On Working

[cynic51]

My last random list inspired a few imitators. Since somebody is clearly reading these, let's do another one.

Here's a complete list of all my jobs, not counting things like "I was paid $20 to move furniture" and the like. I got my first job after my sophomore year of high school and haven't been unemployed against my will for more than a week since.

1. The Dairy Bar, Thompson, North Dakota - Seeing as I had no car, and no prospect of getting one, my available options for employment in Thompson was pretty much being some kind of assistant youth league coach, mowing lawns, or working at Thompson's only fast food joint. I worked there starting the summer after my sophomore year of high school right until I left for college, nearly 2 1/2 years in total. I worked full time in the summers and 2 or 3 shifts per weekend, depending on what sports I was playing in that season. The Dairy Bar was once Lee's Dairy Bar, but Lee wanted to retire so she sold it to Scott & Amber, who were only 6 years older than me; they were seniors when I was in junior high. Scott's mom, Vicki, and sister, Traci, both worked there, as did my classmates Pat, Joe and Angela, plus a girl from the class after us, Krista. We had really good ice cream (hard, soft serve, malts and shakes), hence the name. The cheeseburgers were damn good (even if I did get so sick of them that I didn't eat another cheeseburger until I was almost out of college), the fryer food was standard fryer food. We also had pizza, the quality of which was largely dependent on who made it.
   
   In retrospect, I'm amazed that I didn't hate every second of it. I was always covered in grease and filthy when I got home, I made minimum wage for most of the two years (IIRC, my one raise coincided with a rise in the minimum wage) and since everybody knew everybody in Thompson it gave people I didn't like plenty of opportunity to come in and harass me. Oh well. It was a crappy fast food job.
   
   On a side note, the Dairy Bar went out of business some time after my freshman year of college. It's since been purchased and turned into more of a sit down restaurant, although I haven't been in there since.
2. I didn't have a job my first semester freshman year. My parents wanted me to adjust to college, so I got a bit of an allowance. I probably wouldn't have had time to work while playing football anyway. Second semester freshman year I was a data entry monkey at the Ireland Cancer Center in University Hospitals. I typed in study data, so it's possible that I single-handedly held back the progress of science. I devoutly hope that they've computerized their input system since then.
3. That summer I lived at home and worked for a temp agency. It was the summer after Grand Forks got flooded, so I spent most of it doing flood cleanup. For the most part that meant standing in a warehouse, sans air conditioning, spreading chemicals on documents to keep them from rotting. Joe and I carpooled together. It was dead tedious. They didn't want us to talk because it meant we weren't focusing. This is probably the only job I've had where I had scheduled breaks, and I was glad to have them. Standing up all day in a 95 degree warehouse is not fun.
   
   Once that job was done they sent me out to a site where they were still hauling boxes out of the muck. Mind you, they did this on no notice, and provided no protective gear (boots, gloves, breath masks, etc). I, and several others, quit on the spot. Fortunately, the summer was only a week shy of completion.
4. So when I left campus at the end of freshman year I had arranged for one of my fraternity brothers to take my data entry job with the understanding that I'd get it back in the fall. Naturally, I found out that he'd flaked out 2 weeks after I went home and had gotten fired, not that he'd bothered to tell me. They'd already filled it with someone who still wanted the job so I was out of luck.
   
   I quickly landed a Tech Support Help Desk at the Weatherhead School of Management. I was overqualified. I have all the standard Tech Support help desk stories, and I'd be just as happy never to recount them again.
5. After one semester in that hellhole, I had had enough. I took a big pay cut to be a delivery guy for Library Services. Every morning I showed up at the library and stuck a big box of printouts on a little cart. I then walked around campus and delivered them. I was on a first name basis with every receptionist at the university. This was actually an amazingly relaxing job. The pay was crap, but there was very little responsibility and everybody was happy to see me.***
6. I spent the summer after my sophomore year and the first semester of my junior year on co-op at Lexmark Printers. Ostensibly I was supposed to do programming for them. Now, I'm by no means an expert programmer (not now, and especially not then), but the project they gave me that was supposed to last the first 3 months? I was done in two weeks, and most of the second week was spent doing redundant tests. They gave me a new 'harder' project. Same thing happened. After about three months, they never gave me anything to do, and eventually I stopped asking. When I left did I get a positive review? Nope. I got a negative review for writing personal programs on company time for the last 4 months of the job because I had nothing else to do. Such is life. I was on the verge of changing majors after that, but I figured that not every programming job could be *that* bad. Thankfully, I was right about that.
   
