Tag Archives: jobs i’ve had

Jobs I’ve had: computer lab rat

1 Reply

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.

Jobs I’ve had: stocker at an automotive parts store

Leave a reply

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

Jobs I’ve had: worker in a widget factory

Leave a reply

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 is the last of my high school jobs, unless I’ve killed the brains cells responsible for storing the memories of another one. Which is possible. Last one I’m writing about, that is, not the last one chronologically. I can’t remember where in the timeline it falls exactly.

A guy I’d known since the fifth grade worked in a factory that actually made widgets, or items that most closely resemble what I always imagined widgets would look like: little back-scratchers with wood balls that you’d buy at a mall and other similar trinkets. His uncle (or maybe cousin) ran the place, so he was able to get me and a buddy of mine a job.

I started out working Saturdays doing assembly, which consisted of taking metal dowels that had already been cut, bent, welded together, and painted and gluing and hammering the wood balls with holes drilled in them on the end of the dowels. It was somewhat of a family business. The father of the guy I’d known since fifth grade would come in to help on some Saturdays, walking around puffing his pipe, the smoke wafting in the air.

The uncle/cousin who owned the place was a strange dude who wore glasses and spoke with a lisp that made him sound sort of like Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy. Several of us would make fun of him when he wasn’t around. I guess that was mean, but he had a way of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time that made him seem unappreciative of people’s work. He also spent a lot of time telling us things we already knew.

Despite not getting along with him, my buddy and I were two of the most efficient workers in the place, especially after we started working weeknight shifts. We not only did assembly, but got to work with some serious industrial tools in pre-assembly as well. I remember being warned about how quickly I’d lose a finger if I got lackadaisical around the machine that bent metal dowels.

I also remember carrying in deliveries of those dowels in at night from the loading dock, which was quite a workout.

My least favorite part of the work was preparing the dowels to be sawed, because it involved working closely with the boss. We had to wrap bunches of them tightly with duct tape. It was tedious and he always complained about how we did it.

Only three or four months passed before mine and the boss’ personalities collided one too many times, and I was fired from a job for the first time in my life.

“It’s not your work, it’s your attitude mee-an,” he said in his lispy Cable Guy voice.

My attitude was probably as much to blame as him being an idiot was, as I didn’t (and still don’t) suffer fools well. Passive aggression was once again my method of protest when I had to deal with an unpleasant person. We would stuff big wads of Red Man Golden Blend in our cheeks and spit in cups because we knew he thought this was disgusting. Like at the car dealership, he’d tell me not to, I’d stop for a little while, and then start again.

I may or may not have turned it into a “you can’t fire me because I quit” scene at the end. I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter.

If you have been finding these posts interesting, be sure to also check out similar posts from Sara and Garrett.

Jobs I’ve had: guy who hands out pamphlets to joggers

4 Replies

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.

Much as the timeline has become hazy for some of the jobs I had in college, the timeline is also hazy for my jobs in high school. In the last post I wrote about having jobs at car dealerships over the summer after junior and senior year, and I believe that to be right. However, there were a couple of jobs I had at various points before and after those other jobs, and the exact timeline is lost to the ether. This is one of them.

I had responded to a classified ad from someone who said they had part-time work to offer. That someone turned out to be a chiropractor. What he wanted was someone to hand out pamphlets advertising his services to joggers in a park. You know, since they might throw out their back jogging. The idea sounded as bad to me then as it probably sounds to you now, but I needed to make some money, so I figured I’d try it.

My first day, he took the business van over to the park and I drove my SUV. He handed me a box of pamphlets, and told me a line I should say to people as I tried to hand them out. Almost as soon as I got there, I noticed two attractive girls from my high school class were also jogging there and started to feel embarrassed.

I put in my best effort to walk around the trail for about an hour, handing out pamphlets to people, and was summarily rejected by every one of them. He was jogging in the park while I worked, so I spent the next half hour trying to find him.

When I did, I handed the rest of the fliers back to him and told him this line of work wasn’t for me. He asked how I wanted to be paid, since we hadn’t worked that detail out yet. I told him not to worry about it and left.

Jobs I’ve had: porter at a car dealership

3 Replies

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.

For the first month or two of the summer after my junior year of high school, I was able to mostly just drift aimlessly. I was no longer trying to play anything resembling serious baseball, but somehow had managed to go without getting a job.

My friends and I would try to find activities that didn’t cost us much money, which involved a lot of mostly driving around since the one thing we could pay for was gas. In my case, I still had the gas card given to me the summer before when there was a legitimate reason to give me one.

I was able to go on that way until I got into some trouble late in the summer, which seemed inevitable in retrospect. Suburban teenagers with cars and free gas and not much else to do is a recipe for something to go terribly wrong. Sure enough it did, and I ended up owing my parents a good chunk of money. That’s a subject for another time. My point in mentioning it is it was time to get another job.

More after the jump…

Continue reading →

Jobs I’ve had: amusement park ride attendant

19 Replies

I’ve been in a reflective/nostalgic mood lately, so I’ve come up with an idea to write a series of posts about jobs I’ve had. Hopefully I will follow through on this and actually write about most of them instead of calling one post a series.

Some of these posts may be interesting to you, and some of them may not. I’m going to write them mostly chronologically, starting near the beginning with my job as a ride attendant at American Adventures when I was 16, the summer after my sophomore year of high school.

Technically I guess that wasn’t my first job as I did get paid to help stuff envelopes for my mom’s office before that (I’m sure there’s a joke about child labor in there somewhere). But I’m skipping that for now since a blog post about stuffing envelopes would be almost as tedious as stuffing envelopes was.

Read more after the jump…

Continue reading →