I was an ESL teacher at a private school for adults for ten years in San Francisco, but when the cost-of-living became too much to bear, I had to leave the state and needed to find remote work. I told my parents and all my friends to ask if they knew of any "reading or writing related gigs" and an old friend of my father's told him to have me email her boss, a "Book Indexer."
Flash forward to a decade later, and I'm still gainfully employed in the wonderful "niche" industry of book indexing, which supports me well so I can also write professionally, and I get paid to read 5-10 non-fiction books each month which provides me with a wealth of strange knowledge from all academic disciplines and pop culture. I even get to do autobiographies and biographies for people I greatly admire like Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Robertson, and Baruch Spinoza, to name a few.
I did an index for one book and I LOVED doing the job, but it took so long that I think I probably got paid about $1.25 an hour when it was done.
Mike's probably got some fantastic skills that I didn't have at the time. An index with subject headings and sub-headings is a thing of joy for me, but they require extremely good reading skills to not only conceive of the subjects in the first place, but then, as you're reading, you have to say, "Now this topic here on p.75 seems to address subject A, but maybe a bit of B and Q...it goes on for...looks like 4 pages...I'll add that right now...Hold on: he seems to have linked subject B with subject Q here on p.78...how will I make this make sense for my ideal index-user?"
Proper name indexes are comparatively simple. It's a real art, indexing. Very intense intellectual work. But a really good index is a thing of beauty and joy to behold forever.
That seems to be the way of it usually - stuff a person Loves to pursue is usually Emotional & Passion based. And - like you say ,don't pay worth a darn usually. You do it because you just Have to
I'd say it's pretty doubtful IF AI gets past where some people think it might get...but many experys think it won't be able to get to a point where it can replace me because a lot of the job is "conceptual linking" which you can't do with current or prospective machine learning…
Thank you so much for sharing this! I have the utmost respect for good indexers. My personal hero is whoever indexed the Romanian translation of Darwin's "Origin of Species" published in 1957. Apart from being a beautiful and impressive object (big, sturdy, clothbound in blue), this book shows an approach to translation and publishing that far surpasses anything you can find today. It was translated from English into Romanian by one person, then 3 other people compared it to the Russian, German, and French translations. After all this work came a final review performed by a "stylizer" (not the same thing as in neural machine translation, for sure), who in this case was a major Surrealist poet :) To top it all, there's the index, a work of art in itself. Done all by hand, or rather by brain. You can appreciate it here: https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1957_OriginRomanian_F747.pdf I sometimes look at the various translations of Darwin's works just to see how they were indexed. It's an odd thing to do, but very instructive. This is a great resource: https://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html
Thank you for your service. I highly value thorough book indexes (indices?). A good index is hard to find. Most seem to have everything except the thing for which I am looking.
That's fascinating feedback. I try really hard and my bosses have an editor who works with me and I think we do a great job! I see lousy indexes all the time and it gets me a little fired up to try even harder!
That’s awesome! I’m in a similar situation (also ESL teacher out of work, leaving an overpriced US city behind… and looking for remote work) and am inspired to spread the asking around further…
My dad was an aspiring writer in the early '70s and sometimes paid the bills doing indexing for Norton and other established publishers. I vividly remember the stacks of 3 by 5-inch cards and the little metal boxes filled with cards with his handwriting on them, easy to shuffle and reorganize as he found cross-references and such. Eventually the finished index would be typed up on an old Royal typewriter and the cards discarded. I have no idea what kind of money he made doing it but I always got the feeling it was an enjoyable job, and I appreciate a good index in any book I read to this day. I imagine the process is somewhat different in the digital age!
This is so funny to read because my bosses had to do this before someone invented the software we now use (which still looks like a relative of windows 3.1 LOL) and I always wonder if I would have been able to do this job before that!
For sure!!! I know about so many things I do NOT want to know about, but it also makes it much easier to hear people talk about issues and take it all with a GIANT grain of salt. Academia is full of talking heads disagreeing about basically everything :)
About 15 years ago my girlfriend at the time used to do stilt walking to earn some extra cash. She'd been booked for the Santa Day Parade in Poole, Dorset (here in the UK) as an extra tall hot Reindeer but they were down a Santa as he didn't have an equity card. For some reason (I'm guessing cos I had a big beard and was known to dress up whilst DJing) her boss asked me if I'd step in. I didn't really know what an Equity card was at the time but I was healthily dishonest and happy to try my luck. So I got a job as Santa for the day.
Problem was I was DJing til 4am in another city the night before, I got back around 5am and there was a full blown after party happening in ny house. I maybe slept half hour before I got woken up to leave and bundled into a car to drive down to the coast.
