Job Hopping in the Ancient World

When I completed my MBA degree from the Business School of Babylon, I counted on having my choice of job offers. But, this being 380 B.C., MBAs were raining from the sky like manna. The economy was bad: shipping had been down for years due to many factors—sea beasts in the Mediterranean, evil winds blowing off the Straits of Gibraltar, and the ongoing problem of too many holes in the ships with no prospect of a bailout.
At the job fair there were 500 job seekers and only three green-robed recruiters. When my turn came to interview I couldn’t take my eyes off the glinting dagger in the interviewer’s belt, and the golden tie clip he wore. The interview went by in a flash. I remember him unrolling the crinkly papyrus of my academic record as the slave girls fanned him with palmetto leaves. He sighed deeply. I held my breath and prayed that I would realize my dream of long, three-honey-wine lunches in the local bazaar and expense-account stays in the finest stables.
The recruiter gave me the once over. Only then did I realize that he was using the jawbone of an ass as a paperweight. The sundial ticked for what seemed like an entire passage of the sun across the sky. Finally, he said in a gruff voice, “We have an opening in the Giza branch … thirty shekels a week … take it or leave it.”
I jumped at the offer. I mean that literally, because there was a cloud of locusts under my chair and a definite whiff of pestilence where I had forgotten to use myrrh after showering.
Four days and three hundred hard caravan miles later, I reported for work in the Isis Corporate Park (named after the pharmaceutical king, not the goddess). That weekend I hunted for an apartment. Not having an irrigation canal on me, I had to settle for a desert dwelling. These places were the pits of the pomegranate. I’m telling you that the sand didn’t even want to live there. The good news, I thought at first, was that the Great Pyramid loomed just behind the recycling bin and the fleshpots of Cairo were but thirty miles away. When the Nile is in flood, I thought, I’ll be able to grow some nice geraniums in the window pots. I signed a two-year lease.
Work was good. My job was basically to fetch olive oil for the bosses and work with R&D on a plan to turn walking sticks into snakes and then extract milk from them.
But my home life sucked like donkey bongs. Within a week I learned why only the wretched and the wanna-be’s lived in my condo complex: pyramid skateboarders.
The sound of wooden wheels being ridden down the raspy slopes of the pyramid was enough to set my sandaled bejeweled feet to twitching. By the end of the first evening I was yelling out the unglassed window, “Come down from there, you damn kids! Who do you think you are, Sumerians?!” They were tough kids, as I learned when they set fire to my thatch utility shed.
I requested a transfer to another branch, any other branch. My boss, Tutenhishornen, was none too pleased that I, a rank junior brand manager, would have the audacity—indeed, the ramses—to want out. The day he handed me the transfer papers, he had an odd smile on his face. Knowing that I had grown up on the south side of Babylon, he said, “Well, you’re going home. Hahaha!” As I walked out the door, he gave me what is commonly known as the One-Eyed Cheer.
I took the weekend to move and get situated. Not until Monday morning at first light did I realize that I was literally living under the overhang of the Hanging Garden of Babylon. I shaved and headed out to work. On the way out I got hit in the face with what felt like a dozen knife-edged sabers. As I reeled in pain and clutched my razor-burned face, I looked up to see a freaking fern hanging down from the top of the terrace. I yelled out to anyone who could hear, “Cut back that plant!”
They didn’t. Next I was transferred to Olympia, the home of the Gods. Turns out the Gods were on a trip to Ark World. I hit town just as the locals were erecting the Great Statue of Zeus.
Olympicburg was, as you might guess, way the hell up in the mountains. It snowed like nobody’s business. I had left my rabbit fur robe back in Babylon. Every day I took the subway to work and got off at the Parthenon/Leper Park exit. Do you have any idea how much snow can accumulate on the butt of Zeus? Quite a bit, I found out one day as I was coming up the escalator just as the anal avalanche came thundering down. “How about a little offering to the Gods here?!” I yelled as I shook off the snow. The local Board of Sacrificial Lamb Farmers was not amused.
Then it was the Temple of Artemis, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, and a marketing research job at the Colossus of Rhodes. I had become a corporate gypsy. Word had gotten back to the head office that I had attitude issues.
Maybe it was the complaint I phoned into the police about the Artemis Chorus singing at the Temple after ten o’clock on a weeknight, or the crack I made about “they should call it the Mausoleum of Moussaka for all the potluck dinners they have after the funerals.” At Rhodes my boss had an inferiority complex, I think, and took it out on me. It wasn’t my fault that he was known around the office as the “Little Guy of Rhodes.”
All I know is that I found myself one day on the back streets of Alexandria. I had reached the end of the line. No one would hire me except an organic hummus firm that had me test which crackers would break when you dipped them. It was backbreaking work, and only paid about half a shekel a week.
I consoled myself that because of the warm breezes off the Mediterranean I could at least save money on lodging by sleeping on the rooftop (I also lucked out with a ten-percent-off perk on all cracked-up hummus). The first night, I had just nodded off to sleep to the soft sounds of a jazz lyre playing in a distant nightclub … when suddenly I was jerked awake by the four hundred immense candles of the Lighthouse being lit by four hundred guys with really long matches.
“Somebody turn that damn light off,” I yelled across the harbor.
As I look back now from retirement, I console myself with the thought that despite all the bad coffee, the seven a.m. meetings, the constant uprooting, and the bad choice of having a 401(k) plan entirely made up of stock in a company situated right next to Vesuvius, I can proudly say that I have been tossed out by security guards at each of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.