no apparent reason

that's why they call it "work"

I was counting up recently and realized that I’ve had 22 different jobs over the past 13 years, ranging in duration from one week to four years (the latter not counting summers). I’m not sure if this is is more or fewer than normal, but at least it gives me something to look back on and ponder in my old age. I started thinking about them and realized that though a lot of them were boring and some of them I really disliked, it was a lot of fun to think back about them and the people I worked with.

--My first job was as a busser at a chicken restaurant. I worked Sunday evenings for about three months when I was 16. I hated it, mostly because the other bussers made fun of me. The actual job was okay, and the customers were a blast. Part of my job was to keep peoples’ iced tea and water filled up. I was pretty bad at it and spilled it all over the tables, but nobody ever minded.

--Summer after freshman year at college, I worked in the gatehouse at a lake near Lincoln. I sold park stickers and spread disinformation. People came out to go fishing and would ask me what was biting. I always said “crappies” because it’s a funny word, but I didn’t really know. The first few weeks at this job were tedious, because I had to paint guideposts all day—guideposts are those two-foot tall log sort of things that go along the sides of roads sometimes for whatever reason, to guide people who can’t discern the difference between the dirt road and the grassy shoulder I guess. I also painted picnic tables and railings. I got very sore doing that, and had paint in my hair for months afterwards. The gatehouse part was more fun, it was not a very hot summer so we didn’t get much business, and I mostly sat in the gatehouse and read all day. I read Atlas Shrugged (all of it except for most of the 50-page speech at the end) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I didn’t like either of them much, but they’re good books to have read.

When people who already had park stickers on their cars drove up to the gatehouse, we would yell “go ahead” at them as they went by, to indicate that they could go on into the park. A girl who had worked the year before told us that it was fun to yell “goat head” instead of “go ahead,” and she was right. Often I would sit just outside the gatehouse and my co-worker would sit inside. She would yell “goat head” at people as they approached; and I got to enjoy the looks of people as they observed my stern unmoving countenance and heard a disembodied voice yell “goat head” at them. All in all, this was one of my favorite jobs.

--During junior year at college I spent one semester at home in Nebraska taking classes and working, because I wanted to study Plains Indian archaeology. I had three jobs during that semester and summer, one of which was in the archaeology lab at the University of Nebraska. I spent quite a lot of the time at that job weighing bags of dirt, dried mud actually, and recording my findings. Every once in a while, this one guy would come bounding into the room to tell me how important this dirt was going to be in the future when archaeologists had developed new tests they could do on the dirt. Whatever. I got very buff at this job, lifting the computer paper boxes of dirt from the floor to the table and back again all day.

--Immediately post-college was a weird job time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and didn’t want to make any major commitments, so I signed up with a temp agency. My first assignment was at this place that manufactured business directories. Each “signature” or section of the book was placed on a round table that rotated, and you grabbed each signature as it went by you in the appropriate order so that it stacked up into the correct book order , then set it aside for later binding, with a little square piece of paper with your name on it tucked in so they could take you to task if you messed it up. This is what I did all day long, though I did spend at least a few days doing other equally dull tasks. You had to sign out for breaks and lunches by scanning a bar code thing they gave you, the scanning tended to take up appreciable amounts of our break time which was annoying. I learned a skill there which has been surprisingly useful to me in later life; which is the ability to collate by hand very quickly.

--After my stint as a temp, I got a job at a local bookstore, which was a great job. I would have stayed there forever if they’d paid me enough to live on .

--While I was doing the temping and bookstore, I also cleaned apartment buildings with a friend. We vacuumed hallways and stairs, scrubbed entryways, cleaned out ashtrays, and swabbed out the laundry rooms. It was a fairly thankless job, nobody ever thought things were clean enough. I found this discouraging, and ultimately quit.

--The spring after I got the bookstore job, I decided I wanted to go to England, so to make extra money I got another temp job and relegated the bookstore to evenings & weekends. The temp job was at an insurance company, where I gathered insurance applications and forms to send out to agents. Both that job and the bookstore required me to be standing up the whole time (I mean not as a function of the job; it was a rule that we weren’t supposed to sit down), so my legs got tired but I cheated and sat a lot.

--A few months after I got back from England, I got another temp job, this time at the State of Nebraska in Child Support Enforcement. I spent quite a bit of time getting bawled out by a lot of angry people despite the fact that neither I nor the department had anything to do with either causing or perpetuating their problems. It was one of the few jobs I’ve had where I’ve felt like I was directly helping people, however, and weirdly enough after I left there I really missed the adrenaline rush from people calling and yelling at me. My co-workers there were very fun, in particular a girl named Misty who one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. She used to recite Kids in the Hall sketches from memory for us, and I’m pretty sure she was funnier than the original.

--When I got done with my master’s, I worked downtown here in Chicago for a year at a technical consulting company. I worked with the salespeople. Me in any kind of sales related position is a total joke—I loathe anything to do with sales, and if an abstract concept were capable of emotions it would detest me too. However, I got to know a lot of techies, learned some stuff about UNIX, and got flown all over the country by the company for extremely superficial reasons. For example, for some reason they sent me to Boston to get trained, where we stayed a few blocks away from the Italian restaurants in the North End, and from Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall.

--I currently work for my advisor, mostly inputting data from his archaeological excavations at Ashkelon into a database that his wife built. I also work in the map collection at the library, and have worked on and off at a couple of other fairly tedious jobs. One spring break I worked for the U of C humanities division, inventorying computer equipment. This involved going into a lot of offices of confused faculty members, asking if we could read the serial numbers off of their computer equipment. One department had all of their computer equipment alarmed, so if you moved it the alarm went off and the police came. That was certainly a humiliating experience.

Posted by michele at January 17, 2003 9:06 PM