great move because this is the exact intersection of everything I've done and everything that I like to do. It's a field where strategy and creativity meet.

Traditionally, the corporate ident.i.ty industry is all about the graphical expression of a company. You know, logos, stuff you look at. Think of the Apple logo. That's kind of an industry cla.s.sic. It was designed maybe twenty years ago by Paul Rand. He's like a legend. And, you know, that Apple logo, it's nice. It's appealing visually, and there are also some underlying interesting things going on there. It evokes certain emotions. I mean, an apple is kind of an interesting thing to choose for a computer company. There isn't just an A next to B situation there. If you think about it, there's actually a total disconnect between an apple and a computer. And underlying that is a lot of meaning. The apple, in the biblical sense, was the fruit of the knowledge tree. That's the way Rand thought about it. And the fact that there's actually a bite out of the apple in his logo means that if you partake of this company you will be getting a piece of knowledge and that this company is all about transferring knowledge, and making knowledge available, and taking advantage of knowledge to make your life better. An apple is a very wholesome thing, and the whole company is about making computers that are very much part of your life, as opposed to being something that's just this crazy technology that's disconnected from you. And so Rand like figured out this very beautiful expression of what this company is all about. And that's what the corporate ident.i.ty industry is all about.

Or rather, I should say, that's what the industry has been about. That's its cla.s.sical role. What we do is kind of evolving right now. My company, which is Siegel and Gale, we've kind of said in the last fifteen years, well, it's true that your logo and the name of your company are expressions of what you're all about, and it's critical that those are really good. But, in fact, everything a company does should be an expression of itself. And what you have to figure out first and foremost is what the core idea of the company is. That affects the logo that you design, the name of the company, the advertising that you do, your public relations, what your web site looks like, the kind of people you should hire. It affects the kind of products you should be introducing, the kind of returns that you should be giving to your shareholders. And it says a lot about what your employees should expect. So, you know, that's what I do. I figure out what a company's core idea is, and then I work with everybody within the company to express that.

We work on a project basis. But it's only big projects. At an advertising agency, you have an account, and you just service that account. We don't do that. I mean, we try to have lasting relations.h.i.+ps with the clients, but it's much more in depth. A company will come to us and they say they need a new advertising campaign or a new logo or whatever. And we'll say, "That's all fine, but what's the core idea? What's this all based on?" More often than not, they don't know. So that's where the project starts.

Like right now I'm on this huge project for this company called TRW. They used to be known as the credit-checking company. If you applied for a bank loan or something, the bank would check your credit with TRW. They'd actually, I think, get a report called a TRW that said, you know, he defaulted on his student loans in 1991 so, you know, f.u.c.k him. Don't give him a mortgage for the house. Well, TRW sold that business a few years ago. They're totally out of it, but everyone still thinks that that's what they do.

So they came to us and said, "Help us. We've got a problem-we sold the business but everyone still thinks that's us." And we said, "Well, what is it that you do now?" And they had no idea. They couldn't describe it. So we went in and we interviewed all of the marketing people, all of the operations people, all the senior managers. And we realized they're actually two businesses. They're in automobile parts, like all the air bags for cars, the switches that let a window go up and down, steering wheels, steering columns, tons of stuff for cars. Some amazing things. And then they're also one of the biggest defense contractors in the country. They make all of the electronics that go into the c.o.c.kpit of the F-15. Remember when Reagan was talking about Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative? Well, TRW were the guys who actually ended up doing it. They were able to figure out how to shoot missiles out of the sky with lasers. They do all this crazy stuff that you would never think of when you think "credit checking," you know?

Basically, we figured out they're like an aeros.p.a.ce and automotive company. Well, what the h.e.l.l did one have to do with the other? We had no real idea at first, so we went back and interviewed more people-more managers, guys on the factory floors, shareholders all over the place, everybody-and we figured out that there's actually something core to all of those businesses. And we were like, what you guys do is you come up with incredible discoveries that end up having a very important impact on people's lives. You may not know it yourself and the world may not know it, but you guys make great discoveries that count.