I got dressed up and bundled onto a lifeboat with Britain's tallest man, Atlas from the Gladiators and a lady from Coronation Street. I realised I was way out of my depth suddenly.
"Don't Worry Santa" said Atlas, "I point and you wave, that's all there is to it". We got off the boat, I had to meet the town mayor then got carried through the streets on a sleigh by the shorter Reindeers as literally thousands of people lined the streets to see me.
I waved lots, kept smiling and shamelessly accepted Christmas lists from kids knowing full well I was a fraud. It was terrifying and surreal, but also one of the funniest jobs I've ever had.
I was living in Barcelona in the mid-90s. I got a call one day from a Spanish friend who asked me, "Do you understand black people?" I'm a white American guy, but I'd dated some black girls, so I said, "Yeah, I think so." But she didn't mean it in any conceptual, cultural way. She actually wanted to know if I could understand black people when they spoke. Turns out, she was a translator for an independent film festival, and that year they were featuring films about Delta Blues and the early days of hip-hop. None of the Spanish translators could understand these old dudes sitting on their porches down south or the Brooklyn boys on the corner in the 70s/80s. So they hired me to translate from Ebonics to English, so they could finish the job with Spanish subtitles. Really spices up my resume.
In my veterinary housepital there was a French gal with her cat in the exam room. My technician goes in first and asks her several questions. The tech comes out to brief me and says there's a cute French girl in there but she doesn't understand any English. I walk in and we have a whole conversation! She couldn't understand the southern accent in the slightest. I'm from Miami Florida so I don't have an accent per se I don't think folks from Miami have an accent, in the context of American English. So I simply enunciated and she got it no problem. Understanding Southern accents is a real trick for folks from out of the country. I'm used to East Coast Southern. I'm sure Louisiana and Delta region would probably throw me for a bit of a loop.
I was in a bar with a bunch of South Africans who were speaking English but I could not decipher their accents. I asked them if they could talk like cowboys and they started speaking with American accents, and I understood them perfectly. Now I've worked with people from across the globe often enough to know that most of them can speak with an American accent if you ask them to.
Working as a sound editor in Hollywood: 12 hour shifts - and occasional 24 hour days like when we were working on "Childsplay" and during tv pilot season; frequent layoffs betwen shows (the Editors Guild got us jobs unloading bananas at the LA harbor during one Writers strike); the tension of getting your work done on time (I know of only one guy who was on the night shift who didn't get his reel finished and we never saw him again. We always wondered if they killed him,)
Sounds bad? I had the most fun I've ever had! I loved the crazy people I worked with. We worked on some great shows (and bad ones) including "Bram Stokers Dracula" with Francis Ford Coppola. It won the Oscar for best Sound Editing. It was creative and fulfilling.
I teach at Chapman University/Dodge College of Film (we're #4!) now and I love my job but nothing compares with my years working in the film industry.
Thanks Michael. It was the treat of a lifetime. We mixed the show at his winery in Napa and Francis sat across from me at lunch and dinner. But I was too imtimidated to say anything to him.
My first job was building sets. Only problem was that I was the only consistent employee and my boss had a traumatic brain injury that caused memory issues. I have no experience with power tools, I'm 5'2, and not very strong. But often he would tell me to do something and forget to show me how, and walk away. I had several 10ft walls dropped on me, almost fell off a ladder, and almost knocked someone out hanging set lights. Still miss that job sometimes.
The boss also had a million stories from touring with Hewey Lewis & the News and a ton of other famous bands back in the day, among so many other weird gigs he had done
I miss building things with my hands. Everyday was a suprise, a challenge, and I learned how to do something new. I love my job now, but I sit at a desk and type. It was really cool to watch a few of the shows in the theater and go I built nearly the whole set they're acting on right now- the feeling of accomplishment from being able to look at something physical and say I built that.
I have had the good fortune to "fall into" many jobs over decades of work, none of which I was qualified for, including, community organizer, social documentarian, radio freelancer, radio producer, video producer, curriculum and course designer, creative writing instructor at a college, voiceover narrator. I've had many careers, all of them rewarding in some way. But the most rewarding, began more than a dozen years ago, after I had been unexpectedly retired (downsized) out of a job by a large corporation that was engaged in some cyclical bloodletting.
As you might guess, it's a bit discombobulating to find yourself out of work at 63 years old. You wonder how you will spend those 7 or 8 hours per day, how you will survive on much less income etc. I busied myself as best I could, practicing guitar, taking up strength training in the gym, playing in a jazz trio, teaching guitar in the evenings in a local music school, and developing and delivering a class on jazz history (many thanks to Mr. Gioia for his writing on the subject).
