she works hard for the money, so you better treat her right.

2006-07-13 / 11:31 a.m.

Thursday thirteen
I yoinked this from Michelle, who posts a Thursday meme on the regular. The Thursday Thirteen is any old collection of factoids, and you yourself may determine the overarching theme, but I liked hers: 13 Jobs I Have Had. (I thought about posting 13 Contraceptive Methods I Have Used, but I could only come up with 9.)

1. Legal Secretary. This was my first job, the summer I was 16. I worked in a small office compound that was rented out by two lawyers and a psychiatrist. I was supposed to be working for one of the lawyers, but when everyone else figured out that I was faster and cheaper than the regular secretary or the paralegal, they started giving me work to do. This included medical transcription for the psychiatrist, who was a low-talker with enunciation problems. I was getting $5 an hour for this, a princely sum in 1991. My main boss was a good-natured nut who liked to say "chonk, chonk" when he pressed keys on the keyboard. He would also say "that's life in the big city" in lieu of "what're you gonna do," which I privately thought was hilarious.

2. Warehouse Worker. Remember Dayton's, now Marshall Field's, soon to be Macy's (gag)? Their distribution center was about 1.5 miles away from my parents' house, so one summer--possibly the same summer I worked for the lawyer et al, or maybe just after I graduated--I got a job unpacking merch, tagging it, packing it, and shipping it to various Dayton's outposts. It was heinously boring and I sustained numerous box-cutter and pricing-gun injuries. Also paper cuts. They were small injuries. But still.

3. Typist. This job was my first experience with being drug tested and taking a typing test. I passed both. And then I typed classified ads at one of the newspapers here. This was pre-internet, you understand, so people called in their orders or faxed them, and I used some totally f-ed up computer system to enter them in. I amused myself by inventing different macros to speed up the entry of common words and phrases. I usually just worked Fridays, because that's when the rush happened, and I worked for 9 or 10 hours. On these extra long days, I frequently took 2 hour lunches and shopped at Dayton's. Was I still rocking my Dayton's discount? That was a good discount.

4. Research Assistant, or Something. I barely remember this job, which was at a non-profit dedicated to reducing industrial waste, or something. It involved library research (fine), calling people (not fine), and sitting in a cube wondering what the hell else I should be doing (while writing letters to my friends). I never have been good at asking for additional work when I've finished what was given to me. If you don't know just how efficient I am, I am not going to make it known to you.

5. Writing Tutor. This was my work-study job all through college. It was fun, actually. I was really good at it. And it was better than any of the other available work-study jobs (unless the radio station manager job was work-study. That would be rad. But maybe too much work). What's appalling about it is that I made minimum wage. I made less money, in fact, than folks who opted to work food service, because they had some sort of money incentive over there at the cafeteria. That's some bogus shit right there.

6. Soloist/Section Leader. This was the other job I had in college. At the time, I was completely mystified to learn that certain people got paid to sing in church choirs. Now I know that this is one of the primary ways in which professional singers make extra money, but when I was in college and was telephonically accosted by the wacko high-energy choir director across the river about coming to sing for her, I was like WHO ARE YOU and WHAT THE HELL. Still, I took the job. It did not pay well, but it paid so much better than everything else that was available to me in 1993. The thing that sucked, besides dealing with said wacko (who was very well-meaning, I'm sure), was getting up at the crack on Sunday mornings. At least once, I was still drunk enough at 8 AM that I wouldn't drive (my boyfriend's car) over to church, instead opting to walk, and another time I remember actual physical pain born of 1) hangover and 2) being stationed right in front of the 18 inch diameter organ pipe during both services. I thought I would die.

