Odd Jobs, and Some Really Odd Jobs

I have been working since I turned 14 (which was totally legal in Maryland). As I have been spending the past few days looking at different part time employment opportunities, I have been thinking about some of the funnier and weirder positions I have had over the years. Most of them were during college...

• I worked a temp position as a temp worker (really kind of a paper-folder) for a big convention for People Soft at the Anaheim convention center, and on the night they had their big gala type thing with lots of free delicious food, I stopped working for a bit to enjoy the festivities.


• I was hired as a house cleaner, but wound up being more of a post-divorce friend a counselor for a lady who had divorced her husband about a year before she hired me and had not cleaned her house since. This was sad, and also very disgusting. It was just gross things like not cleaning your bathroom sink or changing the sheets on your kids bed for a year that kind of got to me. But most of the weeks she would send me home having worked less than she hired me to work and paying me our agreed price. So that was nice.


• I was a care-taker for an elderly woman who needed someone to stay with her while her live-in friend and caretaker had some time out on the town. One activity that she liked was reading the paper, but a few weeks into it I realized it was usually the Sunday paper and she wanted to look at every single section including the ads, and she couldn't really hear me when I read them to her so I had to repeat myself a lot. I started disassembling the paper before we read it to avoid the business section. I tried to take her to get milkshakes at Ruby's once, but she got very scared on the car ride there, so we had to go home.


• I was a nanny for one of the member's of Dave Matthew's Band and they put me up at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco for a week. That was a totally random/fun/awful/experience.


• I nannied for a lady who let her three year-old hit me in front of her without saying anything. Needless to say this was pretty awful and I had no control or respect in the relationship with the little girl. I dreaded going to this job.


• I worked for the Gallup Organization taking telephone polls, and while this was supposed to be a really great job and opportunity, I had a hard time trying to keep people on the phones for twenty minute surveys when their child was crying in the background. I only lasted about 3 days, and when I quit the lady basically told me that I would be a failure in life if I gave up so easily, and she made me cry and to this day I am still trying to prove her wrong.


• I had a guy on craigslist allow me to come to his house babysit and drive his daughter around without event speaking to me on the phone. We had only emailed, and while I am really trustworthy person I thought it was really scary that someone would trust their child's life in the hands of a stranger.

At least I have a lot of good stories to tell. Some possible jobs that I might take in the next few months are working in flue clinics at different retail stores or participating in a phone fund raiser. It will be weird working for ten bucks and hour again, but hopefully my next job will be something fun rather than data entry tedium.