My First Seven Jobs
There’s a meme going around on Facebook: list your first seven jobs. Here are mine. With some commentary.
First seven jobs:
- Not exactly a job, but my sisters and I sold coffee and doughnuts to customers waiting to buy gas on one of those epic lines of the Carter era (ca. 1978?) The line stretched from the gas station at the corner of King Street and Bedford Road, all the way down Elm Street, and up and around Ridgewood Terrace, to the corner of Ridgewood Terrace and King Street, caddy corner from our driveway.
- Newspaper route. Colossal failure. Lasted only a few days. Too active. A scary dog named Caesar, which my sisters and I always heard as “Seize her.”
- Babysitting. Lots of it. More my lazy speed. There was TV. And I loved kids.
- Lickety Split. Worked as a short-order cook. My co-workers included Matt Park, one of my best friends, behind the ice cream counter, and several cheerleaders, one of whom sometimes talked to me. I got my right-hand index finger sliced off (just a tiny bit) in a meat slicer. I had to stop working and actually got workers’ comp for six weeks or so. My introduction to stitches and the welfare state.
- Research assistant for Richard Garwin at IBM’s Watson Research Center (I had gotten a scholarship from IBM, where my dad worked, and part of the scholarship included summer jobs there). Garwin was one of the leading scientists opposing SDI, aka Star Wars. My introduction to anti-nuclear activism, though Garwin wasn’t so much an activist as an uber-wonky scientific expert who argued that Star Wars was destabilizing and expensive and could be easily overcome with fairly cheap countermeasures. I loved my co-workers. All we did was gossip about Garwin and complain about the food. That job launched me on my first letter to the editor. To The New Republic, actually, back in the heyday of Marty Peretz, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Michael Kinsley. All told, not a bad gig.
- IBM’s America’s Group. The summer after Garwin, I worked in international communications, dealing with IBM’s Latin America and Canada divisions. I often say being department chair is the second-worst job of my life. Working at IBM that summer was the worst. My introduction to the quiet desperation of corporate life. Most people there didn’t seem to be doing much of anything except wasting time and marking the days till retirement. Everything you wrote needed to get “clearance”—as if we were in the most ultra-high-security branch of the NSA. Made me realize I could never, ever work in the “business world.”
- Waiter, Friendly’s. My sister Emily got me the job. Eventually, my sisters Gaby and Jessica worked there, too (or did Jessica predate all of us?) Anyway, another bust of a job, though I did enjoy hustling there. Something about the pace and the turnover was exhilarating (though no one ever worked as fast as Emily). There was enough animosity between the grill staff, many of whom were Latinos, and the long-term waitstaff (older white women) versus the manager (a doofus who defined the meaning of white male privilege, even at the ranks of middle management) to keep me going for months. And it did.