All The Jobs I Have Ever Had: The Boring Version

Okay, so I didn’t actually get a question in email format, but I really want to run this banner/picture again so I’m going to pretend.

The ever-inquisitive Kate recently asked me to follow up my long-winded history of my life in church with a similar post documenting my working life. Fortunately, for both you, my readers (now numbering in the upper ones!), and me, this post will not be nearly as long. I think.

The very first job I ever had outside of the home for which I was paid real money was a paper route. I delivered the Yakima Herald-Republic up and down 10th Avenue, between Tieton Dr. (yes, the same Tieton Drive upon which Tieton Drive Bible Chapel is located, only 33 blocks east) and Nob Hill Blvd. It was a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill paper route. I started the summer before 8th grade because I wanted money to buy a guitar. I finally gave it up three years later when my Junior year schedule had me taking Physics at 7 AM. Ugh. (here’s a funny aside about 0 period Physics. It was in that class in particular that I started to get a crush on this girl named Maggie. Finally, at the end of the year, she actually talked to me. She said “Hey, you cut your hair!” and I had. My response was “Well, I didn’t cut it, but I had someone cut it.” D’oh!! That has to be the all-time stupidest response in the history of the world. I can’t believe she was even willing to talk to me ever again, let alone go out with and eventually marry me.) So anyway, the paper route was not very interesting. I hated collecting my money from my customers. I once got bit by a poodle. And by the end of three years I could land a rolled-up paper right smack in the middle of everyone’s porch (without hitting the screen door mind you) from 20 yards.

Concurrent with my paper route starting the summer after my freshman year of high school, I worked at Franklin swimming pool in what can only be referred to as The Snack Shack. Basically it was one of those storage sheds set up as a vendor of snacks. Hot dogs, candy, soda and even the dreaded Italian soda. I say dreaded because it was the most time-consuming to make of all the things we sold. Usually, no one would order one, but once one person did, it was all downhill from there. Everyone would want one, the line would back up out to there, and I would get all stressed. I originally got the job when my sister (who also worked there) was going to be out of town for a week and the usual replacements were unavailable. So I took over, and for three summers I worked in that little hot house. And let me tell you, when it was 100 degrees and I was running two microwaves, it was HOT. Oh, if you ever find yourself at a job like this and a little kid comes up and ask for “that,” he or she means “a Lik-M-Aid.” Seriously, like 80% of the time this is true. But I shouldn’t complain too much about this job. We got all the free stuff we could eat, which is cool for about a week and a half. After that you are so sick of nachos and pop and everything else that all you do is drink water and eat the occasional ice cream thing. And I knew a bunch of the lifeguards, so I often had someone to talk to. And finally, as a teenage boy I lived for the chance to see cute girls in bikinis. Not that this happened very often, but it did sometimes. Sometimes it was even Maggie, though I didn’t really know her at the time, I still thought she was a hottie.

I also spent the summer after my junior year working as a day-time nanny for three boys, in addition to working at the pool in the evenings. I was pretty busy that summer, what with a weeklong trip to Nashville for the International Key Club Convention (also known as high school dork capital of the world. If you want a longer description, send the twentysmthingwhiteguy(at)yahoo(dot)com and email) and a weeklong stay at Leadership Camp (also known as dork capital of Washington State). Nashville was fun, since none of our group was that dorky, but Camp was retarded. I so would have rather stayed home and earned a few more hundred bucks working. Well, back to the story of babysitting. I was in charge of Garret (8), John (6) and Michael (4) Hildebrand from about 8 to 4 (or 5) every weekday. They were good kids in general whom I had babysat quite often over the previous 6 months (they might even still remember our epic day of digging snow tunnels during the crazy winter of 96-97). That’s not to say we didn’t have our share of excitement, though. Two windows were broken over the course of the summer, one downstairs during a particularly exciting game of American Gladiators which involved the throwing of footballs at each other (and unfortunately an innocent window), and another through which a yo-yo was thrown in a fit of rage (not by me) after I sent John to his room. It was a pretty fun job, and I really liked those boys, even if they were a handful at times. It seems weird to think that Garret has probably graduated from high school by now, and that John is probably a Junior now, or maybe just a sophomore, but still. I don’t know if they remember me or not, but that summer we were pretty much inseparable. I also hope that Michael no longer eats peanut butter and jelly and ketchup sandwiches.

