Moose of all Trades 8

Very few people in Amman when hearing the word “guard” would think of a uniformed man with a stick sitting in a booth. It has become simply a reference to the foreign worker living in the garage whose duty is to perform the Ammanites’ household tasks which they’ve become too lazy to do.

That is what I realised when I asked my new boss and co-worker Midhat to brief me on my job description for the day. “You are on call all day,” instructed Midhat. Honestly, that got me excited since “on call” is usually a code for “sitting around and doing nothing”. But he went on to add, “buying groceries, taking out the trash, washing the stairs, washing the cars and maybe dealing with some maintenance issues”. That’s when I hoped I wouldn’t need to get involved in any of those maintenance issues – only for the sake of the poor residents.

So I sat around with Midhat discussing Egypt’s failure to win more than a bronze medal in the Olympics when the first intercom call of duty came in: apartment three needs some orange juice. “This is the same lady who we just saw drive into the garage. Maybe she forgot to buy the juice or maybe it is just easier for her to send me instead of stopping on the way home.” Midhat was not bitter as much as he was entertained by a familiar sequence of events. But either way, this is what he’s paid the big bucks for.

When Midhat had gone to get the juice – after I had won a best-of-five rock-paper-scissors contest – the people in the first floor flat had run out of water and wanted to see if the pump on the extra tank was working. Finally, my ten years of mechanical engineering and turbomachinery were going to be put to work. As I climbed on the scrap wood nailed together into something resembling a ladder, I could hear the pump buzzing. I reported this back to the lady who was too busy – and probably too fat – to check it herself.

“You can learn too many skills working this job,” indicated Midhat when I told him about my pump-chProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 oxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 king experiencProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 “I have a friend, a guard, who is now a very good electrician just from stuff he picked up on the job. He is still officially the guard of the building, but he is so in-demand that he only sleeps there. He makes more money than my brother who is a doctor in Egypt.” Now that’s what I call a career with potential.

Hours lasted: Three
Difficulty: Dealing with houswives.
Money earned: Hooked up Midhat with a JD5 bill to let me wash cars and clean the stairs.
Career possibilities: A few jobs offer such growth opportunities. Plus it includes free lodging.