One day, my phone rang. My son was calling. He worked as a special education assistant at a local secondary school here in Vancouver. He had a question.
"Would you be interested in coming to my class and play music, like you did when I was in pre-school and kindergarten." (I am a longtime guitar player and singer, going back to the folk boom era in the 60's.)
"You mean.... like... Wheels On The Bus?" I asked.
"Yup. Wheels On The Bus."
I said yes, and was booked in for one hour, one afternoon per week.
The kids in my son's class had a variety of severe disabilities: mental handicaps, autism, cerebral palsy, among others. They weren't able to integrate into the regular classes, and were lumped together into one group. A small group of stalwarts, my son and several cohorts, overseen by a teacher, looked after the kids, teaching what they could to whom they could, feeding those who needed help, taking those who needed help to the bathroom, and a myriad of other duties. It was called a Lifeskills Class, and it was the bottom rung of the high school, left alone by the administration and other teachers.
I am fortunate to know a *lot* of songs.... hundreds of 'em, ranging from children's songs to well-known folk, pop and rock tunes.
But I had to learn to navigate and read the room, and discover what songs seemed to appeal to the kids and the staff.
I'd had experience with adults with mental handicaps, but that's just a label, so I was not green as grass, but I had no experience with people with autism, and frankly, each person is an individual. I had a lot to learn! But as Yogi Berra said famously, "you can observe a lot by watching."
I assembled a book of songs that grew over time to more than 100: Beatles songs, Leadbelly songs, Raffi songs, traditional tunes (She'll Be Comin' Around The Mountain, I Been Working On The Railroad and the like), some Creedence, many oldies from the 50's, Broadway show tunes and on.
As I got to know the staff, I involved them... a couple of the guys could sing soprano, so "Sherry" by the Four Seasons got some rotation. When one of them celebrated his engagement, "Goin' To The Chapel" became an obligatory tune, replete with dance steps and harmonies. Staff began picking tunes they liked. One of them, Diana, wanted the eponymous tune by Paul Anka, the one her dad sang to her growing up in the Philippines. Another had a piercing soprano voice, and became the lynchpin for a loud version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".
I got to know the particular tunes that kids really liked. One loved "You Are My Sunshine", another, "Take Me Out To The Ballgame". "Twist and Shout" led to dancing.
I did that for a year as a volunteer, and then the school found a small amount of money to pay me! I earned tens of dollars!
I played with that class for ten years or so, and as word of mouth spread, I added another school with a similar lifeskills class to my week, and then an adult care centre for people with disabillities. More tens of dollars! In each instance, I got to know the dedicated staffs who did the heavy lifting, and the kids, and tailored the hour to each group.
I played music to classes via Zoom during the pandemic, and to the kids and their parents during the summer of 2020, when we were still all locked down. Eventually, I returned to playing in person.
These days, I've added one person to my last career as an "uncertified, unregistered music therapist": a young woman who was in one of the classes I sang for several years ago. She's 18, on the autism spectrum, and school has been an unhappy experience for her. Her older sister contacted me and wondered if I could help - she was spending her time alone in a group home, and had taken to hitting herself in the face repeatedly. She was now forced to wear a helmet and face shield, to prevent injury. I play and sing over Zoom to her. We began in January of this year. For months she ignored me, keeping her head down, colouring and cutting out pieces of paper. But by the spring, we had a breakthrough - she began to sing along! It turns out that she remembers many of the tunes she first heard in the lifeskills class 5 years ago. Today, she wears a ball cap during our sessions, greets me with "Hi, Terry" and "Goodbye, Terry" and joins in on "Hit The Road Jack", "Yellow Submarine", an epic version of "The Cat Came Back", "Don't Worry Be Happy", "Here Comes The Sun" and others. She smiles often, and has begun making hand gestures to punctuate the songs. And she sings in key and follows my inflection. All in 8 months!
To say it's been rewarding is an understatement. I've learned a lot about the wide breadth of what it means to be human, laughed a lot with kids and their helpers, and let's face it, working for one hour per day is ideal! And those tens of dollars ;-)
But the best part of all of this, is that for several years, I got to sing Wheels On The Bus with my son, as we did when he was a toddler, and see how he worked with the kids. A rare treat for a proud papa. A couple of years ago, he went back to university to get a degree in education, and this fall will be an elementary school teacher, starting a new career.
I'm finally a full-time author--best gig in the world!
But...
In my early twenties, I worked at a company with toxic owners/bosses and one Friday night, I walked out with an "I quit" note left on my desk and never looked back. Every anxiety dream I had from that point on was some variation on working there again and being ashamed that I had to crawl back to that job.
