Rusty's Blog

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

So, 13,000 words and 28 single-spaced at Times News Roman 12pt pages later, that’s every job I’ve had before my current job. Well, almost. There were a few that didn’t get their own posts:

Working for my mom’s office

Most everything there is to say about this experience I already wrote in my history of my time on the Internet post.

Internship with Kinetic Design

Same for this one.

Web developer for The Volunteer Channel, the University of Tennessee’s student television station

1) This wasn’t a “job” in the sense of getting paid, and 2) there isn’t a whole lot to say about it. I was in the communications school at UT, and The Volunteer Channel was looking for, um, volunteers to do things. I signed up, and it ended up they needed someone to make a website. So I did, and that’s about all there is to the story. The site you see there now is not the one I made, but the logo is the same as it was, and the content and basic structure of the site isn’t much different. They have some videos there, which they didn’t have when I was there.

News writer and columnist for The Daily Beacon, the University of Tennessee’s student newspaper

Like The Volunteer Channel, writing for The Daily Beacon wasn’t a paid job. Spring semester of my second senior year, I started out there and wrote two news stories which were not very good. Then I wrote a weekly column during my last summer in Knoxville and was on the “editorial board.”

We got to meet John Shumaker, who was president of the university at the time, after we wrote something critical of what he did. I don’t remember much from the meeting, but I remember thinking even then he must be a pretty insecure dude if he cares what a student newspaper says during the summer when no one is reading. Not long after I graduated, he was caught in a shitstorm with more charges than are worth recounting here and resigned.

Some of my columns were okay, some of them were awful. I made no effort to write about UT events, instead just choosing random national topics. I learned writing a column is hard, and you have to practice to get better at it. The first two or three I wrote, I sat around staring at my monitor for hours before I thought of a topic and got much of anything down.

My favorite column I wrote was about decriminalizing marijuana. A copy editor who also happened to be a stoner was very happy when it came across his desk and practically hugged me when I came in for an editorial board meeting.

If there are any jobs I forgot about, I’ll just tack them onto this post later rather than writing a whole new one.

Enough people have hopped on board the meme train since my last post that they’re going to get an unordered list instead of Oxford commas:

• Alyssa was a birthday party lackey-slash-clerk
• Emily was an information architect
• Sara was a clerk for an attorney at LAW
• Nikki temped for a mortgage office
• Thomas was a waiter at Pizza Hut, and was almost a corpse in the trunk of someone’s car

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

This was another job I mentioned in my Internet history post. I wrote:

I also worked briefly for an ill-fated concert promotion company along with Furious D. I designed a couple of web sites, got drunk with some sketchy people, and got into some free concerts. There were two things I actually learned that were useful to me though, both having to do with clients we tried to get but didn’t land.

The first was when the manager of a famous recording artist called us about an estimate for web site development. I was busy with school work and took too long to get back to them, and by then they weren’t interested. So lesson one was a very basic principle of customer service that was later reiterated during my stint at Best Buy: even if you can’t help someone right away, acknowledge them and tell them you’ll help them soon.

The second was when the president of the company (one of the aforementioned sketchy characters) was pitching web development services to a band, and then without warning gave the floor up to me. We had vague ideas about what we wanted to sell — web sites, promotional video packages, and probably some other web-related services to go along with traditional concert promotion. What we didn’t have were package deals and price lists set up. So I learned that just telling someone “we can do anything you want us to do” doesn’t fly. They were coming to me because they have no clue what they want, so it’s my job to tell them and to let them argue with me if they think I’m wrong.

About the president of the company: he was a stocky dude with a bald head and a devil tattoo on his arm the artist had drawn to look somewhat like him. A variation of the tatoo ended up being the company logo. His speech was peppered with colorful, offensive phrases, like when he would observe that something was “cooler than cancer.”

I never trusted him, which turned out to be good judgment on my part. The most I ever put myself out there for the company was to purchase a scanner we needed with my credit card, and I kept that at my apartment (and later just kept it period).

