Worst Job Final - Jenn

Jenn Nissen

February 6, 2012

All through high school and college my parents forced me to get a job. I have had plenty of jobs since I was 16, but by far my favorite and my least favorite job was working at the golf course in my hometown. I started working there when I was 16, and worked there until I was 21. It was only a summer position but my boss made it hell. I worked with friends and kids all my age, and we normally had a fantastic time, unless “she” was there. Basically we had to do all of the things that she didn’t want us to do. The worst, and most disgusting part of the job, was preparing for play-days and company outings. The outings food would consist of all sorts of sides-nothing that bothered me to prepare-and steaks. The steaks were by far the worst part of those 5 years working there. Im sure everyone knows what a steak loin looks like? It’s a huge 30lb slab of cow, that I would have to cut into 10oz, 12oz, or 14oz steaks. And playdays usually consist of atleast 50-300 people. So cutting those slabs for that many people truly was hell. I would wear a garbage bag over my work uniform because blood was dripping, and I would have to sharpen my knife every 5 minutes. Cutting the steaks was probably the worst part, but grilling them came close to being second. To grill 300 steaks and have your boss yelling at you that they are too raw, or too well done, while having smoke hurting your eyes, and grease ruining my hair, I truly knew I wanted to quit. I have never touched a steak nor eaten one since I worked at the golf course, and probably never will again.

So obviously for this project I chose this job. I had a really hard time trying to find a way to put this job on paper without being overly obvious. I also had a really hard time trying to make deconstructive and integrative work for me. I found geometric to be easier for me because grids help me and so does the idea of simpleness and fluid. So my finished product is very simple, but still finds a way to get the idea across. Alex actually gave me a great idea on how to work with letterforms creating them out of actual real life objects using the puppet warp tool. It doesn’t look like I put a whole lot of time into it, but the letterforms that I created out of the actual raw meat for the word steak took me quite a bit of time. Sometimes you can find letterforms that are created with objects and use them for typefaces, but I was unsuccessful with finding letterforms out of meat. So I used the basic geometric structure and grid to create my piece. I put STEAK up in the right hand corner of the piece with the text “So much Blood, Grease, Sweat, Tears, Seasonings, Knifes, & Smoke” placed underneath it in smaller text. The towards the bottom I wrote “I hope you enjoy that steak I took so long to prepare for you!”.

I wanted my piece to come across sarcastic, just as I was when I worked at the course. The whole idea of what we had to do was kind of a joke. It was never in the job description to cut 400 steaks every other day. My job description was to make sandwiches, sell beer, ride around the course on the beverage cart, etc. I am not a butcher nor a professional steak chef. I would truly like to know who really actually enjoyed my steaks.

**The reason I did not attach my other 3 works onto this blog-is because I never actually pushed them any farther. I started with a whole new approach for this final and did not work with the other ones after last Thursday.