"Discoveries That Count." That's the tag line we're working on right now. Tomorrow I'm going to actually meet with the CEO about it. "Great Discoveries That Count." I mean, it's not the most elegant thing in the world, but you know, I made a presentation to some of their managers last week and right after I said, "This is a company that makes great discoveries that count" someone screamed out, "That's the company I want to work for!" And I was like, "Yes, that's exactly it!" I got a f.u.c.king hard-on right there. Because that's really at the core. I mean, we'll do a lot more than just that tag line for this client, but that's the core, the fundamental idea of what we do and why we do it that drives everything else. And it's so important to everybody. Not just to us consultants and the managers and the CEO, but to everybody at TRW. Because it's what people really want out of their work-they want it to touch a chord.

It's so hard to express a company in four words. It's like trying to express a philosophy or a reason for being in four words. But that's what makes this such a great job. It's just like taking all these things that you think aren't connected and finding a story underneath it-a really good, compelling story that helps people make decisions about how they should go about running their companies. And it's even more than that. You know, it's nice. It's a really nice thing to do. Because it kind of humanizes things that people are very afraid of. It humanizes companies, you know? Both for the employees and for the world.

And it's so cool. It's got so much impact. I mean, think about "Just Do It" for Nike. Think about coming up with something like that-understanding what the company is about and what they're trying to say and to express that so well. "Just Do It." It's like an amazing, amazing thing. It's so versatile, it's beautiful-"Just Do It." You know what I mean? It's a great phrase because no matter who you're talking to it makes sense and it's very motivating to do something as a result of it. So if you're saying "Just Do It" to a professional athlete when they're thinking about their lives and what their reason is for doing their athletics, why they're getting up at four in the morning to train for eight hours a day-it's because they want to be the best at what they do. When they get up in the morning, what motivates them is "Just Do It." Just get up and f.u.c.king go break that record. You know, f.u.c.king hit seventy-five home runs, f.u.c.king break that record. "Just Do It." And you take that same phrase and you apply it to the f.u.c.king mealiesta.s.sed, loserish couch potato, the same phrase totally works for them, too. It's like, just get off your f.u.c.king a.s.s and just go run. Do anything. Just f.u.c.king do it. Every person can relate to that. Everybody in the world. And it's like, it isn't just about athletics anymore. It's more than that. It's an inner confidence, a.s.sert yourself. Who doesn't that relate to?

If you can figure out that core idea-well, to me, that's incredibly seductive. To be able to express a really, really fundamental idea about the way people act, the reason why people act, and how people hope to be, to really express that, that's just the s.e.xiest thing in the world. You know? It's so satisfying.

And it's not just this ephemeral thing. I mean, a lot of it is. Most tag lines and logos and corporate videos don't get people to act, and they're very superficial, and you forget them next week. But some have lasting impact and that's incredible. You come up with something that fans out all over the globe and is remembered for generations. It's totally egotistical, but you know what? I don't see what I'm doing as different than anybody else who's trying to create something that has long-term impact on society. And you know, people talk about how corporations are like this big, scary thing, but if you think about it, there are some corporations you feel that way about, and there are some corporations you don't feel that way about. And why is that? It's because of people like me. You know? I mean, people don't necessarily feel bad about Nike. You know?

So this job, it's a lot about humanizing corporations. And I don't think that's a bad thing at all. Because when you humanize a corporation, everyone benefits. The people who work for it and the people who buy from it. They all feel better about themselves. And that's a great thing. I mean, there's this kind of stereotype that corporations are evil, that they're soulless machines, or whatever. And of course there may be some truth to that sometimes, but I mean, wake up, everybody! Corporations do a lot of great things, too, including giving a lot of people a job and a good life. You know? And it's not like I'm going to go out and try and paint this pretty picture over an ugly face. I'm not gonna lie about these corporations I work for. I'm not going to try to tell people that like, say, Exxon, they're the big environmental company. That wouldn't be credible. You're not going to try to paint this picture that isn't true. n.o.body will believe it. You don't even try. What you do instead, is you find the goodness in a company, and you find what makes them valuable.

There aren't any companies that are pure evil. There just aren't. Every company has its redeeming values. Just like every person. All companies do bad things, and all companies do good things. Like even good old Nike. You know? Great Nike, beautiful tag line, beautiful execution, great shoes, company that you feel really great about. Well, there are charges that the shoes were made in Indonesia and they were paying workers f.u.c.king two cents for eight hours of work a day. And you know I understand why they felt like they needed to do that, but it's still f.u.c.king ugly as sin. And those allegations may be true or not, I don't know if they are or not. But every company does things which are incredibly beautiful and also incredibly ugly.