7. Maintenance Bitch. One summer, I took French at the university at home in order to knock down one of my language requirements in the most efficient way. My credit load qualified me to get a campus job, which paid like $7.65/hour, which was unheard of (see above re Writing Tutor job paying minimum wage). I worked for the campus rental maintenance department, which meant dealing with all the university's rental properties, which meant I cleaned, installed toilet flappers, mowed, and smoked up with the dudes who worked in the parking ramp next door. There were four of us--one supervisory dude and 3 student workers--in this "office," which was a garage that has since been torn down and replaced by a dance building. In this garage, there was one air-conditioned room, billions of lawn mowers, gallons of Simple Green, and a basketball hoop. Our boss, who was in some private lair on the other side of the river, was a walking heart attack with a ZZ Top beard and a bandana on his head. He introduced me to gems such as "don't sweat the small shit, and it's all small shit." We never saw him and I don't think he actually worked. The rest of us hardly did, either. We'd haul ass for a bit each day, and then drive around in the Action Van. We watched the whole Godfather trilogy on the clock whe it was too hot to work. That's your tax dollars right there.

8. Book Rush Clerk. My school calendar was just a little off--it meant that I went back later than everyone else, and that I could work the book rush at a local college when their schoolyear started. Amazingly, I did this 3 or 4 times, even though it always sucked, what with all the frat boys and wanky MBAs and the bitchy, bitchy accountant or whatever the hell she was. I read surreptitiously on the job and walked away with a lot of office supplies.

9. Music Specialist. Remember Public Radio Music Source? I think it still exists, though the business has completely changed (thanks internet). It used to be the only way you could find out a) what was playing on your local public radio station last Tuesday and then b) order it. If you didn't order it, you were charged a $1 research fee. This job veered between sucking and being kind of stimulating. The hiring process involved a music history test of sorts, which I aced (I was told, in fact, that no one had ever correctly identified the composer of Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima before, and I was like, "Dudes, I just got a music degree and the music history prize at my conservatory, and this is what I'm doing with it."). I liked the research parts. I liked the detective work. I did not enjoy the phone, obviously. We would also occasionally get calls on weird outside lines for fulfillment orders, which was funny--there was one line in particular which, if it rang, guaranteed a bizarre conversation with a Queensryche fan. It could have been worse. My calls were audited, it's true, and I had weekly "stats," and I had to "upsell," but I made okay money and could take days off whenever I wanted to. This was in the days of long-distance relationship, so that feature was particularly attractive.

10. Office Manager. A temp job that actually involved lobbying for the rights of beer distributors. My boss chain-smoked in her office and tried to hide it, but it turned out she was a giant opera fan, so I forgave her. She was completely fascinated by my (unfascinating) life, which gave me a bunch of leeway when I had to go do auditions.

11. Trust Assistant. Another temp job, one where I had no idea what I was doing and was totally unqualified, yet was still more competent than any of the other assistants. I spent a lot of time doing insane calculations for trust accounts and listening to my boss clip his fingernails in his office. He was a huge opera fan too, which again worked to my advantage.

12. Worst Job Ever. Oh my god, I almost forgot about this one. It was some summer thing, a part-time second shift job working for some records management company whose clients did giant litigations (e.g. regarding EPA Superfund sites) with massive amounts of paper. Our job was to take all of the files apart so that each page could be imaged, and to document how the pages were attached to each other so that they could be reassembled exactly. So I would get a file box containing accordion files, which I'd document, and then there was a whole subset of "attachments," such as rubberbands, binder clips, staples, and paper clips, all of which I would remove and document along with the page count. It was ridiculous. I listened to the Ring cycle and drank a lot of Diet Coke. It was a huge relief when they switched me over to data entry, where I would attempt to make a bunch of disparate documents conform to their weird data entry system. I never got moved to imaging. That would have been the easiest part of the process.

13. Credit Union Biotch. My most recent temp job--6 years ago--where, once again, I wasn't qualified, and once again, I was a magical savior handling people's money and accounts and setting wrongs to right.

Since then, I have been a university fellow, TA, reader/grader, soloist and section leader (again), voice teacher, bogus professor, independently-contracted classical singer, mystery shopper, and I don't even know what to call myself in my current office job. Ms. Assistant Thing. I have never been fired.

It would be interesting to have one job--aside from freelancing, I mean--for an extended period of time. I can hardly wrap my head around the concept, because I am going to head into the basement work area and do at least two different jobs now.

So hard for it, honey,
Maven.

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