Jobs I’ve had: Baxter Street Bookstore
Not much to say about this one since I already mentioned it in one of the shitstorm-predicating class posts. I worked at Baxter Street Bookstore in Athens for about a week in, I think, May of 2001. The job paid minimum wage and no one was scheduled for more than 20 hours a week. I distinctly remember a coworker, a 21-year-old girl in a pink Lacoste shirt, talking about how she had just had laser eye surgery. All my coworkers seemed to be from another planet, and they looked at me as if I were from another planet. (They always seemed to be looking me up and down. The fucking nerve of them.) When I asked the manager if I could have more hours, she took me aside and said that this really wasn’t the job for me, if I was trying to actually support myself. I was pretty pissed off. During the interview (at least I guess I had an interview?), no one had seen fit to tell me this wasn’t a job for people who actually had bills and rent to pay, it was a way for rich kids to make some extra beer money.
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This is a follow-up to my first jobs post and my subsequent “jobs I forgot” list.
Jobs I’ve had: Humane Society of New York
…for all of one day.
Freshman year at NYU, there was a job fair at the student center. The Humane Society was hiring office workers, so I applied. The interview was over the phone. The job was paperwork, filing, answering the phone, that kind of thing. Since it was described as an office job I (naïvely?) assumed it would be in an office.
When I showed up for work, turns out the office was just the front part of the building where they kept all the animals. There was paperwork and filing, oh sure, but when that got light, we were supposed to help clean cages. The whole place reeked of dog. I walked in and thought, “You have got to be fucking kidding me. Fuck this.” I worked one day, I guess for appearances, and then told them it “wasn’t what I was expecting” and quit.
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This is a follow-up to my first jobs post and my subsequent “jobs I forgot” list.
Jobs I’ve had: HTMLer for an internet startup
In my “jobs I forgot” list, I said I worked at SmartGirl in 1998, but it was actually 1999, because it was the second semester of freshman year. It was a work-from-home gig, but I did have to go to their office once or twice. Their office was such a stereotypical late 90s New York startup office. It was a loft in Soho that was divided up with space for several different startups – no walls or anything, just one big open floor with clusters of desks here and there.
SmartGirl was a site where preteen and teenage girls could submit reviews of all kinds of products – from make-up to video games to tampons and maxi pads. The tampons and maxi pads part was pretty cool, I thought, and so did the founder, since none of us knew of any other place where young girls reviewed such products openly and thoroughly.
This was before the age of user-generated content in the sense that we now know it; there were no easy-to-install systems like WordPress where users could submit reviews directly and they would go into a moderation queue. The reviews came to us in a Filemaker Pro database. I don’t remember if a form on the web site automatically put them into the database, or if a batch job ran every so often, or if the reviews were emailed and someone entered them into the database by hand. But each of us whose job it was to post reviews would go into an individual record in Filemaker Pro and copy the information, then select one of several pre-made “templates” (these were raw HTML) and paste in the info, and upload a static HTML file.
I remember one time we had a meeting at the founder’s apartment, and there was a big debate over whether we should hyphenate “e-mail.” The argument was that the style guides at the time had it hyphenated, but kids the age of our users were, for the most part, typing it “email.” I don’t remember what we decided, but I’d bet the decision was against hyphenation. Also, that meeting made me think, “Damn, Manhattan apartments are tiny. And she’s probably paying $2000 a month for this. Maybe living in New York isn’t such a great deal after all!”
SmartGirl, like most late 90s startups, didn’t last as a company of its own – but the site is still around! In 2001 it was taken over by the University of Michigan. You can still read the letter from the founder announcing the change here.
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This is a follow-up to my first jobs post.
Jobs I forgot in the first go-round
I’ve already thought of five jobs I missed in my “jobs I’ve had” post:
- Baxter Street Bookstore (I’ve mentioned this one before. I think my chronology was off there.
- Student Notes
- UGA equiv. of ResNet
- New York Humane Society – for all of 1 day
- An internet startup called SmartGirl. They’re still around, though very different from when I worked there in 1998!
I have a nagging suspicion there’s at least one more.
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!
7-year retrospective
I should have posted this last Thursday, on the date of my actual 7th blog birthday, but this is close enough! Here’s a retrospective of where I was…
Seven years ago: About to graduate from college w/ my BA in linguistics. Married, living in a pretty cool townhouse in Athens (bigger than my mom’s house in square footage!) with an approx. 2 ft. x 8 ft. “yard” out back, where I’d planted some shrubs and flowers and made the place look generally nicer than the exterior of most college students’ dwellings. Total Mac geek obsessed w/ old obscure hardware.
Six years ago: About to wrap up the intense, life-changing, really wonderful experience that was the MIT Program (which includes giving a presentation at UPS headquarters in Atlanta), and graduate w/ a degree that people don’t understand: “Yes, the degree is actually called MIT. No, it’s not an MS in IT. It’s a Master of Internet Technology. That’s a real, separate degree.” And speaking of life-changing experiences, living for four months w/ the secret that my husband is trans – and wondering what the hell I’m going to do, while trying to hold things together on the surface for the benefit of people in my everyday interactions (only Jenny and Niki knew at this point). Applying for a job at a technology non-profit in Dallas, Texas.