I'm not pretending I can resolve these contradictions. n.o.body can. It's just part of the world we live in today. But what I hope I can do, and what I think I am doing, is that I am coming up with ideas that can steer a company, when it has to make a decision, toward doing beautiful things and not ugly things. If you can come up with that core idea that gives a company a benchmark, something to strive for, then when they have to decide whether to do things or not-tough decisions, like what types of people they should hire, what kinds of benefits they should offer, whether to bring in a CEO who's known for laying off tons of people, you know? Well, they may think about that benchmark you've given them and decide to do the good thing. You, your line, your little four words, may make the difference between beauty and ugliness. What could be more satisfying than that?

Put paper with paper, clothes with

clothes, loose change with loose change.

CLUTTER CONSULTANT.

Mich.e.l.le Pa.s.soff.

I spent twenty years in public relations, trying to influence the media to cover stories in a way that reflected well on my clients. And I was successful. I did things for Microsoft, AT&T, McDonald's-a lot of major companies. I worked for several large PR agencies. But life as an employee at these agencies wasn't thrilling. Frankly, it's a stifling environment and, even after a lot of years, the pay wasn't so great that I could see retiring anytime soon. I tried starting my own firm and I found out that to make a profit as sole proprietor was impossible. So I went back to a PR agency, but it didn't feel as if it was leading anywhere. It wasn't profitable, it was thankless, uninteresting.

So I was turning forty and I decided I needed a career change. I wanted to have my own business, but I didn't want to just make money-I was also interested in my personal growth: examining who I was and how I related to the world around me. I took a lot of cla.s.ses and read a lot of books. I did a lot of thinking about what kind of business the world needs right now, and what it means to be a human being and a woman right now. I looked at the kind of problems we face around all those things. And I kept getting the same message in each area of each inquiry, which was: Clean your clutter! [Laughs] I'm serious: in all areas of your life there is just too much clutter- mental, physical, emotional, spiritual. Think about it.

I am now a "Clutter Consultant." I have a business that helps people deal with papers, clothes, furniture and other stuff-memorabilia, whatever. Clutter can be anything that has become irrelevant in your environment.

I chose to focus on the physical arena of clutter because you can get your hands on it, but everything I do is done with an awareness of your whole well-being. It's holistic. Clutter-cleaning is connected to who you are and how you run your life, how you feel, how you relate to other people. It's more than being neat and tidy.

I've been doing this since 1991. I see private clients and I'm a national speaker. I've got a book out with HarperPerennial and there's an audiotape too. It's called Lighten Up! Free Yourself from Clutter. People invite me to speak at conferences. I'm often interviewed in the press. I work six days a week, about twelve hours a day. And I'm doing great. I've never been happier in my life.

Most of my business is on-site consultations, mainly in homes and offices in homes. It seems like everybody is working out of their house these days. And even if they don't literally do it, most people have some kind of command post there-you know-a desk, file cabinets, a computer. A center for life management. And the way that's organized has a direct impact on your family's life.

I charge seventy-five dollars an hour for my consultations. The majority of my clients are women. They run the gamut from being stay-at-home moms to women who run large home businesses with multiple employees. There are even a few nonworking women with no children who just can't handle clutter. Some of them are celebrities and heiresses and philanthropists. It's a very interesting group.

Typically, with a new client, they call me and I get a little information about what their variety of clutter is. Is it paper? Clothes? Little gla.s.s figurines? I try to see if they need to get anything to prepare for my first visit, like maybe filing supplies. At the very least I always tell them to have garbage bags handy. [Laughs] Not that that's all we do, but usually in the process something gets tossed.

Then I give the client a homework a.s.signment. I ask them to spend some time with themselves enumerating their goals in life-not just about the clutter but what are their financial goals? Professional goals? Relations.h.i.+p goals? And when I arrive at their house I'll first do what I call a clutter-cleaning tour. I'll look over the entire premises from top to bottom, attic to bas.e.m.e.nt, drawers, closets, everything. Then we'll sit down and we'll talk about that homework they did on their goals. Because that indicates how we approach the problem. For instance, if your goal is increasing your income, we'll start with your financial papers. If you want to improve your relations.h.i.+p with your spouse, we'll start in the bedroom. If you feel just simply limited in your life, we might start in an attic, try and get you some more s.p.a.ce.

