Hello Worklife, Farewell Parklife

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The good news has just been pouring in for me this week, and now on top of having my big adjustment of status interview on the horizon, I just received a little card in the mail… my employment authorization card! It’s shiny! It’s full of promise and hope! It has a hideous, mug-shot style picture of me on it!

Back home, I would have very limited options: either work at the factory (boring job but fantastic money) or work at a restaurant/gas station/store clerk (tough job, very little money). But now, here I am, in the big city (okay, little city) of Seattle, and as I browse the classifieds and craigslist, I find that, even for lowly little me, with only a high school education (but killer work ethic and fast learner), there are so many more opportunities…

And I feel inert. I don’t even know where to start! I could do anything, I get to pick and choose… I mean, granted, I won’t necessarily be hired right away, but I can choose a basic path. I have a clean slate. And this is where it dawns on me: what do I want to do? I am interested in so many, many things!

Tell me, Dopers, what are your interesting jobs? What types of things did you look for when you were just starting out? I know some of you have more education under your belt than I do, but I’m interested in hearing your stories, as well. What do you think would be a cool job, an interesting job, a bizarre job?

I’ll probably end up with a housekeeping job at an old folk’s home, or secretarial work, or possibly scrubbing boats… but still. If you could live vicariously through me at this step… what would you do?

2

Well, when I lives in Seattle for a summer I worked for a landscaping company. Actually, for two. I started temping for the City of Seattle at $8/hour doing lazy landscaping (cut grass, take State required break, trim bush, take State required break, pull weed, take lunch…which required driving back to the lot and was not counted towards lunch break). Then I moved to a private company in I forget where but East of Ballard, North of Microsoft, and worked Monday to Thursday for 10 hours a day for $9/hour. It was great! 3 day weekends all summer long. This was 11 years ago, so I’d expect the wages to have gone up a bit, but they still seem OK from what I know.

Also, any temp job is OK to start. Especially if you don’t NEED the money. You can take days off, do 3-day stints, whatever.

Let us know how it goes-
-Tcat

3

In retrospect, driving a cab back when I was in college was fun. Kinda nasty sometimes, and you spend the first week trying to understand what dispatch is saying (“What?”), but I was pretty much captain of my own little ship. Whatever one guy and a functional sedan could make money accomplishing, I’d try to do. Sell pizzas, take fares, drive hookers, take fares, locate and rescue drunk cheerleaders, take fares, go find chicken fingers & cigarettes in the middle of the night and deliver them to some dude who called you out of the blue, take fares, drop off coffee & donuts at the local PD stakeout, take fares…sometimes gross and often boring, but a little initiative meant cash and sometimes adventure. Hours were totally up to me, I could disappear for weeks (sans car) and no one would care. Everything over and above the lease fee and gas costs, I kept.

Of course, it had alot more romantic appeal when I was in my early 20s. It was a fun job though.

4

HA! I just got a callback from someone that wants to hire me… I wasn’t sure what the job entailed, but a little mystery has never frightened me off. What would my position be?

Telemarketer.

I burst out laughing. Because, well, you know, then I’d never be able to face Cervaise on trivia nights ever again. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m going to keep looking, thanks. :wink:

5

When I first moved to Chicago, I didn’t have a job lined up. So I signed up with a temp firm, doing data entry. Some of the companies were pretty cool. (Levi Strauss was interesting) Some were nuts. (I still can’t believe that Motorola was hiring temps to man their small accounts account payables. I was handling incoming payments by check.) If nothing else, it lets you see a lot of companies in a lot of areas. I ended up in my current industry through one of those temp jobs.

6

Bartending. Lotsa nighttime work which leaves your days free for searching for other employment if you don’t like it. Plus, in addition to your weekly paycheck (which won’t be much), you’ll take cash home after every shift.

7

Mine was a job with Vitro at Eglin AFb, Florida.

Lots and lots of outdoor work. This was during the Vietnam war era, and what we did was plant all kinds of sensors in the woods, then run “scripts,” that is, routes through the woods while the Vietnam-bound Air Force personnel tracked us.

Lots of walking, lots of digging, lots of other stuff. We got to eat C-rats at the trailer with the AF folk, and at times, to test other stuff about the sensors, we even got to carry unloaded M-16s while doing some scripts. (This was for metal-sensing sensors, not just optical and ground vibration ones)

It was an absolute hoot for this 20-year old.