He had a partnership with a pub in Knoxville I’m forgetting the name of, and most of the concerts the company promoted were staged there. Among the acts booked were 2 Live Crew and Sir Mix a Lot. 2 Live Crew was late to their show because they were getting high at a frat house down the road.

The biggest booking was a weekend-long festival somewhere in the Tennessee mountains with 20 or 30 bands. It actually was a pretty impressive effort on paper. I don’t know much about how it turned out since I didn’t go, but there were some pictures, so it wasn’t a total bust.

My other brush with celebrity when working for this company was when we happened to see Jamal Lewis at the Knoxville Hooters. The president chatted him up a bit, and they apparently knew each other. Considering Jamal’s troubles not too long afterward, this isn’t surprising.

There were a lot of deals supposedly in the works for me to do some development work, but ultimately I only made the company’s website and a website for the aforementioned festival. The company went under when the president skipped town after robbing someone’s car. He was rumored to have been part of other robberies, though I never received confirmation about this.

Update 4:59 p.m. – Furious D writes in:

He (/we, whatever) didn’t actually do the booking for the 2 Live Crew/Sir Mix-a-Lot shows. He just knew enough people to get in for free and “take some of the load off the management” (read: stand around and pretend to have something to do with it).

Haha, had me fooled. That actually makes it funnier to me.

See also: new entries by Jen, Sara and Garrett. And also a new player Nikki!

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

In my “brief” history of my time on the Internet, I wrote about this job:

I got an actual job as webmaster of Rocky Top Books, an off-campus book store. The parent company Nebraska Books had store software, and someone was needed to do some basic skinning and to upload product photos.

The photos I took and uploaded were called out at a corporate meeting as examples of how to do them the right way, which secretly made me a little proud even though we all made a big show of talking about how much we hated the parent company. Little or none of the work I did is reflected on the current web site, but when I was in Knoxville last year I saw the delivery truck still has the decals I designed on it.

Anybody remember when “webmaster” was an actual job title?

When I first started school at Tennessee, there were two competing independent bookstores on Cumberland Avenue: Campus Bookstore and Rocky Top Books. And when I started my webmaster job at Rocky Top Books, it had recently been purchased by Nebraska Book Company, a corporation which owns about 270 college book stores now.

There was a crew of employees who had been working there since before it was purchased, and many of them weren’t happy with the change. Some of them thought the manager was sleazy. They called him The Snake behind his back.

Nebraska Book Company could have put anybody in that position and the employees would have hated him or her. He was definitely corporate and oblivious about some things, but he was an okay guy and was just trying to do a job. I liked most of them okay, but a lot of them seemed a petulant about the situation. It’s probably not a coincidence that the two people from there I still keep in touch with understood this.

More after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

I can’t remember now how I heard about this job working for a contractor that provided technical support for Bellsouth DSL lines. Maybe it was on online classified, maybe it was a job fair, don’t know. The important part was it paid $10 per hour, which was good money for a college student in Knoxville. The cost of living is very low there, so that’s like making $15 or $20 in a lot of places.

It was located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville. You probably are aware Oak Ridge is distinctive as having been part of the Manhattan Project and for being a leg on the original Internet. This inevitably led to a few uncomfortable jokes about our job making us sterile, but truthfully the McDonalds I ate for lunch a couple of times per week was more likely to do that.

Everyone had to go through a two-week (!) paid training before they could get on the phones with actual customers. It’s not that I think this was a bad idea, but the trainer was not very exciting to listen to. I think a one-week class would have been better, as the pace was really slow and there was a lot of repeated material.

The class was about half college-aged people and half people in their 30s and 40s for whom it was a real job. Not surprisingly, a few of us college-aged trainees got to be friendly and started making a bunch of smartass remarks. This attitude became contagious, and by the time the two weeks was over everyone was being kind of mean to the trainer (my bad if you’re reading this).

When we finally got on the phones, we all had to choose pseudonyms. Most people picked bland, forgettable names, which was the smart thing to do. One guy went with Justin Tyme. I picked Russell Crowe. Everyone thought that was hilarious at the time, but hearing “how’s Meg Ryan?” six or eight times per week turned out not to be so hilarious for me.