The basic problem with clutter is that n.o.body knows what to do with it, how to make sense of it. People are without goals. They wonder why they have paper on the end tables and paper on the mantelpiece, clothes on the chairs. They've been collecting everything to do with pigs or penguins for fifteen years and they're not interested anymore but they don't know what to do. They don't even know what to do with the daily mail. They need goals and the skills to implement the goals. That's what I give them. I teach them nine principles to cleaning all sorts of clutter. They are: First, handle one item at time. Second, create a path for everything-instead of being concerned about finding an exact place for things, just get them moving in the right direction. Get all the toiletries in the bathroom, all the pots in the kitchen. Move your clutter-cleaning process along. Third, once you clean an area, don't reintroduce clutter there. Fourth, like-kind things stay together. Put paper with paper, clothes with clothes, loose change with loose change. Fifth, take breaks. If you get tired or bored while cleaning, go restore your energy. Sixth, be thorough in cleaning one area at a time. Do it a hundred percent. Seventh, dispose of things with some ceremony. Make it fun. When you toss garbage or give away what you don't want, it's cause to celebrate. Clean up with panache. Eighth, don't be afraid of the empty s.p.a.ce you create by cleaning. It will get filled with what is good for you. And finally, number nine-pat yourself on the back when you make progress. You deserve it.

And that's it. [Laughs] You just got a consultation. [Laughs] The whole purpose is to get to a place I call ground zero-where each and every object is there deliberately and on purpose to help you fulfill your goals in life with nothing extra added. Ground zero doesn't last for long because more clutter will come your way with the daily mail, but once you know ground zero, you can return to it more quickly.

I see about four clients a week. And it'll take anywhere from one to two dozen sessions for them to get to ground zero, but eventually, if they stick with it, they get there. These principles become integrated into their being. They get excited. They get hope, which is so important because whatever is hopeless ends up as clutter. They see their personal goals fulfilled.

I love this job. It's fun. I love my clients. They need me and they appreciate me and I appreciate them right back. I view this as an opportunity to really support somebody. It's intimate. We talk about their deeper desires and, at the same time, I see their most dark side- what they've got stuffed under the rug, what's not working. I'm really in touch with their sadness and joys.

I just helped a seventy-nine-year-old man who needed to move his aging wife and sickly sister-in-law out of their home from a bad neighborhood to better surroundings. We took so much stuff out of that house that there was a complete lawn full of garbage. I had to have a truck come and take it away. And on top of all the clutter, he was obstinate about what he wanted to keep. He was somewhat willing to clean, just because he had to move, but he was resistant.

Of course, his attachment to all this stuff was understandable. It was kind of heartbreaking, even. But at the same time-it had to go. So I made it fun for him to clean. I recruited his four sons to help him. We made him the "king of clutter" by giving him a chair that we called his throne. And he sat on that throne and we'd show him the things that needed his extra special scrutiny. The sons took care of the things that really didn't need to pa.s.s by him in order to know if they were garbage. Anything that was crucial, we deferred to him for his vote. So he felt very important. And at the end, he was so happy. He embraced the whole thing-it was thrilling.

I feel so much better doing this than I did in public relations. It's given me a level of accomplishment in my professional life that makes me feel fulfilled as a human being, not just as a worker. Every time I leave a client's house, I get a kiss and a hug. When you finish a job in public relations, you get a handshake if you're lucky. I get a kiss and a hug. I can't even tell you how nice that is.

If you have your son's brains dripping

from your ceiling, you want it taken

care of yesterday.

CRIME SCENE CLEANER.

Neal Smither.

I'm the president and owner of Crime Scene Cleaners. We clean up death scenes, like homicides. You know, the room where someone gets murdered. We also handle suicides, accidental deaths, meth labs, things like that. A lot of people have the a.s.sumption that police take care of the cleanup after a crime. That's not true. It's never been true. If Johnny or Sally gets shot in your house, or your store, and there's brains everywhere, it's your problem. You have to do the cleaning. It's not the police's responsibility at all. You clean it. Or else you call my company or one of my compet.i.tors.

