Jobs I’ve had: the all-in-one lightening version
Rusty started a meme, and I can’t keep track of everyone else who’s hopped on board at this point, or I’d link them, too. For now I’m doing a condensed version.
My first job, in 1996 when I was a sophomore in high school, was at a T-shirt screen printing shop. My job was to take people’s design requests and turn them into graphics that could be made into printing screens. I have no idea how or why I got that job. I had never done graphics work before and had no clue what I was doing. Another employee showed me how to use Corel Draw and apparently I did well enough at it that they didn’t fire me. One time I spelled Hephzibah (a small town near Augusta) wrong and nobody caught it til after we’d printed like 200 shirts. I don’t recall getting in trouble or anything. I did get a free shirt w/ Hephzibah misspelled to sleep in.
Senior year of high school I got a job at Waldenbooks. I think I talked about JD Salinger during the job interview; you can imagine what I was like as a 17-year-old. I was first hired as seasonal help for the calendar kiosk they had in the middle of the mall from September to December. A creepy college-age employee sexually harassed me and another girl; we reported him and he was fired. After the seasonal gig was over, the manager let me stay on and work in the actual bookstore. I worked there until I left for college, then when I came home for Christmas break freshman year, and then again the summer after freshman year. I made minimum wage the whole time, even when I was a keyholder that last summer (which I was very proud of), but at the time it didn’t bother me; I had a job that I liked that managed to pay my bills, and I got an employee discount on books.
During the second semester of my freshman year at NYU, I worked in the Faculty Records Office. I don’t remember a whole lot of what I did there other than a lot of it involved going through the files for every professor and pulling their original CV. Some professors had been there so long that the original CV was a tattered old carbon-copy from the 60s. I don’t remember what was done with the CVs after I’d pulled them. One time, my boss, who was a born-again Christian in her late 20s or early 30s, overheard me talking on the phone with my boyfriend, arranging logistics for the apartment we were going to rent that summer in Augusta. She told me I was playing the whore in my father’s house. I was caught so completely off-guard that I had no idea what to say.
Sophomore year at NYU, I tried to get a job at the Waldenbooks on Wall St. but they wouldn’t hire me because I hadn’t sold enough Preferred Reader cards in the final month of my employment in Augusta.
I babysat off and on throughout high school and college. For some reason I don’t consider that a job though. My steadiest babysitting job was freshman year (and then a little bit of sophomore year) when I babysat a baby from the time she was 4 months old until she was a year old. She was usually already asleep for the night by the time I would come over; so I would hang out in this swank Upper East Side apartment while her parents went out to dinner, a play, whatever. The dad was a lawyer and the mom was an NBC executive turned stay-at-home mom. They paid me well and gave me cab fare. You might expect that they were snooty, but they really weren’t at all.
Also, sophomore year at NYU (which was really just fall semester because I transferred to UGA in the spring), I worked in the NYU ResNet office. We helped students set up their ethernet in their dorm rooms, that kind of thing. I really enjoyed that job. Our boss was a hoot. He encouraged us to pad our hours so we could take more of NYU’s money since we’d be in debt to them forever anyway. The ResNet office was tucked away in the back corner of one of the campus computer labs, with no windows. That didn’t bother me, though; I liked all my coworkers and the work was interesting. There was a BeOS machine in the office that I enjoyed playing with. BeOS was a really underrated OS.
For spring semester 2000, I transferred to UGA. My jobs in Athens are a little hazy and I think I’m probably forgetting at least one; but I’m pretty sure my first job was at Copy Services. Sometimes I’d work in the Main Library and sometimes I’d work in the Science Library. Boy oh boy what a boring job that was. I’d go around to all the copy machines and fill them with paper and check the ink levels. Sometimes professors would bring in orders for big print and copy jobs, but the full-time employees were usually responsible for handling those. One of the full-time employees was always talking about his band, Boulevard. Everyone’s in a band in Athens.
I quit Copy Services after a few months because I got a job in the UGA Computer Science lab. That was another favorite job of mine. There were Sun Solaris machines all named after Georgia towns, and some Windows PCs in the back of the lab. The Windows PCs were for use by 1301 (the intro class) students; you didn’t get a Unix account until you took 1302 – or worked in the lab. The two guys who were in charge of the lab really hated the Windows machines and did only the bare minimum to keep them working, and they only did that because it was a job requirement. One of them was from Poland and one was from rural north Georgia. They both had long hair and were super-cool, not obnoxious and condescending like a lot of male geeks can be. One time, one of them told me I was one of the only lab employees who “knows what you’re doing,” and to me that was a big compliment. Another lab employee who was the obnoxious and condescending variety of geek sexually harassed me; I don’t remember if he was fired or not, but I do know he got a talking to from the Polish guy. I made a bunch of signs with brightly colored markers that answered frequently asked student questions, and they’re probably still there today; I know they remained at least until I finished grad school in 2003. It was during that job that I was first acquainted with the term “the world’s largest outdoor cocktail party” – I showed up for work one morning right before fall break and there was a sign on the lab door saying it was closed for that.
