The great thing about crap jobs

It’s just after 5pm on a Friday. I’m sat at my desk with a bottle of beer (Truman’s 1883 Export Pale Ale to be exact). What follows is the first in what I hope will become a series of reflections about life working on a startup.

Working on a startup like DeskBeers throws you into some weird situations. When this happens, it’s often the skills you learn as a teenager that you fall back on. Crap jobs are one of the great things about being a kid. You don’t know what to do, and even if you did you wouldn’t be qualified to do it. So you take a string of crap jobs. And you learn.

Here are some of the crap jobs I’ve had in the past, and why, with hindsight, they were great:

Kitchen staff at McDonalds

McDonalds is one of the biggest distribution systems in the world. It’s so complex it’s insane. Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, getting to see that machine operate up close has informed a lot of my thinking about how DeskBeers might evolve, specifically how we might go about allowing you to opt out of certain styles of beer or beers with certain characteristics (i.e. really strong beers). It’s basically the same as a quarter pounder with no pickles, right?

The way McDonalds reduces everything down to a formula is impressive. Regardless of your opinion of the product, the design of those systems leaves nothing to chance. The worst I remember happening was running out of diced onions. The solution? Grab a knife, start chopping onions. Everything is measured, nothing is unknown. I think the devops movement, particularly the “monitor everything” movement, could learn a lot from a few shifts at McD’s.

Sales assistant at GAME

I’ve never been a “gamer”. I don’t say that to distance myself from recent controversy, but because the only reason I got the job at all was, even though the closest I got to playing regularly was Gran Tourismo on my brother’s PS1, I used to be able to talk a good game (pun intended). I’ll always harbour an ambition to play Time Crisis on a life-size screen, but beyond that my interest in computer games fades rapidly.

What working at GAME did teach me about was sales. I joined as a Christmas temp and earned enough money to buy a Fender Telecaster (Mexican) over the holidays, but to do so I had to sell. Not that we were on commission, but rather the best temps got more shifts.

I learned about asking open-ended questions to establish what the customer wants, and asking closed questions to start closing the sale. I learned to “Sell What’s Available Now”. I learned to read when people wanted something and when they were just killing time. I sold lot of computer games and systems that year, all without particularly giving a damn about the product.

Oddly I think it was easier to not give a damn. With DeskBeers I feel more than ever that I want people to enjoy our product as much as I do. It really hurts when people say they are ambivalent to our beer choices! But at the end of the day the skills I learned selling computer games come into play every day. And not just in selling beer — selling myself and DeskBeers to partners (e.g. courier companies and breweries) and selling my ideas to the team are just as, if not more, important.

Barman at a local pub

At university I managed to land possibly the easiest job imaginable. I worked at the pub two doors down from my house. I worked three hours in the early evening every Monday to Friday. I had plenty of time to go to school, and just about enough cash to eat, pay the rent and go out at the weekends (well, the student loan helped too).

Working a bar is the purest form of customer service. The customer is always right. The customer may not be able to stand up, talk or remember where they live, but they are correct (and somehow there is a taxi waiting for you out front and no I didn’t call it perhaps you did when you popped out for a smoke behind the fruit machine yes we all saw you).

Pubs like the one I worked in have locals. You get to know them, their stories and, perhaps most importantly, their drinks. There is nothing better than walking in to the local and ordering a drink with the slightest nod of the head. It’s difficult to do via the web, but this is the level of customer service I aspire to. Getting to know who your customers are, what they expect from you and fulfilling that expectation without anyone having to say a word. That’s what it’s about.

So that’s it. Since leaving university I’ve held several great jobs at Mint. I’ve been a copywriter, a tester and a developer. Somehow I never made it on to the design team. I learned a lot doing those jobs, too. But I think it’s worth reflecting on the crap jobs once in a while, and remembering why they are important.

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