After having two jobs in a row wherein I failed because I was haunted by my first boss, The Mustachioed Bastard, I was excited to start fresh in a new city. So I moved to Cambridge and took a job at Fotomat, a one-hour photo lab. While the perks were nice (reprinting customers’ pictures for ourselves, lifting film when we wanted), the customers were a friggin’ nightmare.

Once, I helped a woman who flew into the place while eating fish jerky. It was the first and last time I saw fish jerky in all my life. She stormed the counter, flopped the arms of her white fur coat onto it, and swam through her bag. One by one, she located rolls of film and dropped them onto the counter. Between her coat and her fishy breath, I couldn’t help feeling like I was being clubbed by a baby seal.

After finding her last roll, she held it up in front of me and asked “Has this roll been used?” I calmly explained to her that there was no way to tell whether the roll had been shot or not. She was not happy to hear this. I tried again, and said that she would be wise to let us develop it, so that she did not lose two rolls worth of precious moments, as opposed to the $3 processing fee of an “empty” roll.

“This is ridiculous, you’re the professional.” She looked around. “None of you can tell if this roll has been used?”

I leaned forward, measured my tone, and spoke. “Ma’am, Jean Claude Van Damme himself would not be able to tell you whether that roll has been used.”

This, she bought, incredibly. Satiated, she handed over all her rolls, and was soon gone.

I walked home that night listening to the voices in my head. “You’re doing everything wrong. This job was taking you nowhere. Your girlfriend is getting tired of you. You can’t borrow 200 bucks from your brother every month. You deserve better.” I saw myself as I was: a 25-year-old getting paid eight buck an hour to amuse his 19 and 20-year-old co-workers.

That night I planted myself in front of my computer and instead of emailing friends for hours on end, I signed up for a certificate program at Clark University in Cambridge. Graphic design, full-time, four days a week, $8,000. Holy crap, what a plunge. But it felt good. I went to bed that night thrilled with the idea of such a life change, but also dreading the thought of telling my boss, Jim, that I’d be leaving Fotomat.

As soon as he walked in the doors the next day, I asked if we could talk.

“God-DAMN-it.”

He was pissed. He tore the Breath-Rite strip off the bridge of his nose slowly, rolled it up and tossed it into the garbage. I was in shock. ‘How could he really be this mad?’

“Peter, you agreed you would be here for at least a year when I offered the job. Now you’re just walking out the door. Well that’s just great. No goddamn loyalty.”

I felt like he should have been happy for me, that I was going to be bettering myself, and all that crap. From what he was saying though, it seemed like he was breeding me to take over the place, and I betrayed him.

“Just finish up tonight and…well, tomorrow will be your last day. That’ll be enough.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really.”

I treated the next day literally as a joke. I sulked around, eyeing what items I’d be taking home with me that night, until Jim came in and took me into his office.

“Listen, I went home, kicked around a few trashcans, and cooled off. I shouldn’t have reacted like that. If you want, you can finish off your two weeks here.”

Taken aback, but happy to hear it, I said ‘okay’ without thinking twice.

The last two weeks ended up pretty quiet and dull, and I found myself dying to get out of there, wishing Jim hadn’t changed his mind. He only kept me on so he could train someone new anyway.

In the waning hours of my final day, an old gin-blossomed Irish guy started complaining that his pictures weren’t ready yet. I tried to explain.

“You dropped the film off a half hour ago. I told you we couldn’t promise any less than one hour. You can’t expect to come back and pick up your stuff like that; we’re not a half-hour photo lab, we’re a one hour photo lab.”

But he persisted.

“You throw my stuff to the back of the line, hah? You don’t care.”

‘I don’t care?’ I thought. ‘No, I don’t.’ I had enough of this guy, and of this job.

“You want your film now? You want it now? Here!” I picked up his negatives and threw them in his face. Instant exhilaration. I was filled with adrenaline.

“You?” He was too flustered to speak, but he gathered himself. “Who’s the manager?”

“I am! I own the place, bucko! Now get out of my store!”

He looked around and only saw the stunned faces of my co-workers. “You’re crazy, you forget to take your pills or what?”

“Ooh, my pills! Yes!” I smiled.

Beaming, I came around the counter and started singing Cheryl Lynn’s disco smash “Got To Be Real”, circling the man with hips thrusting and hands overhead, clapping. “Whatcha think, ahh! Whatchoo knoooow, now! To be real!”

Dazed, he picked his negatives off the floor and staggered toward the door.

“You’re nuts,” he muttered as he walked out.

I was shaking with excitement. I felt like the demon of retail work was finally behind me, that I’d exorcised myself of the drone of shit jobs. Not at all true in hindsight, but revelatory on that day. At least one thing was true, the spectre of The Mustachioed Bastard would no longer haunt my work life.