In retrospect I shouldn’t have quit that job. I quit about a month before my wedding because I thought I would have too much to do with wedding planning and school. Later I tried to get the job back but the boss above the two guys previously mentioned wouldn’t hire me back, even though they both wanted to. :P I had a hard time finding a job in early 2001 and finally ended up working at Haband, which is a mail-order clothing company that makes clothes that elderly people LOVE. I worked in the call center, taking orders over the phone. There are several highlights from that job that really warrant a separate post. That job sucked.
I worked for about two weeks at Five Points Deli but I don’t remember where in the chronology it fits. When I quit, I lied and said I’d gotten an internship that conflicted. Really I just hated the job but didn’t want to say as much to the manager.
After I quit Haband was around the time I most seriously considered various forms of sex work. One night I decided I wanted to become a stripper, and immediately began researching it on the internet. My husband and I visited the two strip clubs in town to check them out. Clubs in Athens are topless only. I ended up being too intimidated by my lack of dance ability and lack of walking-in-heels-without-breaking-my-ankle ability.
I also checked out a place (can’t remember the name) that wasn’t a jack shack, it wasn’t a place with those booths… I don’t know what you’d call it. In the front they sold lingerie. Customers could also buy time with one or more of the women working there. For example, they could pay to watch an adult movie with two women. My husband and I went and the owner gave us a tour; I remember asking, “So what do you DO here?” because I really wanted to know, and she was appropriately (and annoyingly, to me) vague. She said something like, “The better your tips, the more intimate and personalized your experience will be.” I decided not to work there because I thought I’d probably have to deal with a lot of jerks. Whether I was right or wrong on that, I’ll never know. Looking back, what’s really weird is that when the owner gave us the tour there didn’t appear to be anyone else there, employees or customers.
I also remember thinking about independent escorting, though I didn’t know that term at the time. My husband and I had a discussion about how much I could reasonably charge for a blowjob and expect to make decent money in a college town. We figured frat boys probably had plenty of disposable income. If the price were high enough I was fine with sucking frat boys’ dicks, and in fact I thought I’d love to take their stupid money. I ended up not doing it because I was too scared of getting arrested, and/or of something like this happening. :/
After Haband, in the summer of 2001, I landed quite a coup of a job: call center operator for the Distance Learning department at the Georgia Center. Wait, don’t get too impressed. It definitely looks good on a resume. But I was the call center (they didn’t have any form of support before), and they converted a broom closet to an office for me. The only way the desk would fit in was all the way up against the back wall, so I had to sit w/ my back to the door and I was always paranoid about people sneaking up on me. But the job paid $10 an hour, which at the time was huge, and I got a neat magnetic nametag that I wore proudly, and it was an office job, even if my office was a broom closet. I began learning SQL there because they used an open source ticket management system called Keystone, and it had a few basic built-in queries, but for anything actually useful, you had to input a SQL query yourself. I worked there throughout my final year of undergrad and into the summer.
In the summer of 2002 I got a job at Borders. The job at Borders and the one at the Georgia Center overlapped for about a month. I was working full-time hours at Borders and part-time hours at the Georgia Center, and taking a Java class (1301! [see above]) that was a prerequisite for the graduate program I’d been accepted to. When I woke up one day and realized how thoroughly exhausted my body was, I knew it was time to quit the Georgia Center. It was convenient because my husband took over that job and stayed at it for quite some time, and was damn good at it.
By the time I got the job at Borders I already had this blog – and indeed, if you go back to my 2002 archives, you’ll see that I describe some of the finer points of the ordering and cataloging system in excruciating, probably fireable detail. But it was 2002 and nobody there knew what a blog was, and I didn’t think twice about posting all kinds of details, full names, etc. I think we’ve all been there, right bloggers?
Okay, that’s all for now. Maybe later I’ll do separate posts on individual jobs, if the mood strikes. I’m putting this up without proofreading!
This has me thinking about my previous jobs. Totally going to do a post on that!
Aspasia,
As soon as I hit “publish” I remembered two other jobs that I left out. So I’ll have to do another post. And I really should do a separate post about Haband… oh lord.
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I look forward to it!
“Honey, I ain’t got no legs!”
Heh. You said it before I could. :)
Second best was:
Customer: “I lost a lot of weight, so now I’m ordering all new clothes.”
Me: “Oh, congratulations!”
Customer: “I was in the hospital with cancer.”
I had two roommates who were employees of Chelsea’s and Topper’s and even, briefly, the Ripcord — which was the muy sketchy strip joint in Arcade. One of them did very well — she paid tuition and bought a car before she moved on to other stuff.
Fantasy World is the place you’re describing with the customized experience. They refer to it as “private modeling.”
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