Fast forward over ten years and I'd just started a new job as a new public health nurse. Part of my duties included going to companies and administering flu shots. Imagine my shock when my very first solo gig was at that company. I was so new, I didn't want to make waves and explain the issue to my new boss, so I embraced the suck and found myself there a week later. Talk about surreal. I felt like I was living out my anxiety dream.
To make matters worse, not only did they remember me, when one boss had called to leave me a message, she'd actually recognized my husband's voice on our answering machine (plus he said our somewhat distinctive names, and yes, it was that long ago) so they knew it was me coming in.
To their credit, they were very nice to me, acting as though we'd all parted on great terms. Then again, I was about to stick needles into their arms, so that MIGHT have contributed to their friendliness. So, there I was, back at the toxic place I'd left years ago, where it was now my job to stick needles into the people who drove me away.
I haven't had that anxiety dream since. Moral of the story: face your fears! With a needle in hand if you can.
My first job was washing dishes for a cranky German woman in a place that always smelled sauerbraten. My second one was in the meat dpt. at Kroger. Then a college library until I dropped out. Then again at Kroger. Then trying to sell newspapers over the phone. I've been lucky to work at a library for about 23+ years. The library is a conducive place for any writer and radio show programmer as myself. Plus you get access to all kinds of music and books you might never have read or listened to. So much culture, so many choices. I applied three times before I got in, and it took me over ten years before I got a promotion, but it has been worth it. I wish others similar good work that is fitted to their personality.
I worked in an exotic pet store. One night, I was attacked by a vicious Golden Tegu Monitor lizard. 🦎. It nearly took my finger off and I nearly shit my pants running away from that damned thing. I ran out the door and never came back, not even to pick up my last paycheck.
When I was 15 (summer of 1993), I did four hours of telemarketing and quit.
The gig was to call random businesses around the USA and say, 'We're your packing tape supplier, would you like to re-order?' The vendors would reply, truthfully, 'we don't have a packing tape supplier.' That's when I was to go into the spiel about how if they ordered a box of tape from me, I could send them a free clock radio.
I hated the lying and I saw a pile of index cards with leads stacked a foot high on my desk and I told the boss I wasn't feeling good and walked home and never showed up again.
A classic maneuver. I once quit a bad retail job the same way, to play an unpaid trio gig with two musicians I loved. The start time of the gig overlapped with the end of my shift so I just left during lunch, texted that I'd run into an "emergency" and never spoke to those people again.
I did this same gig and also left at lunch on Day 1 and never returned! I knew it was trouble when they told me not to use my real name because it was "too memorable"
Right after the economic crash of ‘08- 09 I went to work in a call center that was selling real estate leads on seized properties(basically properties that were cheap).
After a couple of months on the job our paychecks started bouncing. The doors closed.This made the local news in Austin. The company apologized and set up a meeting for us to go and get legitimate checks. The news watched this carefully. The 2nd round of checks bounced.
I've been working since age 15. Here's a chronological list of jobs I've had :)
-ice cream stand at local pool
-babysitter
-gymnastics coach
-steakhouse hostess
-waitress
-record store clerk
-Alzheimer's/Dementia caregiver
-MRDD caregiver
-Greyhound Rescue Ambassador
-Pharmacy/Non-Foods Assistant Manager
-Travel Agent
-Market Research
-Piano School Administrator
-Foreign Language Coordinator
My least favorite job was at the piano school. It's still weird to type that because I was beyond excited to get the job offer. I left a cushy corporate job in marketing for a career in music. The owner was a sadist who got off scaring students, other teachers, and her admin staff. I only worked under her for 11 months, but I'll never again underestimate the toll a toxic workplace can take on one's mental health. Being smeared, rumors, gossip--no thanks! It still makes me cringe to think of that environment. I truly hope she got some help.
My favorite jobs were at the record store and my current one. At the record store, I memorized a ton of bands. I was 16 and worked with college students who taught me all the cool music :). Now, I manage a document translation department. I get to contract with hundreds of interpreters from all over the world in my average-sized midwestern town. I've learned so much about culture, languages, religion, taboos, and our shared humanity from the comfort of a small business. It's far from perfect, but it feels so good when my clients trust me...even when we don't speak the same language.
