Right now I have the best job I’ve ever had, as get this, a janitor! I like it because I go in, clean up the building, it looks nice, I go home. Nobody checking up on me, I can take a break any time I want, do the work any way I want, and change the hours (as long as I get the work done.)
I second “The Job I Have Now” as the best job I ever had. I’m doing independent contract copywriting and PR work right now for a doctors’ practice. Easy commute, great fellow workers, and a Starbuck’s on the way to work! It’s awesome. Did I mention how nice the people I work with are? I’ve been there since June and it is so cool. I really feel like a real working girl! Oh, yeah… and lots of cute docs…!
There was this one Blow Job that was pretty damn good, I gotta tell you.
The job I have now ranks right up there.
But for interest’s sake…One summer I worked in “Summer Programs” for my alma mater. That means we were in charge of logistics, hospitality, and so forth for any and all groups who came through to use the otherwise-quiet campus all summer. That job itself wasn’t always great (although my boss was a total delight). But for a couple of weeks we hosted an Elderhostel group.
Elderhostel, if you’re not familiar with it, is an educational program for retirees. They can elect one of several week-long programs (sometimes longer) where they go shack up somewhere (hotel, or college campus) and take 2-3 themed classes on topics of interest.
This was the neatest group of people. At the time I was 21, just graduated from school, unsure where I was going in life. My relationship with my boyfriend of several years was in limbo, my friends had moved away after graduation, and I had a lot of angst. To hang out with these interesting people who had been around a lot longer than me, all of them active and involved despite their age, many of them in long-term successful marriages… it was wonderful for me and I absolutely enjoyed them. They were also among the least demanding of the groups we had that summer (on the other hand, I loved bending over backwards for them, so no wonder they were happy).
I was ready to go work for the Elderhostel organization after that experience (although I didn’t pursue it)
The job I am currently in is by far my best job ever, especially compared to what I started out with. Right out of high school I worked in fast food and continued to work there while I went to college. When I graduated there wasn’t much of anything available in my field, so I stayed with fast food and became a manager. I don’t know how I put up with six years of low pay, long and varying hours (sometimes very late at night), the grease, heat and other uncomfortable working conditions, the high rate of turnover, and worst of all, the nasty and stupid customers. It felt so good to leave that job.
The second job also lasted six years, working in a well-known office supply store chain. The hours, overall working conditions, and the customers were better, though they were complete idiots there, too. I even got most Sundays off, yeah! The pay wasn’t much more, but I still felt better about working there than I did in foodservice. This job was interrupted about three and half years into it by a two-month stint working in a call center. The call center job wasn’t for me and I went back to the office supply store.
About a year ago I left that place and am now working for a major printer manufacturer testing printers. the pay is substantially more, I can wear my street clothes to work, I work Monday through Friday and work the same hours each day, and I don’t deal with the public. I hope to stick with this one for awhile.
Yet another vote for “job I have now.” Stand-up comedian.
I used to run geochem crews in Alaska, sampling veg cuttings, humus and water across the Kenai Peninsula, the North Slope and the western mainland.
We were working a desolate part of the Yukon/Charley wilderness 80 miles north of where the big river enters from Canada and were having a hard time helicoptering in because of the brush. So for two weeks I cut helicopter LZ’s, or landing zones. Each morning my pilot would fly me up from Eagle and drop me off in the wilderness. I’d have a shotguns with slugs for bear, a map, radio, chainsaw, gas can, lunch and a compass. I’d walk a transect across the tundra and low hills, cutting an LZ every half mile. I’d usually cover 5 to 8 miles a day.
It was terifically difficult work but I was by myself in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t have felt more alive. Jeez, I miss the hell out of it.
The job I look back at as the most memorable was piano moving. I was in a crew in Boulder, CO for a year or so. We would pick up and deliver pianos all over Boulder county, have adventures in piano moving (especially in the mountains in winter) with my piano-moving bretheren, and usually party a little on Saturdays while we bitterly worked into the cold evening. It was very intense work because pianos are very heavy and precious and you have figure out the move and then get three guys (usually) working together in perfect coordination to apply the correct piano-judo manipulations.
Ultimately it was a burn-out job because it wore on my body (trashed my back, actually) and the hours and pay weren’t enough to sustain any kind of self-respecting lifestyle but the comraderie (the guys I worked with were generally pretty cool) and intensity were pretty unique.
The job I have now is certainly ‘the best’ in terms of money, long-term satisfaction and so on but it’s an office job so that youthful comraderie brute strength excitement level isn’t quite there.
I like the job I have now because I get nights and weekends off, the trade off being I work in an office.
Before that I was a manufacturer’s rep . . . for a company 1000 miles away! I worked out of my house, set my own appointments, my meals, car and hotels were paid for, and I got to travel! If you wanted, you could even sneak in a day off here and there with no one really knowing, as long as the job got done! I mean, it was pretty damned laissez-faire. 
The downside became the travel, and having to constantly take boring clients out to lunch and dinner and make small talk and that got real old. There was also this fuckhead consultant who would fly in and I would have to drive him all over the place and listen to his same pitch over and over and over again. I was also asked by my company to do some things to customers I felt unethical, and the consultant started saying things behind my back when I refused to travel with him a couple times because I already had other clients appointments planned, and well, it was time for a change, but boy was it fun while it lasted!