Five years ago: Newly transplanted to Atlanta after seven months in Texas. I would hesitate to say going there was a mistake, because I learned a lot and I don’t think I would be the same otherwise. (Insert cheesy platitude about every experience shaping who you are… blah blah.) Ultimately it was a positive, because I learned what I didn’t want, and it made the things I did want come into much sharper focus. Working at The Job (also known occasionally herein as PHS, and in a few scant places, by its real name). Still married legally but separated in most senses of the word, though she was staying w/ me after moving from Athens until she found her own apartment in May. A therapist I was seeing at the time gave me crap about us sharing the same bed and “how that looks,” and I promptly fired her (the therapist). Blog archives for April 2004 are lost to the ether due to a hard drive failure. :P
Four years ago: Been in Atlanta and working at The Job for a little over a year. Hanging out w/ Brent, Ryan, and Sam at Houlihan’s several nights a week after work, then walking home in the almost-dusk light. Recently met some local bloggers IRL; I’m starting to make connections in this town. Officially divorced now, for seven months. This place feels like home (and I selfishly wish Jenny and Niki would move here). Reconnected w/ Dacia and Dipika thanks to blogging. Occasionally fucking a not-so-closeted Republican, but getting increasingly fed up w/ the situation; got my eye on a local political blogger who, by casual appearances, you might not think is my “type.” Trying to hatch a plan to get in his pants.
Three years ago: Rusty and I have been an item for almost a year (the plan worked!). Moved out of my first Atlanta apartment a month prior, even though I didn’t really want to; but they wouldn’t budge on raising the rent, and anyway, it had been taken over by a new, shitty management company. Moved to the Ice House Lofts, into an apartment at the other end of the hall from Rusty. :) We call it our halfway house to living together. Working at Large Media Organization, after departing The Job in October ‘05. My dad had a stroke a month earlier and things are kind of rough in that area. Official launch of Georgia Podcast Network is imminent.
Two years ago: Surprise – back at The Job! This time as a contractor, and it’s all for the best. Coming back was one of the best “career-related” decisions I’ve made, and I told my boss this time I’m never leaving. Total site redesign and launch of new platform complete, and I raked up major overtime bucks with which I dug myself slightly out of debt (finally paid off that car I bought seven years earlier!). Rusty and I have moved in together in an ill-fated apartment. PodCamp Atlanta has come and gone and I’m exhausted and swear I’ll never organize another conference – and yet, I dream up the idea of Sex 2.0 and decide to try to make it really happen. In honor of my 5th blog birthday I’ve moved my blog off my homegrown PHP/MySQL system and onto WordPress. Due to peer pressure and the inevitability of “anything I hate on, I will be a fanatic about in 6 months to a year,” I’ve started using Twitter. I graduate from level 3 pole dancing and get my purple garter.
One year ago: Sex 2.0 really happened OMFG!! And it was a huge success w/ a full week of post-orgasmic bliss! But this time, I’m standing firm on my promise to myself to never organize another conference. What else? Back to being a permanent full-time employee at The Job. Performed in the second PoleLaTeaz student showcase. Rusty and I are living together back in Decatur and have recently brought Puff and Stuff to live with us. We meet with a super cool financial planner and lay out a plan for getting out of debt, saving money, and eventually buying a house together.
There’s more – much more. There’s no way I can accurately condense seven years into a “highlight reel” of a post. But, I felt like I should put something up, just to reflect on how things change over the course of [x] number of years, and how keeping a record of your life – whether a blog, a personal journal, or any other medium – is, I believe, extremely valuable.
Maybe later I’ll go back and edit this post w/ hyperlinks to relevant posts about key events!
Update: Post has been updated w/ a million links!
Ideas, anyone?
So, my mom is looking for a second job. It needs to be something with flexible enough hours that she still has time to do real estate stuff when needed, and also where she doesn’t have to be out of the house for 8 straight hours a day, since my dad can’t be left alone for that length of time. She’s concerned about finding something that pays a decent wage, as someone her age and with no college education. Of course, age discrimination is illegal, but it’s one of those things just like other insidious forms of discrimination… you have to prove it. Which can take away time and energy people need to devote to other things (like finding a job).
She is looking into a part-time property management position opening up at the real estate office where she has her license; if that worked out and paid decently, it would probably be ideal. I just worry that the broker might try to low-ball her and/or that she’d end up too busy with this added to everything else on her plate.
I suggested Starbucks, because: 1) they pay a competitive wage for that type of job (supposedly, anyway); 2) they are big on diversity; I have seen plenty of people my mom’s age and older working there; 3) employees have access to health insurance if they work 26 hours a week (BIG PLUS); 4) the hours would be flexible; 5) she was a bartender for years, so making lattes would be a cinch.
She said everything she’s been seeing in the newspaper pays like $8-$10 an hour . (She made a comment about that being more than minimum wage but still not enough to live off of, and I wondered for a fleeting second, could my mom actually turn Democrat? But I digress…) She’s probably going to go to an employment agency and see what all is available. I’m worried that she won’t be able to find something that pays much more than that, especially in Augusta where cost of living is low (but of course, “cost of living” estimates don’t include piles of medical bills), and because damn near every job now, even if it’s just working at a cash register, lists a college education as a requirement even if it makes no sense.
So this is a very long-winded way of saying, does anyone out there have any bright ideas? Here is stuff she has done: Realtor in Augusta for ~21 years; before that, bartender and waitress for many years; before that, worked at a bookstore and at one point did a ~6-month stint at Ingram Book Company in Nashville, in the accounts receivable department.
I’ve put my thinking cap on and will be brainstorming like crazy. What say you, blog readers? Help my mom find a job!
Conversation about sex work, college, money, and more
Today I had a rather lengthy email exchange with Christopher Penn about sex work, economics, financial aid, and stereotypes. (Yes, all of those things together!) I was frantically typing away in multi-tasking mode while at work, and somehow my replies ended up being longer and smarter-sounding than I’d expected, so I figured I had blog material on my hands. (I did some minor editing to fix typos and such in the parts I wrote.) Hence:
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