The process to answer 98 percent of the calls for level 1 tech support was heavily scripted and could be accomplished by pretty much anyone who could hear, read and speak. They were severe about making sure you stuck to their process. Even after a couple of months when I could do everything from memory, I still had to go through their questionnaires on screen so they could have a record that I looked at them as I went through the call.

Without warning, supervisors would listen in on calls and then summon me over to tell me what I did right or wrong. They were obsessed with keeping call times down, and I got scolded a few times about calls going long early on. However, it didn’t take long for us to figure out there was a quirk in the system: every time we hit the hold button, it reset the call time. After that, my call time was never an issue again because I could put someone on hold for a split second and they were never the wiser.

Whenever a call was over, you got a period of two minutes or so that was ostensibly to take notes about the call, but which was also a nice breather without having to speak with customers. It only took me 30 seconds or a minute to enter my notes after a call, so I usually got to have a minute to myself.

That minute is what I remember most vividly about the job. On busy days, the ringing phone was relentless, and my minute wouldn’t really be a break because I was full of dread knowing it would inevitably ring again. Most customers were okay, but the longer the waits got, the more likely it was they would be irate, which is precisely when you are out of the required patience to deal with them.

Like any other customer service job, another not fun part was explaining a policy to them that you secretly agreed with them was dumb. For example, at the time Bellsouth offered no support for people who plugged their modem into a router. To offer them support, we had to make them unplug the modem from the router and plug it into a single PC.

It also wasn’t fun having to apologize for products I knew were not very good. At that point Bellsouth had most of its DSL customers on Alcatel modems that only worked if you plugged them into the USB port on a PC and installed Bellsouth software on the computer. The software was buggy and caused a lot of problems.

The worst call I had there was a woman who barely spoke any English and was irate and refused to let me pass her call on to a native Spanish speaker. One of the rules was I couldn’t hang up on a customer unless they were cussing at me and they refused to stop after I asked them several times. I had to just wait for her to shout herself out.

It probably sounds like I’m mostly griping, and I am, but I liked the people I worked with. That made the job bearable. We had a lot of fun playing Unreal Tournament in the break room on the networked computers they had set up in there. And I’d stand around with them outside when they smoked on breaks and we’d snark about customers.

I worked there for about six or eight months before I found another job closer to campus.

See also: Sara’s fourth installment in her Jobs I’ve Had series.

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

I worked off-and-on in the University of Tennessee computer lab for two or three years. It probably was the least eventful of all my jobs. I sat at a desk, checked people’s IDs to make sure they were students or faculty, and gave them a plastic marker denoting which computer they should use. Sometimes I reloaded the paper in the printer or fixed a paper jam. If it was crowded, I called names off a waiting list.

I’ll just post a few random memories from working there:

• I was frustrated with a new policy prohibiting us from installing programs on the computers. I found out they hadn’t locked the computers down tight enough, only prohibiting access to C:\Program Files and installed AOL Instant Messenger to a folder outside there with a really long passive aggressive name like C:\youcantrytostopusfrominstallingAIMbutweregoingtodoitanyway. They found out it was me somehow and I got a nice talking to about that.
• I went on a few dates with a girl with two first names who worked in there. She was very forward and I was startled by that and didn’t really know how to react. All it really amounted to was me spending a lot of money on alcohol, some crying, and a slap on the ass.
• Speaking of my relationship prowess, against my better judgment I asked a girl who was a frequent user in the main library out. Surprisingly, she didn’t exactly say no. She told me I should meet her at a particular coffee shop she spends a lot of time in. I drove by there one night, saw a bunch of hippies sitting there, and decided not to go in.
• The main lab in the UT library had both PCs and Macs. There was always a wait for the PCs, and usually several Macs open. The vast majority of people in those labs were writing/printing papers or dicking around with their email. I always used the Macs even before I was converted to the dark side because it was just more practical.
• The main UT library also had some mean-looking Sun Solaris workstations. Sometimes I’d check out one of those to read email between classes just because they were cool.
• Working in the labs over the summer is about the biggest slacker job in the world. I frequently would work a four-hour shift and not see a single person the entire time, especially on late shifts.
• I played a lot of Dope Wars and this home run derby game ESPN had on their site at the time.