I was also a real estate agent which was a challenge, but would have been more fun with a salary.
Its gotta be my first job.
Working at the local cinema, with people my age, watching all the movies for free.
OK the hours were not great, some days up to 12 hours, but I met my first girlfriend and got up to some things that we really shouldnt have done!
The place was small enough not to get many people in (many times the staff out numbered the public) but when a really popular film came in we were still packed out.
Those were the days, how I miss them so.
For two summers in college, I worked at Busch Gardens in Florida on the African Queen boat ride (similar to the Jungle Cruise at Disney World).
Each boat held 15-17 people, you loaded them on and took them around a circular “river” tour with wild animal displays (lemurs, maribou storks, rhinos, spider monkeys, alligators, crocodiles), a hut city built on sunken poles, a crazy man that jumped out of a hut brandishing weapons (male coworkers would take turns dressing up), a crashed plane, a wrecked boat and a waterfall.
There was some hokey story about finding the “lost scepter” but it was mainly an excuse to tell really really bad jokes. For instance, the city was referred to as “Waterfront Congominiums.” My coworkers waiting to secure the boat at the dock with chains were “chained professionals” or if I were feeling saucy and had a receptive boatload (we called them “crews”) they were “professional hookers.” People that stood up before I gave the count of three to stand together and disembark? “Victims of premature evacuation.”
The boat ride job did an excellent job of preparing me for my current job as a corporate trainer. I have absolutely ZERO fear of public speaking, I mean if you can tell 17 absolute strangers that the madman poking at the boat with his spear was a “sharp guy” and “trying to get his point across,” you can do anything involving public speaking.
If any of you have visited the Tampa Busch Gardens recently, the African Queen boat ride was replaced in 89 with the Tanganika (sp?) Tidal Wave, a water roller coaster that generates a huge wave designed to drench observers.
I miss the African Queen, I never had a job that I enjoyed so much. I discovered that I am a total ham and adored playing to an audience (I really loved an audience that was trapped with you on a boat for 15 minutes!).
Don’t come on board, come on excited!
• In college, I worked as ass’t. curator of a costume history museum in Baltimore. Loved it. I have kept in touch with every costume history museum in the English-speaking world, and there are no (salaried) openings, dammit.
• Five or six years ago, I was a writer/editor for Microsoft’s “Cinemania” CD-ROM. Only job I actually looked forward to getting to work in the morning. Then Bill Gates pulled our funding and we all got canned . . .
Working for a law professor my first summer of law school- we liked to joke it was like the old soviet system: they pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work.
Even better, the professor was gone half of the summer and emailed me my “work”. Woohoo- that was great- spent a ton of time riding that summer. . . .
-me
I spent several years doing research (primarily historical, a little bit of technical) for a novelist. It was a dream job: I set my own hours, I was paid to learn interesting things, I had no management structure beyond “get me what I need when I need it”, I worked at home (or in University libraries), and I got a nice introduction into the world of genre publishing.
If it had only had a medical plan I might still be doing it.
Here’s another vote for the job I have now. Here’s what I said about it in another thread that asks is it ok to like/dislike your job.
I have two jobs now (&^%&%%& California mortgages). One of them is-- get this-- writing stuff down and getting paid for it. Being a writer is a lot of fun, though sometimes it truly is hard work. But I still can’t believe I can hammer away at a keyboard for a couple of hours, then, a few days later, a check appears in my mailbox. If I weren’t a scientist, I’d swear it’s either magic or fantasy.
The job I have now as a legal assistant is by far the best “full time this is how I pay my bills” job.
But of all the jobs I’ve held, I’d have to say that babysitting gig in high school.
The kids I babysat were soooo easy to take care of. One family with 2 kids and the other with 3 (not babysitting at the same time though).
Because of the multiple kids thing I made pretty good money.
Mom and dad still paid the “real” bills, so the money I made went straight to my pocket.
Plus I didn’t work for a company so there weren’t any taxes taken out.
Ah but life was good back then.
I love my job. As a musician, I’ve done every god-forsaken type of work you can imagine, and some you wouldn’t want to.
Now, thank goodness, I play full-time at a club called “Howl at the moon” and I LOVE IT.
Lead Intelligence Analyst on the North Korean Desk, Misawa, Japan. I stood up the desk, and knew more about the NK Navy than anybody on station. Got me lots of notice (the good kind).
I was also the Command Briefer, so I got to do lots of podium time, which I like and I’m pretty good at.
In College, flower delivery guy.
Basically consisted of tooling around in a large van, radio cranked up, window down, spitting sunflower seeds on the floor. People were generally very suprised and happy to see me at the door. Added benefits: (1) Continued possibility of living a bad porn movie – she answered the door in her nightie, the goofy music started playing (never happened, but, hey, it could have!), (2) knowledge of flowers and flower arranging (well, sometimes it comes in handy).
Eerie twist: Delivering funeral sprays and coffin toppers to mortuaries. I must have seen two dozen dead guys that summer (the guy opens the door and points to the room - up to the delivery guy to arrange the sprays and place the flowers onto the (most times) open casket). One guy that I can still picture was dressed in his security patrol uniform.