Decompression

I was a science teacher for four years at a charter school in Philadelphia during the late 2000s. As I look back on it I feel like the job was a complete failure, because I never was able to control the classroom.

I envied other teachers who seemed to be having a better time in their careers. One “old head” of a math teacher on the first floor had scores of snapshots of his students covering his whiteboard, along with birthday wishes. Another teacher took her students skiing, and another was the school’s lacrosse coach. I had no such memories there, except that I felt I was simply trying to survive. In my last year I was sent to a workshop in Arizona, where I learned that the cortisol level of stressed teachers would become sharply elevated. Finally, in 2010 I was dismissed from my assignment. I got to keep my laptop, and that turned out to be the best thing, as it assisted me in my next endeavor.

I took the next six months off, collecting unemployment compensation. But I had an enjoyable time as I could be a stay-at-home parent, and it was then I started taking lots of pictures. I bought my first digital camera at the beginning of my unemployment. There were visits to grandparents, and a video of friends coming to our house with their own young son for a play date. My favorite picture is of when we were in the backyard on a stiflingly hot day. My son and I were playing with the hose. I got out my camera and snapped a cute picture of him, smiling adorably up at me with his little outfit and hat on. Later on, there were pictures of him staring out the window at people working on our driveway, and he was tugging at his hair for some reason, fretting over them trampling the grass in the driveway. Then my wife took a long video of our backyard after a wild snowstorm, and he's saying, "I'm shoveling!", pulling on his boots and winter cap.

I eventually had to get back to work, but I needed a job where I could be on the road for hours per day so I could cogitate, think and decompress after years of doing such a bad job as a teacher. I took a contracting position for mortgage companies, in which I would drive around to specific residences. I was then to take at least three pictures of each home, which included the house number, the front of the home and the street. Sometimes there were scores more pictures required, such as with an occupancy visit. For these, I had to photograph every room in the house, the front and back doors, up and down the street, the street sign and house numbers. Other visits required me to try and meet with the occupants and hand them a printout, demanding they contact their mortgage provider.

My first assignment was in Narvon, a town I had never heard of. I plugged the address into the Garmin that I bought with the very last of my unemployment compensation. I got in my 2012 Chevy Sonic and hit the road, heading out on the expressway to Route 30 west, and then to 401 west. After what seemed like an hour, I arrived at a single level home with a garage.

A huge Rottweiler was out front, pushing the metal head of a shovel with his nose. He eyed me, blinked, and then went back to his game. The shovel would clang loudly on the ground with each boop, and then he barked fiercely at the shovel. He repeated this activity, but fortunately he kept ignoring me.

A woman came out. I showed her the paperwork to be completed for the insurance job. She was expecting me, and I apprised her of the photos I had to take. She brought me in, and she stayed close behind as I went around, taking pictures. I made my foray up into the attic, using a ladder proffered from the garage. The woman had gingerly plucked it off the wall, and then she expertly lifted it up over her husband’s truck, never scratching it. All the while she was on the phone with him, listening intently to his plans for an upcoming visit to the New Jersey shore. With all the pictures saved on the SD drive of my camera, I completed the paperwork, and she then signed it. I then headed out to my next assignment. My compensation for that job was $10.

Most of my jobs paid $4.50 each, but then I’d get 40 of them at a time. Many of my assignments were in Downingtown. I found out that the easier assignments were off of major roads. The really awful ones were homes on busy roads, with traffic streaming by, as I tried to get all of the required pictures.

One of the more memorable assignments I had was in Schwenksville. It was a once per month assignment, and the house was abandoned. The occupants had probably fled in the middle of the night. They left furniture, clothes, stereos, TVs, CDs, and a refrigerator full of rotting cheese, eggs, milk and kilograms of once-frozen meat; I had to open the refrigerator every month, get a picture, and then gratefully close it back up. The smell was overpowering, and I breathed through my mouth. The stench stayed glued on my garments, and I had to shower as soon as I got home. There were also herbs in Bell jars and canned peaches and potatoes. There was so much to photograph that more than once I forgot my house number picture, and I had to go back and get it. I couldn’t reuse an old house number picture.

It wasn’t long before I started talking to myself in the houses. I recalled things that happened during my teaching job and how my classes had seemed like study halls. I recalled how one student ordered twenty pizzas from my class during a lesson. It infuriated me. Then I remembered how other teachers caught on to my lack of dedication and grew unsupportive of me. Then there was the constant eating, sleeping, listening to music and the ceaseless talking in class. It all had depressed and discouraged me to no end. I started to compare teaching to taking pictures of houses, and I felt like I had more power, even at $4.50 per house. I could leave notes for the mortgage companies to review.

But soon I talked to myself so much, and I thought about my old job so deeply, that soon my pictures started to suffer, and my assignments were cut and given to another contractor. I then moved to another company, and then later I signed up with an unrelated company maintaining water dispensers at Whole Foods stores in several towns.

The new company, which also involved taking pictures of houses, required that I be much more interactive with the homeowners, and to actually counsel them on paying off their mortgage. I met with one young lady in Philadelphia who owned a duplex. It was a hot summer night, and I handed her the package of documents I’d printed out. She and I sat down and followed along, and she started to see the importance of continuing with her payments.

