My Resume Needs a Laugh Track - Part I

My dad has told me stories all of my life about the myriad jobs he had before graduating college. A true mark of the sheer quantity of jobs is that I even remember finding out about a new one I hadn't heard of before when I was a late teen.

Apparently I aspire to emulate my father's employment cornucopia because M makes fun of my own employment history. We've been married almost six years and he only just recently heard about one of these. I'll admit I have some random ones. So feel free to laugh at the sheer diversity too if you find it amusing:

AVOCADOMONGER - As a young child, I used to sell avocados on street corners. My family lived for a little while in an avocado orchard in the San Diego area and our lot had 14 producing trees. We got so many we didn't know what to do with them. My family would pick the avocados and then we'd take them to get inspected and certified (at least we started doing this after a policeman stopped and told us we had to). Then we'd set up with our family's Suburban on some street corner and my mom would sit with the car and my little sister while I held a sign that said "AVACADOS 4/$1" Those things sold like hotcakes. My parents started savings accounts for my sister and I and let us deposit the proceeds.

KID WRANGLING - Of course, I babysat when I was between 12 and 16. Not very noteworthy.

GLORIFIED BUSBOY - When I was 16, I got a job as a "floor server" but at a buffet restaurant. This basically amounted to busing tables. No one knew whether or not to tip a restaurant worker that is helpful, but doesn't actually bring you your food. I don't know either. Do you know? I hated it, but I had followed a boy there, and after working together all summer, we ended up dating. So I suppose in that respect the job was successful.

PSEUDO-JAPANESE TUTOR - The summer after I graduated high school, I was lazy. All I did was take an extremely part time job tutoring 2 little kids. They were half-Japanese so my vague knowledge of Japanese culture and pronunciation were a big hit. The little boy's name was Ryoske, so I think I was one of about 4 white people he knew (including his father) that actually pronounced his name right. We worked on arithmetic and reading comprehension and I got paid the way you get paid when you tutor kids who attend a very exclusive private school.

PSEUDO-JAPANESE TRANSLATOR - The first two summers in college I worked as an office assistant and technical manual translator/editor at my dad's company. I ran technical manuals about Post-Exposure Bake systems for computer chip mask manufacturing that were written in Japanese through translation software. Then I fixed the resulting gobbledygook Japlish, translated some of the stuff the software couldn't handle, and fixed the formatting. Man, I was a MSWord whiz. While doing this, I also answered the phones, sorted mail, etc.

MATHOPHILIAC - The summer after my sophomore year of college, I reduced my hours at my dad's company so that I could tutor advanced math on the side. I was a flier posting fiend. I reaped the benefits of parents where I lived pushing their kids too hard in school and got great pay. It almost didn't seem fair to take their money like that. I got over it. The only problem was that I forgot to take down the fliers and my parent's house got calls from people looking for a tutor for almost a year after I left and went back to school in the fall.

APPLICATIONS ENGINEER INTERN/SUMMER OF THE ROOMMATE HELL - This is the one and only time I actually had a job that matched my college degree. I got paid pretty well to live in a suburb of Portland, Oregon and have fun all summer. I was researching the effects of focused ion beam spot quality on hard drive head cross-section milling quality and trying to come up with a reliable metric. On the side, I had bizarre adventures with roommates and even spent one weekend technically living out of my car. But that's a post in and of itself... not today.

DEMOTED OFFICE ASSISTANT - I worked a little at my dad's company again the summer I was engaged. It was the semester after my senior year of college, but I still had one semester of classes before I graduated. I worked a little less than full time but for much better pay because I was so experienced. I couldn't work full time because I was too busy having fun planning my wedding! I did basically all the office assistant stuff I had done before, but without all the cool translating/editing stuff.

. . .

I am SO not done. I'm just going to have to break up this post into several installments to make it manageable for you and me both. We'll use my marriage date as an arbitrary break point for me to rest these typin' fingers.