The A2’s

by Charissa Nasrallah   

There was a ranking order with in the common workers and upper management of the park referred to as “the chain of command.”  It was basically designed to determine who tells who what to do.  But there always seemed to be some sort of loophole in the chain of command that resulted in things never getting done the proper way.  Whenever upper management ever delegated some sort of action, it never turned out quite right.  The problem seemed to be that the people who actually worked on the park and knew what needed to be done, were hardly ever the people who decided what to do.

The A2 were part-time workers, who still worked full time, but only got paid hourly and did not receive benefits or insurance.  At least half the employees at the park were A2 workers, who struggled to make ends meat.  I was an A2 worker.

Despite the attempts at simplicity I made with my lifestyle, I could have never survived on the paycheck I received from the park.  It barely paid half the rent of the small apartment I shared.  If it were not for my job as a waitress, I would have never been able to afford food or clothes.  I sympathized for the A2 workers who had children.  Most of the full time workers at the park still didn’t make a lot of money, but at least they had some kind of health insurance. 

My associates thought I was crazy for taking such a low paying position with a college degree.  But I was doing the exactly thing I wanted to do and I was making a great deal more per hour as a waitress.  I might not have been able to afford anything too extravagant, but I was getting by.

Two months before I was fired from the park, I applied for a position as the head of the education department, in hopes to get a job that would pay me a salary I could actually live on.  I didn’t get this job and it was probably for the best.  I had never bothered to learn about any of the other various aspects of the park apart from its ecology and animals.  So I continued on as an A2.

The other A2’s taught me many things about the park, and about the things that happened on the park.  I was trained by an A2 on the natural flora and fauna of the area, and the afternoon I spent with him was equivalent to a college class.  A2’s also taught me how to drive the trams and fix broken fences.  My fellow A2 interpreters gave me a lot of the information I used in the programs I designed.

I saved money on gas by carpooling to work with a few of the other A2’s, who became my good friends.  It was also nice to think that by carpooling I was conserving gasoline and cutting back amount of toxins in the air.  If I was really serious about reducing the amount of toxins I consumed, I suppose I could have cut back on my social life some, but that would have been too simple.  Sometimes I had the tendencies to make things out to be more complicated than they actually were. 

But in August of 1999, when the alligator died, I knew I was not overreacting by being concerned about the toxins that might have been in the water.  Originally, I believed a probable source to any pollution might have been the results of some of the rain’s run-off water from the park’s parking lot.  But many of my co-workers seemed to think this contamination was the result of something else.

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