My first big-money job started the summer after I graduated and filled up every summer from 1998 to 2001. At this point you may notice that I have yet to have a job during the school year. There is a simple reason for that: it was forbidden by my parents, which was actually kind of nice. Once less thing to worry about, you know? So, this new job was in the agricultural industry, as are about 50% of the jobs in Yakima in some manner. I worked for Diana Fruit as a forklift driver at a cherry processing plant. My dad was the manager, which might be why I got such a cush job. I drove the “dumper.” It was a slow-as-molasses forklift with hydraulic gripping and dumping forks. Basically, I dumped cherries that arrived in orchardists’ bins into our bins so that the growers could have theirs’ back the next time they rolled in. The first year was really fun seeing as I was working with a bunch of friends from high school including Steve Fontana, Ben Meals, Dave Cole, and John Pham. On the slow days, when we had finished all our work until the next truck showed up, we would hang out and play cards in the tool shed. Actually, all 4 years were pretty fun. Maggie even worked there for three of them. So did her sister. And her sister’s boyfriend, and my brother (the disappearing brine maker). Nepotism all around. It was a pretty dirty job though. When I was done with my forklift duties, I had to go join the other pad workers doing the fun stuff. For example, pumping a relatively caustic chemical solution into bins of cherries in order to bleach all the color and flavor out of them. If you weren’t paying attention, it was easy to get a face full of the brine (at about a gallon per second) after which the smell would not leave your nose for days. Actually, even if you didn’t get a face full the smell wouldn’t leave you. It was pretty bad. And it was hard work. During the busiest times of the season we could sometimes put in14 hour days, 7 days a week. That’s a real good method for saving money. You make a lot of overtime and have no time to spend it. Sweet. But this job is the reason why I won’t eat maraschino cherries any more.

The one problem with the cherry job, as it was always referred to in my family (seriously, my dad had been working there every summer for like, 20 years) was that it ended in early August and UW didn’t start until the end of September. So, due to this, I had a plethora of various other temporary jobs into which I will not go in depth. Here they are

I worked at a winery bottling and boxing that year’s Chardonnay

I worked for a few days with a contractor cleaning up the Yakima Target’s parking lot and grounds

I worked for a few weeks as a dishwasher/salad chef at the now-defunct Tratorria Russo (owned by one of Maggie’s mom’s friends).

I worked for quite a while actually at Eschbach Park (for those of you not from Yakima, the proper pronunciation is ash-ball. Don’t ask me why) as a fee-taker/litter picker-upper/bathroom painter/off-roader. I’m telling you, those little carts can get some serious air if the bumps are big enough.

The summer after my sophomore year, I didn’t get a second job because Maggie and I were married on August 26th of that year. Just in case you were wondering.

So, that wraps up my summer jobs. Now on to my college jobs.

There are really only two that fall into the college job category. To be honest, all but my sophomore year I (or we for the last two since I was living with Maggie) had enough money from scholarships. Ah, the beauty of in-state tuition. But my sophomore year I was dead broke. I ended up working two jobs just to make ends meet and borrowing money from Maggie when they still didn’t. My first job was a pretty standard campus job. All I did was work for about 15 hours a week at the Chemistry Library checking out and reshelving books. Nothing to it, really. My second job was way more rewarding and time consuming: tutoring high schoolers for the SAT. I pretty much aced mine, so that gave me good credentials in the parents’ eyes. I worked as a subcontractor basically for a company called Score!Prep. I spent 7.5 hours over 5 weeks with each kid (at their houses, of which almost all would fall into the “mansion” category) going over strategies for the SAT. Mind you, I wasn’t teaching them how to do math, I was teaching them how to do SAT math, which is totally different from math in general. It was pretty fun, and I think I was pretty good at it. At least the kids’ parents seemed to think so. I managed to be very forgiving and kind (I know, can you believe it) to the point that one girl, whose parents didn’t want here being tutored by men because they were to mean, flourished under my tutelage. I wish I could have tutored her at life, because she needed it. She was a not perfect girl living with perfectionist parents who were slowly destroying her will to live. I hope everything turned out okay for her. Anyway, I had the library job for one year and the tutoring job for two. My senior year, I didn’t have any jobs other than school, and that was enough.

Hmm, we seem to have now reached that critical after-college time. Let me say this. I did get a job right out of college, but not until one week before graduation. Up until that point, Maggie and I had no idea what we would do after graduation since neither of us had jobs. I was thinking about working at the local Blockbuster or going to film school. Then, in the nick of time I got a job with the company for which I am still working. I won’t say anything about the job I have now because I don’t want to get fired if they read about it. Suffice to say I work in the automotive safety industry. I once worked with propellants as a quality engineer and now I work in research, often with the government. If you want more details, I’m afraid you’ll just have to talk to me.

As I read back over this list, I come to the realization that I have never really had a bad job. Huh, no wonder why this post isn’t very funny. I much prefer Ryan’s list of jobs.