Some of the people were not so cooperative. One woman in southern Delaware County owned her home, but she lied to me, pointing at the big work boots in the corner and saying it was her boyfriend’s house, when clearly it was a woman’s name on the paperwork. The woman finally relented, and she listened to my spiel. I finally left, with her tearfully saying she didn’t know what to do, but she had at least heard me out.

I was nearly beat up on one visit in Pottstown. The first time I visited said domicile was on a lovely Saturday morning, and a woman with two small children answered my knock. I informed her that the mortgage payments had been missed a few times and that I needed to talk with the owner. The woman looked very uncomfortable, saying the owner was out and that I should come back later. I returned a few days later and knocked again. A hulking, two-meter-tall man burst out of the front door, nearly knocking me own.

“What the hell do you want?” he demanded. I showed him the paperwork.

“Come out here,” he said. We walked out to the center of the driveway.

Then he said: “You tell those fuckers at XXXX Mortgage that I’m not giving them a penny! They don’t give a shit about me!” And then he moved closer to me, almost touching my chest. Horrified, I stood my ground and didn’t move a millimeter, and he finally backed off, a grim look on his face. I gratefully entered this incident into the required narrative, and I never returned to that house again.

Perhaps the most memorable visit I made was to a farmhouse, which was pretty close to Chester Springs. On this particular visit it had been perhaps the fifth or sixth time, and the home was usually quiet. The road was very busy that day, so I pulled over as close to the house as I could. I snapped a picture of the house, perfectly framed in my screen. Then I drove slowly ahead and was about to turn right.

A young woman came out, visible in my rearview mirror. She took her own picture of me. I had been caught. Deflated, I drove down the side street and then pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, but not before getting another picture of the side of the house facing the driveway. Then the woman came tramping in her flip flops towards the passenger side of my vehicle, walking fast.

I imagined her opening the door and getting in my vehicle, so I picked up my netbook and camera and just sat there. Her mortgage notice was displayed balefully on my screen. Then at the next second the woman actually did open my passenger side door! She then hopped up, sat down and closed the door. She then crossed her arms and glared at me. Slowly, I looked over at her, and then I slid my laptop off the dashboard and showed it to her. The woman read the page for a few seconds, and then she looked back at me.

"He didn't pay the mortgage," she said. "I don't know what he's doing. Does this mean we're getting kicked out? Do you work for the bank?" Then I briefly explained that I was a contractor, and I handed her the printout of the page she had just read.

"I'm really sorry", I said. "Maybe you should call the lender. The number is right here." The woman sighed. "I have no idea what I'm going to do", she said. Her glare softened somewhat. "Do you really have to take all those pictures?"

"Yes, I have to have everything I need. I actually have to get a shot of the house number too."

"Go ahead", she sighed. I jumped out of my Sonic and ran around to the front of the hose and got my picture. Then I walked back to my car, and the woman was still sitting in the passenger seat, staring blankly at the house. 

“I’m sorry, but I have to get going”, I said. Gingerly, I opened the passenger door, and she stepped out.

“Just call your husband”, I said. “Maybe you can work something out.” 

The payment of $600 was on the page in her hand. “Can you get anything to them right now, like on your own?” I asked brightly. The woman stared at me and shook her head.

“There’s got to be something”, I said.

“No, there’s nothing”, said the woman. “We’re squatters in our own house. And it’s your fault.”

“Ma’am”, I said. “My wife and I pay our mortgage every month. We do without smartphones, and we have the cheapest internet possible. We don’t have cable TV. You just have to do it. But you have to live somewhere! Is there anything you can sell? Maybe grow your own food. You do have a farm!”

The woman just stared at me.

“OK”, I sighed. “I have to go home now”. I went around the front of my car and got in. The woman walked away, towards the back door. I drove away, feeling like I’d been blamed for giving a low grade to a student, and I hadn’t even reminded her that no, it wasn’t my fault at all. I could have returned and talked to the woman again, but I let it go.

Did I forget to mention that this job was supposed to help me think, cogitate and decompress? Well, there was some of that, but not enough to get me out of the teaching pipeline. I wound up going back to substitute teaching at a sprawling, single floor middle school in Chichester, and I got to spend the entire afternoon showing "The Day After Tomorrow” to an eighth-grade science class. After this, I returned to one of my old school districts and picked up some science assignments, and I actually started to enjoy it.

The house picture job lasted until early 2017, long after the first company (where I took many more pictures) hired me back. The second job, where I’d go and counsel mortgagees to repay their mortgages ended after less than a year. The second job was what got me thinking about returning to the classroom, because I was counseling and advising, and that sounded suspiciously like teaching. So why couldn’t I just go to one place and stay all day with a more receptive audience instead of driving around talking to jobless, irresponsible adults?

I had really screwed up two jobs. I screwed up teaching, and then I realized after starting with the picture taking job that I’d been implicit in getting people removed from their homes in the 2008 mortgage scam and underwater mortgages!

Now I’m writing about it. Maybe writing is the very decompression I was looking for…