The idea to start this business came to me six years ago. I was twenty-five years old. I'd just been laid off from my job as division manager at a mortgage banking firm. There I was, wallowing for weeks in my unemployment misery, when one day, bam! I was watching the movie Pulp Fiction. And you know that scene where they blew the guy away in the back of the car and then had to bring in Harvey Keitel to clean the whole thing up? Well, I saw that scene and I thought, wow, that's intriguing. Are there people out there doing this kind of job in real life? I did some research and found out that the answer was yes. But there were only a few companies, and they weren't marketing themselves to a broad-based range of clients. They weren't selling effectively. Well, I knew I could sell, I just didn't know if I could do that kind of cleaning. So I made some phone calls.

I called every janitorial company, anyone who had anything to do with cleaning. I made literally thousands of calls. I'm a neat freak, typically, but I didn't know how professional companies carried out their work. So I took a job with Merry Maids for a couple of weeks. Merry Maids is a residential cleaning company, sort of the McDonald's of maids-really cheap, really s.h.i.+tty. But working there taught me a lot about technique.

Then, next, I started contacting coroners and police, because they were going to be my target audience. I was gonna give them a percentage to give me business referrals. You know, so like somebody dies, the cops show up, they're like, "Hey, we know a guy who'll clean this up." They send me the business, they get a cut of my fee. Good idea, right? No. Wrong. Because what I found out is that they're not allowed to give out referrals, due to liability. They can't give one, they have to offer a list of cleaning companies, so there's no issue of favoritism. That was a bit discouraging, but whatever, I was into it by then. I just changed gears and I started targeting the people at mortuaries. They can give referrals.

My first job came on referral from a mortician. The victim's sister hired us. It was a lady down in the Marina Bay area of Richmond. She had terminal cancer and she'd blown her brains out-shot herself in the head with a .357. Experience-wise, it wasn't too messy-just enough to cut my teeth and kind of get an indicator of whether I could do this. And I learned I was capable of doing it. When the cleanup was done and I named my price, the client started cutting a check without any hesitation whatsoever. I knew immediately that this work was for me.

Of course, back then, I was totally inept. My partner and I-I used my wife as my partner on that job-we were there for three hours and I only charged two hundred and fifty dollars. Now, I'd be there an hour and we'd charge five seventy-five. So I've learned. I've learned so much.

My second job was so hardcore-I'll never forget it. When I think of how little I knew, doing a job like that, it just makes me laugh. It was at a fairly upscale condominium complex in Oakland. A hugely fat guy had died on his Hide-A-Bed. Weeks, weeks, and weeks had gone by and no one had discovered him. He was a loner. No one knew he was dead until they smelled it outside, and by that time, it was atrocious. My a.s.sistant and I-this time it was my sister-opened the door and this unG.o.dly smell just slammed us, big time. We hadn't learned about wearing respirators yet. We hadn't a clue. Well, the whole bottom of this guy's bed was encased in plastic from the manufacturer, and the plastic had trapped all these fluids. So I was moving the bed around, and it started stirring up these juices. And when I tip the bed over, not realizing what's going on inside of it, this rus.h.i.+ng torrent of maggot-filled liquid spews out all over the place-all over the carpet and all over my clothing. I vomited several times. My sister started gagging uncontrollably until she just couldn't take it anymore. So she ran out the door, and jumped over the deck, right into the pool! That one still rates as the worst "decomp" we've ever done. We knew so little about equipment, disposal techniques, the whole thing.

Disposal is a big issue in this business. And I just wasn't going about it in the best way back then. On my first few jobs, I would gather all this guts-soaked c.r.a.p into the back of my pickup truck, haul it and burn it in a medical waste incinerator. It was so disgusting, and somewhat hazardous, not to mention a huge ha.s.sle and monetary expense. Today, I would suck up that guy's waste-all those maggots and that fetid liquid-with an extractor. You're basically shampooing the waste out of the carpet or wherever, and then sucking it into a tank, where it gets. .h.i.t with this enzyme that kills any body fluid you can imagine. After that chemical hits it, it can be flushed down the toilet. Any remaining solid waste-the affected area of the carpet, for instance-goes to the dump and gets put into landfill. It's totally legal. When I started using the extractor, my profits skyrocketed. Landfill costs two bucks a pound, and incineration is like six bucks a pound. That extractor tripled my returns. It also made the whole disposal operation much safer, which is seriously important. Because if I violate any of the rules, I could really get hammered.