Worst side job: Selling the services of a company that makes those business pamphlets that sit in a little plastic stand on the counters of dentist's offices or whatever. Driving around a county in Ohio, selling literally nothing because it was 2010 and who still needed a specialized company to make a pamphlet anymore? It just felt pointless while also sort of discouraging, haha
Best side job: The Solid Waste Management district in the county where I grew up hired me to put on an inflatable aluminum can costume and stand outside of box stores spreading the good word about recycling. I was like 16-17yo. It paid really well, the can costume had this remarkably adorable face on it, and I was completely mind-blown at how well-received I was by literally every person entering/exiting the stores. Kids would hug me, families would want a photo, dudes high-fiving me. Haha, it was just solid positive vibes and I did literally nothing other than shuffle around, waving, and doing my best to imbue a giant inflatable can with something like affable warmth and infectious enthusiasm. A friendly can en route to being recycled but keeping a good attitude about it. An existential lesson for all of us.
I was working as the site superintendent for a large general contractor. We were rehabbing former military buildings after the base had returned to civilian ownership when the military withdraw. I’m in my office working on some bid sets for potential future projects. Then I realize I can’t hear anything, and this is a site with approximately 100 people on various subcontractors and our own crews. The power is on but still no audible cues of activity. So I go out to have a look around, and after about ten minutes found all 100+ standing in front of the building, but looking opposite.
Across the field is a noted historical building that predated the base by over 300 years. And in front of it were a dozen Victoria’s Secret models having a photo shoot.
I worked for a silk screen t-shirt company while attending the Cooper Union art school.
The creative director was a follower of Sung Yun Moon. I had to endure sermons from time to time.
However, the entire operation was a front for laundering cocaine dealing. One day I showed up for work. The place was surrounded by cop cars with their lights flashing.
I was an ESL teacher at a private school for adults for ten years in San Francisco, but when the cost-of-living became too much to bear, I had to leave the state and needed to find remote work. I told my parents and all my friends to ask if they knew of any "reading or writing related gigs" and an old friend of my father's told him to have me email her boss, a "Book Indexer."
Flash forward to a decade later, and I'm still gainfully employed in the wonderful "niche" industry of book indexing, which supports me well so I can also write professionally, and I get paid to read 5-10 non-fiction books each month which provides me with a wealth of strange knowledge from all academic disciplines and pop culture. I even get to do autobiographies and biographies for people I greatly admire like Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Robertson, and Baruch Spinoza, to name a few.
I did an index for one book and I LOVED doing the job, but it took so long that I think I probably got paid about $1.25 an hour when it was done.
Mike's probably got some fantastic skills that I didn't have at the time. An index with subject headings and sub-headings is a thing of joy for me, but they require extremely good reading skills to not only conceive of the subjects in the first place, but then, as you're reading, you have to say, "Now this topic here on p.75 seems to address subject A, but maybe a bit of B and Q...it goes on for...looks like 4 pages...I'll add that right now...Hold on: he seems to have linked subject B with subject Q here on p.78...how will I make this make sense for my ideal index-user?"
Proper name indexes are comparatively simple. It's a real art, indexing. Very intense intellectual work. But a really good index is a thing of beauty and joy to behold forever.
I just completed my longest project ever: a 2407 page encyclopedia. it took me 7 weeks!
First time I hear about indexing as a job and I have a lot of questions. Isn’t an encyclopedia already basically an index?
no. indexes only reference page numbers for topics in a book. enclyclopedia's are alphabetized but also contain indexes at the end. make sense?
That's a boggle to me how anyone could index a 2400 page encyclopedia. Man alive!
Diderot would be proud.
I won't lie: about five weeks in, I wanted to quit, but I'm glad I persevered and finished! :-)
That seems to be the way of it usually - stuff a person Loves to pursue is usually Emotional & Passion based. And - like you say ,don't pay worth a darn usually. You do it because you just Have to
I want this job!
Do you think it will still exist in 10 years when I’ve gotten my kids through elementary school, or will AI take it over?
I'd say it's pretty doubtful IF AI gets past where some people think it might get...but many experys think it won't be able to get to a point where it can replace me because a lot of the job is "conceptual linking" which you can't do with current or prospective machine learning…
Your job sounds fun to me, Mike!
Thank you so much for sharing this! I have the utmost respect for good indexers. My personal hero is whoever indexed the Romanian translation of Darwin's "Origin of Species" published in 1957. Apart from being a beautiful and impressive object (big, sturdy, clothbound in blue), this book shows an approach to translation and publishing that far surpasses anything you can find today. It was translated from English into Romanian by one person, then 3 other people compared it to the Russian, German, and French translations. After all this work came a final review performed by a "stylizer" (not the same thing as in neural machine translation, for sure), who in this case was a major Surrealist poet :) To top it all, there's the index, a work of art in itself. Done all by hand, or rather by brain. You can appreciate it here: https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1957_OriginRomanian_F747.pdf I sometimes look at the various translations of Darwin's works just to see how they were indexed. It's an odd thing to do, but very instructive. This is a great resource: https://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html
Awesome!!
