For the record: I've never been fired from a job. Laid off, yes. Fired, no. I'm proud of that.
Here they are in loose chronological order.
Jobs:
Steak restaurant salad buffet worker, waitress
Flower shop cashier
Fast food restaurant biscuit maker, drive-thru, front line
Maintenance and custodial crew member at a summer family camp
University campus cafeteria burger/grilled sandwich station
Government-paid caregiver for a four-year-old autistic boy
Gas station/convenience store cashier
Summer day camp counselor for underprivileged kids
Archeometry lab assistant
Easter bunny at the mall
Sears appliance repair call center (inbound calls)
Fingerhut sales call center (outbound calls)
Barnes & Noble bookstore associate
Home daycare provider
Office janitor
Medicare insurance sales
Content writer--independent contractor
MWI senior content writer
Manuscript/general editor (current)
School bus driver (current)
Gigs:
Cellist in the Low album Songs for a Dead Pilot
Runway model for wedding vendors showcase
(I'm not counting my numerous forays into MLMs as jobs. Those were just costly mistakes.)
As I made this list, my brain pulled up memories I haven't thought of for years. I could see the places I used to work in and feel the feelings I had then.
Most boring job: archeometry lab assistant. Oh. My. Gosh. I spent hours preparing soil samples for analysis, swirling blobs of dirt around in a solution to separate the pollen and grass seeds from the soil. It was mind-numbing. I also managed to accidentally break every large beaker the lab owned. All it took was one little tic against the side of the prep sink, and it shattered. The smaller beakers appear to have been stronger, as I didn't break any of them. I'm just lucky they didn't deduct the cost of the broken beakers from my paychecks or I would probably have owed the lab rather than making any money.
The job that cost me the most money: Medicare insurance sales. I am not a salesman, for one thing. I hate selling things to people. I cannot sell someone something if I know I'm going to put them into a worse position than they were before, and when it comes to Medicare insurance, I found this was often an issue. Also, I was dealing with older people who might or might not have dementia or Alzheimer's and who could appear to be totally mentally competent during our visit but weren't, yet it was tricky to not insult fully competent seniors by suggesting they have a trusted family member present at our meeting. When that Medicare Part A and B season was over, I ended up owing the company money because they overcompensated me. I also had to pay for my own fuel and car, and I was making house visits all over The Big City. I think that after all was said and done, I only actually earned a few hundred dollars for all my time and effort.
The job I thought would kill me: shopping mall Easter bunny. There were some fun aspects to this job, but the bunny suit was stifling. I wore as little clothing underneath as I could get away with (tank top and shorts), and the photographer had a fan blowing on me at all times, but I quietly cooked in that suit as I sat on a bench and had people of all ages sit on my lap and have their pictures taken, some of those people screaming and squirming in more terror than others. The bunny head was also very heavy. It was suspended on a rig that balanced on my head like a hat, and by the end of my shift, I thought my neck would break and my head would explode from the pressure.
Also, people didn't know who I was under that suit. Most assumed I was a man. One time, my across-the-street neighbor came in with his girlfriend (we were all about twenty years old at the time), and they plopped themselves down on my lap, and I was sure both my femurs would snap. That neighbor still doesn't know I was the person in the bunny suit because at that age we led very different lives and never really interacted. I had had such a crush on him when I was a kid and we all played together. I wonder if he still has that picture? I sometimes think about all the people who still have an aging and yellowing photo of them or their children sitting on my lap, and it was me in there, happy that I could help make someone's day memorable but silently dying inside that suit.
The job I had to quit on principle: Fingerhut call center. I don't know if Fingerhut products are any better today, but back when I worked in the call center, about twenty-five years ago, most of their stuff was absolute crap. The only reason I knew this was because they had a little store that only call center employees could shop in, and it was stuff that customers had returned. I was astonished when I handled the items and saw how cheaply they were made, because the catalogue photos made them look so nice (yes, back in the days before internet). I did buy a few things from there, but it was rare, and they were things that were actually good. I still have a cookbook I bought there.
Anyway, for some reason, I did well enough in sales that I was promoted onto the Add-Ons team, and on that team, I would call an existing customer and offer them something that went along with an item they had already purchased. For instance, if someone had purchased a leather jacket, I would offer leather protector, and we'd add that cost onto their monthly bill. It would never be more than a few extra dollars per month.
My biggest issue--besides the very low quality of most of the products--was the interest rate people were paying on a monthly basis: around twenty-five percent! We had to read them a verbal receipt, and I would emphasize the twenty-five percent interest rate and pause just a bit so see if they would see sense and cancel the transaction, but no one ever did. And then my manager would come over (she of the short, dyed hair and talon-like false nails with painted dragons) and say, "No, that's not how you do it!" and proceed to show me how quickly we were supposed to rattle off the verbal receipt. Between that level of shysterness and how many people absolutely hated me for cold-calling them (and how much I hated myself for doing it), I had to quit after about four months.
