Job Shark

I have had so many jobs in my life, that I sometimes feel like I’ve have lived a hundred times over. How have I possibly fit so many different, ridiculous jobs into my 25 years of life, of which I have only been working for 10? It seems kind of crazy. I know part of it is my absolute inability to stay at any given job for any longer than 1 year due to the fact that I just get bored and quit. Work has never seemed fun for me; it was always just something to do, so that I can do what I really want to do. Travel and write.

My first job was at a fast food restaurant, and I hated it. I had to wear an ugly ass purple uniform, complete with a hat, and I came home smelling of grease every day. I had to work the morning shift every Saturday and Sunday, so that job pretty much ate up my weekend. This job was my first real experience with people being absolute assholes for no apparent reason. I quit shortly after the day a guy yelled at me for putting a wrong ingredient on his hamburger. Honestly, if you get that worked up over a hamburger, something is not right in your head. That’s what I wanted to shout at the guy too, “It’s. Just. A. Hamburger!!” Of course I didn’t, because I was young and intimidated by the crazy guy yelling at me over mustard, but I think if it happened to me now, the guy would be getting a smack down. I lasted at this job for 10 months.

My next job was at Wal-Mart. It is probably unsurprising that I hated this one too. The uniform was equally as repulsive, maybe even more so. This job solidified a lifelong hatred of Wal-Mart for me.

The next job I had was working for the city. I spend my summer cutting grass, and painting doing other random odd jobs. I kind of loved it. I got to be outside, and everybody else that worked there was around my age (with the exception of the team leaders). We had a blast that summer. We would cut the grass, and then play baseball. Or we would fix the buoys in the lake, and then go boating for the rest of the day. To this day, tt was probably the greatest job I ever had. It only lasted for the summer though, and then I was back to school.

The next summer, I went back to work for the city, but I agreed to do a different job. Looking back on it now, it was clearly the wrong choice, but I agreed because it meant going in an hour later. My job this time was to count trees, and look for any potential signs of disease. This might seem interesting, but it wasn’t. We had to look at every city owned tree in the entire city. That’s a lotta trees. We got to type all the info into little palm pilots, and by the end of the summer, I was so bored with the whole thing, I would type stuff like “there’s a fungus among us” if I saw a diseased tree. Note to city: get students who actually know stuff about trees to perform tasks of this nature!

My next job was at a Sprout restaurant. I didn’t really mind this job at all. The people I worked with were great, and the food was amazing. This too eventually became boring though, despite the fact that we would routinely have dance parties at work. One day, I accidentally cut off part of my finger with some scissors, proving to myself that me and the restaurant business just weren’t meant to be.

Next job was a portrait studio. I had my moments with this job. Sometimes I loved it (like on pet day, or when the children were too young too speak). It is easy enough to make a baby smile…just play a little peek a boo behind the camera and you are good to go. Once they got older than two though, it was very trying. I am not the kind of person that is going to act all ridiculous just to get a child that doesn’t know me to smile. I usually left that up to the parents. Because a) I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough to make a complete ass of my self, and b) the child has no idea who I am, and would probably be more inclined to smile at their parents. This job lasted about eight months.

The next job after this was a front desk of a hotel. I almost forgot about this one. But I hated it. I realized after this job, that I usually ended up hating a job a whole lot more if I had to wear a uniform. It’s like, okay, not only am I taking crap from everybody that comes in here, but I have to do so while wearing an ugly ass uniform. NO THANKS. My best memory of this job was when someone else my age actually worked there, and there happened to be one shift where it was just the two of us working. Some guy gave us a bottle of wine he picked up at a local winery, and so we drank it, while cranking the radio and dancing. It is probably important to note that this hotel was not busy, and we spent most of our time sitting around doing nothing anyway. Wine and music just made the time past more quickly.

My next two jobs I loved, but they were contracts, so they eventually came to an end. I can’t dwell on them too long (it was for the same company and working with the same people, I just ended up getting two different contracts one after the other) as it still depresses me a bit that I don’t still work there.

So you see, the idea of a “career” in the traditional sense has always scared me. I think I would rather poke out my eye then spend 30ish years doing the same thing. I guess it’s possible though, that I just haven’t found the right job yet.