Sounds like a dream job, well done.
Thank you for your service. I highly value thorough book indexes (indices?). A good index is hard to find. Most seem to have everything except the thing for which I am looking.
That's fascinating feedback. I try really hard and my bosses have an editor who works with me and I think we do a great job! I see lousy indexes all the time and it gets me a little fired up to try even harder!
That’s awesome! I’m in a similar situation (also ESL teacher out of work, leaving an overpriced US city behind… and looking for remote work) and am inspired to spread the asking around further…
My dad was an aspiring writer in the early '70s and sometimes paid the bills doing indexing for Norton and other established publishers. I vividly remember the stacks of 3 by 5-inch cards and the little metal boxes filled with cards with his handwriting on them, easy to shuffle and reorganize as he found cross-references and such. Eventually the finished index would be typed up on an old Royal typewriter and the cards discarded. I have no idea what kind of money he made doing it but I always got the feeling it was an enjoyable job, and I appreciate a good index in any book I read to this day. I imagine the process is somewhat different in the digital age!
This is so funny to read because my bosses had to do this before someone invented the software we now use (which still looks like a relative of windows 3.1 LOL) and I always wonder if I would have been able to do this job before that!
For sure!!! I know about so many things I do NOT want to know about, but it also makes it much easier to hear people talk about issues and take it all with a GIANT grain of salt. Academia is full of talking heads disagreeing about basically everything :)
About 15 years ago my girlfriend at the time used to do stilt walking to earn some extra cash. She'd been booked for the Santa Day Parade in Poole, Dorset (here in the UK) as an extra tall hot Reindeer but they were down a Santa as he didn't have an equity card. For some reason (I'm guessing cos I had a big beard and was known to dress up whilst DJing) her boss asked me if I'd step in. I didn't really know what an Equity card was at the time but I was healthily dishonest and happy to try my luck. So I got a job as Santa for the day.
Problem was I was DJing til 4am in another city the night before, I got back around 5am and there was a full blown after party happening in ny house. I maybe slept half hour before I got woken up to leave and bundled into a car to drive down to the coast.
I got dressed up and bundled onto a lifeboat with Britain's tallest man, Atlas from the Gladiators and a lady from Coronation Street. I realised I was way out of my depth suddenly.
"Don't Worry Santa" said Atlas, "I point and you wave, that's all there is to it". We got off the boat, I had to meet the town mayor then got carried through the streets on a sleigh by the shorter Reindeers as literally thousands of people lined the streets to see me.
I waved lots, kept smiling and shamelessly accepted Christmas lists from kids knowing full well I was a fraud. It was terrifying and surreal, but also one of the funniest jobs I've ever had.
I was living in Barcelona in the mid-90s. I got a call one day from a Spanish friend who asked me, "Do you understand black people?" I'm a white American guy, but I'd dated some black girls, so I said, "Yeah, I think so." But she didn't mean it in any conceptual, cultural way. She actually wanted to know if I could understand black people when they spoke. Turns out, she was a translator for an independent film festival, and that year they were featuring films about Delta Blues and the early days of hip-hop. None of the Spanish translators could understand these old dudes sitting on their porches down south or the Brooklyn boys on the corner in the 70s/80s. So they hired me to translate from Ebonics to English, so they could finish the job with Spanish subtitles. Really spices up my resume.
"I speak jive"!
In my veterinary housepital there was a French gal with her cat in the exam room. My technician goes in first and asks her several questions. The tech comes out to brief me and says there's a cute French girl in there but she doesn't understand any English. I walk in and we have a whole conversation! She couldn't understand the southern accent in the slightest. I'm from Miami Florida so I don't have an accent per se I don't think folks from Miami have an accent, in the context of American English. So I simply enunciated and she got it no problem. Understanding Southern accents is a real trick for folks from out of the country. I'm used to East Coast Southern. I'm sure Louisiana and Delta region would probably throw me for a bit of a loop.
I was in a bar with a bunch of South Africans who were speaking English but I could not decipher their accents. I asked them if they could talk like cowboys and they started speaking with American accents, and I understood them perfectly. Now I've worked with people from across the globe often enough to know that most of them can speak with an American accent if you ask them to.
Thanks, cultural hegemony!
Reading this in your voice makes it so much greater 😂
Working as a sound editor in Hollywood: 12 hour shifts - and occasional 24 hour days like when we were working on "Childsplay" and during tv pilot season; frequent layoffs betwen shows (the Editors Guild got us jobs unloading bananas at the LA harbor during one Writers strike); the tension of getting your work done on time (I know of only one guy who was on the night shift who didn't get his reel finished and we never saw him again. We always wondered if they killed him,)
Sounds bad? I had the most fun I've ever had! I loved the crazy people I worked with. We worked on some great shows (and bad ones) including "Bram Stokers Dracula" with Francis Ford Coppola. It won the Oscar for best Sound Editing. It was creative and fulfilling.
