I love snowmobiling, I just hate guiding, and until I quit my job yesterday I was in the middle of my 5th year of snowmobile guiding. And, despite the guests and the contact I'm forced to have with other humans in this particular line of work, I probably could have made it through to the end if the work to compensation ratio hadn’t been so far out of whack this year.
Allow me to explain –
In years previous I lived within 40 minutes of the job site. Both places of employment were in or near Park City. I’d get there by eight a.m., warm up the snowmobiles and be guiding by nine. That, and I had a normal person for a boss. This year I got a job at Snowbird and my reasoning was that this place was closer and would be easier to get to and from work everyday. Not true. This was the routine. After teaching school all week I’d use my weekends to get up at six, drive 40 minutes to the bottom of Little Cottonwood Canyon, hitchhike to Snowbird, catch the 7:30 tram to the top of the mountain, ski down the back side of the mountain, change out of ski gear and into snowmobile gear, warm up and gas snowmobiles, hope the guests don’t cancel, take guests for rides on dangerous machines, repeat process in reverse, go home without a break in my week. On top of all that, my boss, who was a short, stalky, angry lesbian (imagine Grumpy, of the 7 dwarfs, with longer hair and a sex change. I kind of think she was angry all the time because she was a lesbian by chance and not by choice; a no-other-options kind of deal. She was always talking about how she was going to “chew your a$$” if you did this or that and “sh#@ runs downhill” so don’t do this or that cause the “sh%@’s going to hit the fan” and there’s going to be a “sh#@ storm” so “watch you’re a#@” or “I’ll chew it.” She was surprisingly fond of expressions involving a@#’s or sh#%, and for some reason she wanted to chew on both of them - a lot. But I digress.) On top of all that, my boss, the angry lesbian, decided that she would have less problems if she put two guides, instead of one, on every tour. At the end of the day, what that means is I was making half as much in tips. Well, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I called the angry lesbian and told her I was done. Surprisingly, after our conversation, I didn’t smell any sh@#, and my a#% was still intact.
Anybody have any great ideas for a weekend job?