These days, there are a lot of companies that do what I do. Everything's regulated by the Department of Health Services and OSHA, which is Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA regulates the cleaning, and DHS oversees the disposal. So we're doubly regulated. If your operation's not tight, you're dead. The first-time fine for illegally cleaning and disposing is twenty thousand dollars. But that's actually great for business, because these rules are imposed on everyone-even relatives of homicide, suicide, and accident victims. If they decide to do the cleanup themselves, they have to abide by these regulations, just like we do. And officially, these unlicensed parties are supposed to file for a "cleaning pa.s.s" before they do the job. But there's a threeto four-day turnaround to get that pa.s.s from the state. And, I mean, if you have your son's brains dripping from your ceiling, you want it taken care of yesterday. You're not gonna wanna wait for that pa.s.s. You don't want to deal with it, you want it cleaned and you want to be charged a fair price. That's why it makes obvious sense to hire a company like mine. We usually arrive in a matter of hours, we do the job quickly, with a smile on our face, one-stop and then we're out of there. And unless it's a really severe job, we try to keep our prices down. We rarely charge more than two grand for a job-much cheaper than the fine.

It's a very good business. Very, very good. That's not saying it's easy, though. There are definitely jobs that wear on you. We did this one recently out in Crow County, off the 680 freeway corridor, rural as h.e.l.l. Some guy breaks into his ex-wife's house-she's away on business, works half the year in j.a.pan for Chevron or something. So he doesn't like her, so he gets into her bed and shoots himself in the head, and then just sits there for three months until she comes home and finds him. No joke. By the time we got there, there was a foot of rat s.h.i.+t in the bedroom. The rats had been eating the corpse. The guy had totally decomposed, and I swear to G.o.d, you could see minute details of his body and flesh imprinted on the bed, down to his hair. His spinal fluids, cerebral cranium fluids, everything, had purged from his body. And with every step you take, you're crunching, and I mean crunching like Wheaties, on dead flies, because they've been feasting and laying their eggs near the body.

And we're standing there, drenched in sweat. Tyvex suits don't breathe, nor do respirators, so you're just drenched. Meanwhile, the radio is still playing. I guess when the guy killed himself he had this radio strapped around the bra.s.s bed frame behind him, so his head is between the railings and he has a radio earpiece in his ear, blasting KGO. Very creepy. Very surreal.

So it goes without saying that this is some nasty s.h.i.+t that I deal with. Fortunately, for me, as the owner, these individual jobs are not that important to my business anymore. My real bread and b.u.t.ter now comes from the corporate clients I've got under contract, nationwide. That's where I'm making the real money. And that's also where I'm focusing my energy.

I think of our big corporate clients as gems. I targeted them all specifically. We do the Denny's and Coco's chains. And right now I have two of the largest grocery store chains-Safeway and Von's- under contract. We do everything for them. If the butcher cuts a thumb off and bleeds all over the G.o.dd.a.m.n store, we clean it up. If an old lady becomes incontinent and does her thing all over the store, we clean it. If there's a murder in a store, we do it.

I also do all of Motel 6, and yesterday, I signed the Westin St. Francis Hotels, which is another major contract. Most hotel jobs are homicides or suicides. Every single hotel in this country has had at least one. I also clean up meth labs, which are very prevalent in the low-end places. We do about thirteen a month, average. Motel 6 gets by far the most. It's that thirty-three-dollar a night clientele.

These people-tweakers, we call them-rent a room, and then use it to manufacture methamphetamine. It's easy to make, and very profitable. But you cook up fifty pounds and it leaves up to like five, six hundred pounds of by-product waste, which is highly toxic. When we walk into those labs, they smell like jet fuel-extremely noxious. And the walls are yellow with residue. There's red phosphorus in the carpets. No hotel wants to deal with that themselves.