I teach at Chapman University/Dodge College of Film (we're #4!) now and I love my job but nothing compares with my years working in the film industry.
As someone who's been obsessed with Coppola's Dracula for 30+ years, I salute your work, Harry!
Thanks Michael. It was the treat of a lifetime. We mixed the show at his winery in Napa and Francis sat across from me at lunch and dinner. But I was too imtimidated to say anything to him.
My first job was building sets. Only problem was that I was the only consistent employee and my boss had a traumatic brain injury that caused memory issues. I have no experience with power tools, I'm 5'2, and not very strong. But often he would tell me to do something and forget to show me how, and walk away. I had several 10ft walls dropped on me, almost fell off a ladder, and almost knocked someone out hanging set lights. Still miss that job sometimes.
The boss also had a million stories from touring with Hewey Lewis & the News and a ton of other famous bands back in the day, among so many other weird gigs he had done
My goodness, I wouldn't miss that.
I miss building things with my hands. Everyday was a suprise, a challenge, and I learned how to do something new. I love my job now, but I sit at a desk and type. It was really cool to watch a few of the shows in the theater and go I built nearly the whole set they're acting on right now- the feeling of accomplishment from being able to look at something physical and say I built that.
I have had the good fortune to "fall into" many jobs over decades of work, none of which I was qualified for, including, community organizer, social documentarian, radio freelancer, radio producer, video producer, curriculum and course designer, creative writing instructor at a college, voiceover narrator. I've had many careers, all of them rewarding in some way. But the most rewarding, began more than a dozen years ago, after I had been unexpectedly retired (downsized) out of a job by a large corporation that was engaged in some cyclical bloodletting.
As you might guess, it's a bit discombobulating to find yourself out of work at 63 years old. You wonder how you will spend those 7 or 8 hours per day, how you will survive on much less income etc. I busied myself as best I could, practicing guitar, taking up strength training in the gym, playing in a jazz trio, teaching guitar in the evenings in a local music school, and developing and delivering a class on jazz history (many thanks to Mr. Gioia for his writing on the subject).
One day, my phone rang. My son was calling. He worked as a special education assistant at a local secondary school here in Vancouver. He had a question.
"Would you be interested in coming to my class and play music, like you did when I was in pre-school and kindergarten." (I am a longtime guitar player and singer, going back to the folk boom era in the 60's.)
"You mean.... like... Wheels On The Bus?" I asked.
"Yup. Wheels On The Bus."
I said yes, and was booked in for one hour, one afternoon per week.
The kids in my son's class had a variety of severe disabilities: mental handicaps, autism, cerebral palsy, among others. They weren't able to integrate into the regular classes, and were lumped together into one group. A small group of stalwarts, my son and several cohorts, overseen by a teacher, looked after the kids, teaching what they could to whom they could, feeding those who needed help, taking those who needed help to the bathroom, and a myriad of other duties. It was called a Lifeskills Class, and it was the bottom rung of the high school, left alone by the administration and other teachers.
I am fortunate to know a *lot* of songs.... hundreds of 'em, ranging from children's songs to well-known folk, pop and rock tunes.
But I had to learn to navigate and read the room, and discover what songs seemed to appeal to the kids and the staff.
I'd had experience with adults with mental handicaps, but that's just a label, so I was not green as grass, but I had no experience with people with autism, and frankly, each person is an individual. I had a lot to learn! But as Yogi Berra said famously, "you can observe a lot by watching."
I assembled a book of songs that grew over time to more than 100: Beatles songs, Leadbelly songs, Raffi songs, traditional tunes (She'll Be Comin' Around The Mountain, I Been Working On The Railroad and the like), some Creedence, many oldies from the 50's, Broadway show tunes and on.
As I got to know the staff, I involved them... a couple of the guys could sing soprano, so "Sherry" by the Four Seasons got some rotation. When one of them celebrated his engagement, "Goin' To The Chapel" became an obligatory tune, replete with dance steps and harmonies. Staff began picking tunes they liked. One of them, Diana, wanted the eponymous tune by Paul Anka, the one her dad sang to her growing up in the Philippines. Another had a piercing soprano voice, and became the lynchpin for a loud version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".
I got to know the particular tunes that kids really liked. One loved "You Are My Sunshine", another, "Take Me Out To The Ballgame". "Twist and Shout" led to dancing.