   I got back from co-op. Due to a combination of full-time employment and nearly zero expenses (gas, gym, groceries - about $150/month), I had a lot of money banked. I didn't work that semester, which was good because I was president of my fraternity and had a lot going on.***
7. Starting with summer 1999, I worked two years for CWRUPhone with such luminary coworkers as vja2, dmw7 and trygve. It was full-time in the summers and as many hours as I wanted during the school year. Even by the princely standards of CWRU Student Employment I was raking it in. I've never had an office before or since, but for those two years we split an office in Crawford. And the best thing of all? We did essentially no work. I estimate that I averaged 2 hours of gainful employment per week.
   
   Most of that was tweaking the ridiculous perl scripts that ran the CWRUPhone directory. These scripts were 10,000+ lines of code. It's ok, they had comments. Of course, those comments were in Russian, or possibly Ukrainian. Fortunately, what was needed wasn't too complicated. We also did some imaging of computers and the like, but really for the most part we did nothing.
   
   Well, not quite nothing. 1999 was the year that webcomics really took off, and we read them all, whether they were syndicated, independent or just something some guy threw up in an afternoon. This was the summer when I read the entire Doonesbury archive (1971-1999) at a rate of one strip every five seconds. When comics got old, I did data entry and programmed the PHP back end for the Preacher fan site I used to run. Nobody cared; in fact one full-time employee said that as long as I was learning something they didn't care what we did. What a great gig.
8. Alas, all good things come to an end. I graduated, which meant no more student employment. I spent the summer after graduation as the cashier at The Boarding House Deli on campus. This is my only retail job ever. I was on a first name basis with every wino in the neighborhood. It wasn't a ton of fun, but it gave me plenty of time to relax.
9. I moved back home to get ready for OCS. This was the period of my life where I lost ~25 pounds in 3.5 months. I spent almost all of my waking hours working or working out. Most of the working was through the temp service again. I had short lived gigs as a filing clerk for a health insurance provider and as the night shift operator running the truck scale at the Simplot potato warehouse.
   
   The big gig, though, was as a call center worker for Amazon.com. Due to the fabulous North Dakota accent and the farmer work ethic there are a number of call centers in that part of the country; Amazon.com placed one there after partnering with a tool company from that area. I worked there for 12 weeks over the Christmas push, with three full weeks devoted to training. It was a cinch job. This was 2001, so internet retail was still somewhat new to most people, but like most CWRU students in this area at least I was way ahead of the curve. They stuck me on corporate accounts, which mostly meant that when law firms called to ask if we had 500 copies of "Item X" to deliver tomorrow I totaled up the numbers from the system and told them yes or no. No, this wasn't automated (not then anyway). The best was an embassy that wanted 1000 copies of a Louis Armstrong CD. When I wasn't doing that I answered email from customers who were upset about one thing or another. I got lots of questions about when the next Harry Potter book was due; actually, that may have been where I first heard about that series.
10. In January 2002 I entered Marine Corps OCS at Quantico, Virginia. I screwed up my knee on Valentine's Day and officially washed out at the conclusion of week 5 of 10.
11. Within 3 days of getting home I was temping again while I looked for a real job. I spent most of the next 2.5 months at the Cirrus factory in Grand Forks. The first week or so I was running a grinder, which was all sorts of not fun. Then they moved me over to the fiber glass molds for the remainder of the gig. This job numbed the mind. The scary thing was that a lot of my coworkers were talking about how great it was and how they hoped they retired from it one day. This, mind you was a job where the top salary was about $15.00/hour and where it was all physical labor, all the time. I'm spoiled.
12. I started my current gig as a programmer in May 2002. When I hit the 7 year mark, I'll have spent almost as much time working for Hyland as I did in all prior jobs combined. Scary thought. Even scarier: The Dairy Bar is still #2 on the list.

***It's killing me, but there's this gap in my memory. I *think* that I took the semester off after my co-op, but part of me thinks that I had the delivery gig that semester. But if I did the delivery gig, what was I doing second semester sophomore year? I know it wasn't tech support. Hurm.