A Brief Annotated Work History

#FirstSevenJobs

I am a corporate drone. But this was not always the case. There was a time when I engaged in actual productive work. Thus, I present, an annotated work history:

#1: Babysitter
My piano teacher, the neighbors, maybe some others I’m forgetting. I played with kids, got free food, and generally made about $20 a night. I’m told rates have increased significantly in the past 15 years. Age 12(ish)–17(ish)

#2: Fireworks Salesman
Saleswoman? Saleschild? The first formal job [Read: with a time clock and taxes and shifts and managers] I ever held, selling fireworks about a mile from my house. I learned how to punch a time clock, pretended to check IDs but didn’t really know what I was supposed to be looking for, and was trusted to sell explosives to people who probably should not have been trusted with them. Age 15.

#3: Organic Farmer
Spent summer afternoons walking around fields of vegetables, laying down drip irrigation, and unintentionally fooling the 20-something hippies I worked with into thinking I was 19 rather than 16 and thus inappropriately hitting on me and offering me joints on the back of the four wheeler. I learned to drive a stick shift on a massive pink flat bed truck named Matilda. I lost this job when high school interfered with the harvest.

#4: Gift Shop Clerk
Partially concurrent with #3. On a good day, I might have sold enough product to cover my (under the table) wages. For some reason I was trusted with keys and cash alone in a store with lots of candy and fun things to play with when I was 16. Spent a lot of time reading and eating licorice.

#5: Church Secretary
Concurrent with #3, #4, and #6. For something like $100 a month, I typed up the church bulletins once a week, changed out vestments as necessary, and mailed out the monthly newsletter. Another under-the-table job, usually portioned out to some trustworthy high school kid whose parents were church members in good standing. Once again I was trusted with keys and autonomy. Apparently I gave the impression of being a very reliable 16 year old.

#6: Pizza Cook
Probably the most useful position to this point for developing life skills. I learned to throw a pizza and use a knife. My vegetable chopping abilities continue to astound. Eventually I was transferred from part-time evening pizza cook to prep work during the lunch shift, where I hung out with a couple of eccentric 30-somethings who took it upon themselves to educate me on bad 80s movies.

#7: Skeet Shooting Judge
Over a long weekend, I watched middle aged men aim shotguns at clay pigeons and counted how many they hit. Apparently my ability to count accurately was rather extraordinary (in relative terms), and I was commissioned to judge the finals.

[Sidebar: I don’t see a reason to stop at seven, although from my understanding the intention is to show some career progression and started-from-nothingness gumption. I just found it entertaining, so I kept going until it got boring.]

#8: Hotel Housekeeper
At a budget truck stop hotel, filler the summer between high school and college. About a month into my three month stint I told the manager I was going to need two weeks off to go to Europe with my best friends, which I think put them off me for the remainder of my time there, since they gradually stopped scheduling me for shifts. A couple years ago my brother and I made the beds at my grandmother’s house, and it was 100% apparent which of us had worked in a hotel, so apparently I’ve retained some of these skills.

#9: First (Unpaid) Undergraduate Research
I went to college and suddenly my jobs became more about using my brain than brute force. I got credit (not money) “working” on a project for a civil engineering professor I never met under the supervision of a grad student I couldn’t understand, the scope of which is still unclear to me. As I recall, the job involved taking pictures of building and mapping the footprint from multiple angles by matching the corners in some specialized software. For the majority of the semester I did absolutely nothing, until in the final two weeks I suddenly realized I needed to produce a 20-page paper before the end of the semester, at which point I spent a lot of time looking at poorly composed pictures of a building on campus and writing a bunch of nonsense, peppered with plenty of images to extend the length. The professor requested that I repeat the endeavor a second semester, as this apparently put me in the upper echelon of his students. I declined.

#10: Second (Unpaid) Undergraduate Researcher
May arrived and I wanted an excuse to stay in my college town instead of returning to my parents’ house 1000 miles away, so I emailed a professor who had previously asked if I would be interested in a research position. He dumped me with a couple of grad students with very little direction. Did I learn much? Not particularly. Did it look professional on my resume, fill the gaps between my summer drinking binges, and provide the desired rationale for not moving back in with my parents? Very much so.

#11: Third (Slightly Paid) Undergraduate Researcher
After two semesters abroad, I finagled my way into a research position through a program intended to facilitate cross-cultural understanding or some such nonsense. I don’t recall ever meeting the supervising professor, the grad student asked me to design something physically impossible, and I’m still not sure what I was supposed to accomplish or contribute, but it came with hosuing, a stipend, and another 10 weeks in Germany.

#12: First (Paid) Summer Internship
They offered me $13.50/hr, the most I had ever made, so I spent 12 weeks of my summer in Florida living in someone’s spare bedroom. I did very little, because they should have hired a chemical engineer. Fortunately, all that free time gave me plenty of opportunity to prep for #13.

#13: Fourth (Unpaid) Undergraduate Researcher
Far and away the coolest “job” so far. (I use quotation marks because this was again unpaid, and really more of a college class with some extra trappings that gave it the feeling of an unpaid internship or research position. It’s included in this list mostly because it’s cool and still on my resume and led directly into #14 and indirectly into #15, #16, and #17.) I followed doctors around the Ob/Gyn ward of a Ghanaian hospital and watched babies being born. Then we engineered and designed things.

#14: Startup Founder
A bunch of 22 year olds decided that we should try to sell the things we had designed (see #13). Fortunately, there were people willing to give us just enough money and advice to make this seem feasible, but not enough to allow us to live like adults rather than college students. I spent a lot of time trying to convince people to give me more money and learning to live on nothing, thus necessitating #15, #16, and #17.

#15: Test Prep Tutor
Working for this (well known) company required me to swallow some Kool-Aid I found I couldn’t stomach. I didn’t make it through the training program. My paycheck arrived and I found that instead of the promised $17/hr, I had received $8/hr, apparently because the fine print stipulated that the higher rate only applied after completing the training. I’m still holding a grudge.

#16: Independent Tutor
After failing at #15, I did basically the same job without the corporate structure. I taught high school kids how to do math, trained one girl for her GMAT, and generally imparted wisdom onto impressionable children. Only one of my clients lasted more than a couple months, and she spent most of our time together freaking out about how she was probably going to fail her ACTs and then her life would be ruined. (Spoiler alert: she didn’t, it wasn’t).

#17: Warehouse Puller
My best friend ran the warehouse and set me up with a part time job so I could support my other job (see #13). I made $10/hr filling orders, packaging boxes, and taking photos for the website, and worked just enough to cover my rent.

#18: First Real Engineering Job
With (some) benefits and a regular salary. At a startup, where they liked my previous startup experience and apparent gumption. I was given far more responsibility than is probably advisable for the average 23-year-old and endured some minor sexual harassment. I quit after two years without a raise or title change despite ever-increasing responsibilities.

#19: Consulting for First Real Engineering Job
I quit (see above) to move across the country, and suddenly my previous employer found that they couldn’t function without me. I started working in my pajamas from home and making 2x what I had when I was a salaried employee. Unfortunately this only lasted about 6 months.

End. [Things get boring and corporate after this.]