Scintillating, I know.

Maybe you’d be better off reading Sara’s latest entry in her series with the same name.

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

Now we’re moving on to jobs I had during college. My timeline is hazy for college jobs, so I’m going with approximately chronological, but will skip around a little since some things will be better off grouped into a single post like I did with my two car dealership porter jobs.

Either the first or second summer I was home from college, I took on a job as a stocker at Pep Boys, my third car-related job.

The work itself was pretty miserable.

I had to arrive at six in the morning, which meant waking up around 5:15 every weekday. Around 6:15 two or three times per week, The Truck would arrive. The Truck contained at least four or five palettes with loads of key chains, air filters, chemicals, shammys, steering wheel covers, screws, nuts, bolts, license plates made to look like spray-painted t-shirts in Panama City, Edelbrock intakes, fake carbon fiber interior accents, Yosemite Sam tire flaps, and all the other crap you can buy at a Pep Boys. All of it boxed and saran-wrapped together to stand about five feet tall per palette.

Unloading the palettes from The Truck wasn’t the bad part though, as we had lifts to, well, lift them for us.

The worst part was the tires, anywhere from 60 to 100 of them per load, most of them weighing at least 20 pounds, with truck tires being much heavier. It was a three-man job to get them unloaded in any reasonable amount of time:

• Man 1 (usually the driver) stood in the truck trailer, and carried or rolled a tire from inside the trailer, handing or rolling it to…
• Man 2 (usually me) who stood on a platform, took the tire from Man 1, and rolled it to…
• Man 3 (usually an older guy who worked the same shift I did) who stood just inside the door and stacked the tires after I rolled them to him.

I was never Man 1, but I was Man 3 sometimes. There was a technique to rolling the tires. You had to bounce them off the asphalt with enough speed to get to Man 3, but not so fast that if he was behind on stacking the tires that you’d injure him with a rolling tire or send an errant tire flying into the store.

Once the truck was unloaded, which was usually by 7 or so, we spent the next hour working furiously to stock as much of the merchandise on the shelves as possible for the next hour until the store opened at 8. I would usually be stocking merchandise for most of the day until my shift ended at 3:30.

My uniform was black pants I bought on my own and a t-shirt with the Pep Boys logo on it that they gave me. A couple of times I noticed after work that battery acid had burned holes in my shirt from when I’d been stocking batteries. It was bad enough once that I had to ask them for a new one.

My manager was a huge guy, maybe 6′ 5″, bowlegged with a square head and a buzz cut. What little hair he had was red, and he said people called him The Rooster. He made up a nickname for me that I can’t remember now.

That job would have been so much worse if he had turned out to be a jerk, but fortunately he was one of the better managers I’d ever been around. He always kept a positive attitude, but more importantly, he was always helping us stock stuff when he didn’t have something else to attend to. It means a lot in a job like that for the manager to demonstrate he’s not asking you to do something that he’s not willing to do himself.

I also got to go on the occasional parts run, since Pep Boys does do some repairs. One time I went on a run to a dealership more than an hour outside Atlanta and got lost on my way home, and didn’t end up back at the store until almost closing time.

There was also a cute cashier who was a UGA student who was home for the summer. She flirted with me a little, and I’m sure I awkwardly flirted back. She had a boyfriend, so it wasn’t likely to go anywhere.

When I didn’t have anything in particular to do, I would go in the store room behind the wall of cleaners and rearrange the extra cleaners. This was nice because I didn’t have to talk to customers. Although it turned out that despite me being a blunt and antisocial person generally, I was pretty good with customers when I dialed up the Southern a little.

At the end of the summer when it was time for me to go back to school, The Rooster asked me if I wanted him to keep me in the system so I could work there over Christmas break.

I told him sure, but I knew I wasn’t coming back.

If you’ve been digging this series, you’ll be happy to know Thomas has joined the party. Sara has also written a couple of more posts in her series since my last post: Part II and Part III