The job where I dated my coworker: university campus cafeteria. I worked in the burger/grilled sandwich station at my university. It's all different now because they've put in a bunch of fast food franchises, but back then we had different stations: burgers/grilled sandwiches, ice cream, Navajo tacos, salad bar, cold sandwich bar, and doughuts. I had worked as a sub in all stations for a while before being offered that job, and then I worked 3-10pm on Mondays and Wednesdays, and 3-11pm on Fridays. Those were some long days, and I didn't move from my station. I worked with only one other person at my station on all three days--a guy named Scott--so though I knew my other coworkers to varying degrees (I did go on dates with a couple of them), I got to know Scott really well.
I was lucky. Scott was absolutely fantastic. He was intelligent, funny, hard-working, and cute. He was also a returned missionary and had maintained a good spiritual life.
Our work hours plus school hours plus study hours meant that neither of us had much of a social life that semester, so we became each others' social lives. I was usually out front taking orders, but we would switch places so I could cook and he could take orders when we got really bored. During the whole shift, we talked and laughed. The night he accidentally emptied the grease out of the fry vat onto the floor because he forgot to put the catch-bin underneath it turned into a skating party while we stayed a couple hours late to clean it up. If I was working with someone I disliked, that night would have been miserable.
My roommate had somehow roped me into being on a dance committee for the big girl-ask-guy dance, but then she ended up quitting the committee after I was already committed to heading up one of the off-campus dances (I'm not sure how that happened. I could not possibly have volunteered for that on my own!), which left me both in a position of having to organize and set up the whole thing alone and also having to attend and be in charge during the dance. Scott didn't have a date to any of the dances, and I liked him a lot, so I asked him to go with me and help me out, which he consented to do. He was a trooper about having to hang around while I made sure the dance was going well. I still have the picture from that night. To make it up to him, I took him to a different dance the next night--one I wasn't in charge of. (Embarrassing story: I didn't have any formal dresses. The pink dress I'm wearing in the picture was borrowed from a girl in my dorm. I did have a little black dress, but the hem was too high for BYU standards, and they almost didn't let me into the dance the second night. I pulled the hem down and begged them to let me in, and they relented, but it was still embarrassing.)
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| Me and Scott overseeing the dance at the Springville Art Museum, Fall 1991. I was either 19 or 20, and Scott was 21. |
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| The next night in my too-short little black dress. Scott was a trooper. |
We became kind of an item after that. Scott was always cautious and careful in his decisions, and I was a lot more impetuous. It was hard for me to read him to see if he really liked me, what with my tendency to overthink things, but we had a good time hanging out. Over time, I decided that I wasn't the right girl for him; that I was, perhaps, too flighty for his carefully considered life. It wasn't anything he ever said or did that made me feel that way, just my intuition. So while I really liked him, I didn't allow myself to quite fall in love with him.
About halfway through the semester, I decided I was quitting school at the end of the semester in order to go home and work so I could go on a mission. That decision also hung over us and prevented anything really serious in our relationship. Also, I was a foolish girl then, and I was sort of dating another coworker at the same time. That kept things from getting serious with either of them, although each of them knew about the other, and they got along with each other. Not ideal. Very stupid. But I was more stupider back then.
I left school after the fall semester, so it was December when school ended. The night before I drove out of town, Scott called me and asked if I would come over to his apartment so he could kiss me good-bye. It was just so cute. I went over to his place, and his roommates all said good-bye to me and then disappeared. Scott kissed me good-bye under the mistletoe they'd hung in a doorway.
That wasn't the last time I saw him. A year later, I flew back to Provo before entering the Missionary Training Center, but I had no one to pick me up from the airport and get me to where I was staying with a friend overnight. I had been writing to Scott during that year, and he agreed to pick me up and drop me where I needed to go because he had a car. It was really nice to see him again, and he quickly took me to his apartment to feed me because I hadn't eaten anything in hours and hours. It was slightly awkward because I had been set apart as a missionary, so I wasn't, technically, supposed to be alone with a guy, but there really wasn't any other option. He was a pure gentleman, and we had a nice, non-touchy reunion.
Later, when I was on my mission and had met the man who would be my husband, I wrote to Scott and told him. He sent a sweet, kind letter back. In his understated way, he said that he'd kind of been hoping we could date when I got back because he really liked me, but he was glad I was happy and wished me well.
A couple years ago, Scott sent me a friend request on Facebook. I hadn't talked to him since that last letter, when I was twenty-two. He's happily married and has several sons, and it was nice to see how things turned out for him. What a good guy. And it all started because I got a job at the burger/grilled sandwich station. Not regretting that decision.
Whew! That's enough reminiscing for the day. I still have another bus run to do, and tonight is a work dinner that Husband is so excited to attend with me. (Sarcasm. That's total sarcasm. Husband is only going to be nice to me, but I appreciate his sacrifice.)
