And Shove It

Courtesy of Makkie, one of the few memes I'm interested in at this point: List all the jobs you've had in your whole life.

1) Ages 13-16: Babysitter. This was cake, except for the one or two times I had to enforce a rule and deal with crying kids. I should have charged more than five bucks an hour.

2) Age 13: Leaflet distributor. For my dad. I think I made a hundred bucks or so for a few hours of work, but it was really hard. Had I to do it over again, I'd have saved the money instead of buying Fleetwood Mac's boxed set.

3) Age 16: Intern. A cushy job at a weird science nonprofit with a surprisingly large staff (it was the nineties, after all); my duties mostly involved watching and transcribing videos of news reports and entering the data into the computer. I was ruined by the fact that I had to pass Sam Goody on the way to the train every night.

4) Ages 18-21: Copy center assistant. I learned more about copy machines than I had ever expected to in a lifetime. I'm still surprised when I realize that it was some of the most valuable work experience I've ever had.

5) Ages 19-20: Intern. This one was at a tiny little publishing company, and was probably the most fun of all. I got to open the mail, reject the worst manuscripts myself, do the filing and general office organization, order supplies, and so forth...basically what I did last year, except without a Masters degree.

6) Age 21: Special events assistant. I was the aide for various special programs conducted over the summer at Vassar--sometimes the personal assistant to a program coordinator, sometimes a desk attendant at the gym, sometimes just a gofer. It paid the rent.

7) Ages 22-24: Teaching assistant. For four semesters I carried papers, proctored exams and answered simple questions. For two semesters I taught whole classes by myself. I wasn't very good at either, and kind of wanted out before long.

8) Age 24: Quality assurance analyst. In my third year, all of my friends in the department got jobs at a software company, and I followed suit (though they'd cherry-picked the best jobs before I arrived). My job was to compare actual outputs to target outputs and log the discrepancies--simple but paradoxically confusing.

9) Ages 25-26: Doorman. Read the archives to see what I thought about doing this. It boils down to constant boredom and humiliation, not least because I was never deemed worthy of doing it full-time.

10) Age 27: Facilities coordinator. I didn't talk much about this at the time and probably shouldn't start now. It wasn't for me...but I'm still sorry it had to end in such an unappealing way.

I left out one-day gigs--a few times I was hired by my parents to paint, two days of temping two years ago, and one unfortunate day when I got suckered into a door-to-door sales racket. But this is basically it. And I haven't the slightest idea what coherent pattern is formed here.