So we do it. And then we turn around and-and this is our real value to our corporate clients-when we take on a job we become responsible for that site's sanitary condition. All liability gets s.h.i.+fted to us. The hotel's not legally responsible anymore. Let's say we don't do a good cleaning job. Let's say a sc.u.mbag in there has hepat.i.tis, and he expires, let's say of liver failure, and it leaks out. Let's say we miss some blood, and there's hepat.i.tistainted blood under the baseboard, and it goes airborne and the next guest inhales it and gets hepat.i.tis and can prove where it came from. Then the hotel can get sued. But with the release of liability, they don't get sued. I get sued. I have a fivemillion-dollar insurance policy. But I don't need it because I don't make those mistakes. I can't afford to. I have a serious reputation to protect.

My business has grown enormously over the past six years. We're at the top of this game. We've got the hotels, the grocery stores, contracts with Santa Clara, Alameda, Santa Cruz, and Contra Costa counties for outdoor public incidents. We've done all the big jobs in California for the past few years: Heaven's Gate, Phil Hartman, the Lafayette murder. If something happens in the Bay Area, we've got the job. We do about one-point-three jobs a day in this county alone.

I have three hundred and seventeen employees, nationwide. All of them are trained personally by me, here in California. And except for my four managers, every one of them is a freelancer, ready to work at a moment's notice. Because, you see, I have guaranteed our response time across the country, which is no joke. I mean, in my contract with these companies like Motel 6, I'm guaranteeing a response time. So somebody blows their brains out in a Motel 6 in wherever- the middle of Montana-I have to have somebody in there within a fixed window of time to earn my full fee. But it would be ridiculous for me to keep a guy on payroll someplace like that where I might get two calls a year, right? So what I've done is I've developed a dependable roster of freelance employees throughout the country.

I've hired people who're already working in related areas fulltime and they do my stuff part-time. Usually they're coronary staff, mortuary staff, or property management staff. They're professionals in the field. I've trained them, and they're ready to go whenever. But I don't pay them unless they're working. They just get commission. So we get that call from the middle of Montana, well, we've got a guy working in a mortuary near there. So bam! We call him. It's two in the morning, whenever, he's out of bed. He's on-site. He does the job and makes a hundred and fifty bucks, which is a nice wage for a few hours of work. And, if he brings me the business himself, he gets a thirty percent commission of every referral. So, let's say one of my reps works at a property where there's been a suicide, and he refers the job to me and does the cleanup. Not only is he going to get onefifty for the on-site work, he'll also get thirty percent of the gross. If we do a two-thousand-dollar job, then he's getting a big chunk of change.

But, if you work for me, and I call you at two in the morning and tell you to go to work and you hesitate, that's it. Never mind. You're not working for me anymore. I hang up. I call my next rep. Because I'm under the gun. I don't give second chances. I don't have to, I have too many people asking for work. I don't care if you don't like me. I don't care if I'm gruff. I have a goal and I have a plan to achieve the goal and if you're in my way, get out of the way. That's it. You work for me, I don't work for you. Start your own company and hire me, and then you can tell me what to do.

Because, you know, I talk about these commissions and referrals and all that, but the person bringing most of these jobs to the table is me. I'm out in the field, getting nasty, maybe four out of seven days a week. The rest of the time I'm making sales calls to all these different companies. It's a constant sell because every mortuary, every hotel, every condominium complex, every grocery store and restaurant chain across the country is a potential client. And the sale itself is the most important aspect of my work. You can always fix the cleaning. If you screw up the sale, you can't fix it. You only get one shot.

I am the only person who does sales for my company. All sales and marketing is done by me. It's my strength. I go out and sell, get in people's faces. If it has anything to do with death, I go. I'm extremely aggressive. I hound people, mercilessly. I get on people like stink. They're going to meet with me or they're going to tell me to f.u.c.k off. And generally they're going to meet with me. And because of that, my business has taken off.

I work a good fourteen to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. I love what I do. I'm always on call. I could get a job right now, and I'd go. My truck's right outside. The only reason I'm even home right now is because I'm waiting for the movers to come. My wife can't take my lifestyle, so today, I'm out of here. I'm leaving her. She says we don't have enough time to spend together and she's right. I mean, we did seven hundred jobs last year. We've done over three hundred this year and it's only April. I don't really have time for a relations.h.i.+p and I don't really care. I have no life outside of this. Because the company is my girl, my dope.