After a brief conversation that was had via electronic mail, I had arranged to show up at her West Hollywood home at 10:00 on Wednesday, May 26th.
Driving to/in the West Side is one of the things that I despise most about living in Los Angeles. I can't stand traffic and I'm still dumbfounded by the millions of people that have normalized bumper-to-bumper traffic as an everyday occurrence in their lives. Anyways, I got to Dana's apartment at about 10:05, thanks to some slow&go on the Hollywood Freeway. So I pulled up to her apartment, which was located about three blocks from the Whiskey A Go Go, and found her apartment door, Unit One. The door was open so I peaked my head in and politely said, "Hellooooo." Out came a beautiful blond woman that was probably in her late-twenties and dressed in casual, lounging around the house attire. In what was probably the sexiest Aussie accent that I had heard all week, she pointed to a large pile of boxes, flattened cardboard, and trash bags that I was to load into my car and dispose of properly. After Dana offered to help me I explained to her that I would take care of everything, which was exactly why she was paying me. She smiled and then returned inside, leaving me as I looked upon this huge pile of garbage and asked myself, "How the fuck am I going to fit all of this shit inside the car?"
I began with the flattened cardboard and proceeded to fold and bend the piece of shits in whatever way would make them fit into the back of my dad's SUV. Thank god I had asked my dad to use his car instead of the old Volvo, I would have been totally incapable of finishing the job had I not done so. After about twenty five minutes I had succeeded in getting all the cardboard into the back of the car, in the processes filling the whole back compartment. Next I had to load a few big trash bags into the middle compartment, which was easy enough, requiring only minor packing and shoving. Small items were tetris-ed in and soon I was feeling a bit more confident in my ability to stuff all that shit into the car. I filled up the passenger seat with a huge box that was full of everyday house hold trash: boxes for vibrating condoms, tampax wrappers, and some cool Australian coins. Unfortunately, once the whole car had been filled to capacity I discovered another box that was full of the same bullshit. Luckily I was able to dump the contents of that box into another partially filled cardboard cube, leaving me with one last empty box. I proceeded to rip that box into a bunch of small pieces so that I could fit them into the car and upon doing so I was done.
I closed up the car and returned to Dana's door. The door was still open and by this point my favorite Australian boss had received a guest who she was entertaining in her newly furnished apartment. I told her that I had finished, she walked to her purse, and quickly returned with the $50. She sent me off with a smile and final, "You're a legend mate." A true Aussie.
Now I had to get rid of all this shit, I suppose I should have thought about that prior to accepting the job. Because the passenger seat was blocking the side-view mirror I felt uncomfortable driving back on the freeway in such a state. I decided to dump the box that was blocking the mirror in a neighborhood trashcan that was just blocks away from Dana's house. I drove away and got on the freeway fifty bucks richer.
I decided to recycle the cardboard and I did so at a recycling center right off of the 710 freeway exit on Valley. Got an extra $5.66 from this and then took the rest of the junk to Ultrazone's dumpster. Unloaded all of Dana's old possessions into the dumpster of my former employer and drove home. Overall it was less than three hours of work for $55.66 bucks. Now, I'm no math major, but a rough calculation indicates that this was about $18/hour; not bad. A good first job.