I did that for a year as a volunteer, and then the school found a small amount of money to pay me! I earned tens of dollars!
I played with that class for ten years or so, and as word of mouth spread, I added another school with a similar lifeskills class to my week, and then an adult care centre for people with disabillities. More tens of dollars! In each instance, I got to know the dedicated staffs who did the heavy lifting, and the kids, and tailored the hour to each group.
I played music to classes via Zoom during the pandemic, and to the kids and their parents during the summer of 2020, when we were still all locked down. Eventually, I returned to playing in person.
These days, I've added one person to my last career as an "uncertified, unregistered music therapist": a young woman who was in one of the classes I sang for several years ago. She's 18, on the autism spectrum, and school has been an unhappy experience for her. Her older sister contacted me and wondered if I could help - she was spending her time alone in a group home, and had taken to hitting herself in the face repeatedly. She was now forced to wear a helmet and face shield, to prevent injury. I play and sing over Zoom to her. We began in January of this year. For months she ignored me, keeping her head down, colouring and cutting out pieces of paper. But by the spring, we had a breakthrough - she began to sing along! It turns out that she remembers many of the tunes she first heard in the lifeskills class 5 years ago. Today, she wears a ball cap during our sessions, greets me with "Hi, Terry" and "Goodbye, Terry" and joins in on "Hit The Road Jack", "Yellow Submarine", an epic version of "The Cat Came Back", "Don't Worry Be Happy", "Here Comes The Sun" and others. She smiles often, and has begun making hand gestures to punctuate the songs. And she sings in key and follows my inflection. All in 8 months!
To say it's been rewarding is an understatement. I've learned a lot about the wide breadth of what it means to be human, laughed a lot with kids and their helpers, and let's face it, working for one hour per day is ideal! And those tens of dollars ;-)
But the best part of all of this, is that for several years, I got to sing Wheels On The Bus with my son, as we did when he was a toddler, and see how he worked with the kids. A rare treat for a proud papa. A couple of years ago, he went back to university to get a degree in education, and this fall will be an elementary school teacher, starting a new career.
Wheels On The Bus, indeed!
I really enjoyed reading all about your musical journey with the kids. Great stuff.
Wow. What an amazing story.
What a lovely story.
This was a WONDERFUL story ! Thank You
I'm finally a full-time author--best gig in the world!
But...
In my early twenties, I worked at a company with toxic owners/bosses and one Friday night, I walked out with an "I quit" note left on my desk and never looked back. Every anxiety dream I had from that point on was some variation on working there again and being ashamed that I had to crawl back to that job.
Fast forward over ten years and I'd just started a new job as a new public health nurse. Part of my duties included going to companies and administering flu shots. Imagine my shock when my very first solo gig was at that company. I was so new, I didn't want to make waves and explain the issue to my new boss, so I embraced the suck and found myself there a week later. Talk about surreal. I felt like I was living out my anxiety dream.
To make matters worse, not only did they remember me, when one boss had called to leave me a message, she'd actually recognized my husband's voice on our answering machine (plus he said our somewhat distinctive names, and yes, it was that long ago) so they knew it was me coming in.
To their credit, they were very nice to me, acting as though we'd all parted on great terms. Then again, I was about to stick needles into their arms, so that MIGHT have contributed to their friendliness. So, there I was, back at the toxic place I'd left years ago, where it was now my job to stick needles into the people who drove me away.
I haven't had that anxiety dream since. Moral of the story: face your fears! With a needle in hand if you can.
Great story… amazing how controlling and sharp the mind of a competent psychopath can be! I have echoes of this experience
If it was an anxiety provoking experience, wouldn't the opportunity to jam needles into the arms of those accountable be somewhat joyful?
My first job was washing dishes for a cranky German woman in a place that always smelled sauerbraten. My second one was in the meat dpt. at Kroger. Then a college library until I dropped out. Then again at Kroger. Then trying to sell newspapers over the phone. I've been lucky to work at a library for about 23+ years. The library is a conducive place for any writer and radio show programmer as myself. Plus you get access to all kinds of music and books you might never have read or listened to. So much culture, so many choices. I applied three times before I got in, and it took me over ten years before I got a promotion, but it has been worth it. I wish others similar good work that is fitted to their personality.
I worked in an exotic pet store. One night, I was attacked by a vicious Golden Tegu Monitor lizard. 🦎. It nearly took my finger off and I nearly shit my pants running away from that damned thing. I ran out the door and never came back, not even to pick up my last paycheck.
My husband owns a tegu! You win! -
You win. Best story!
When I was 15 (summer of 1993), I did four hours of telemarketing and quit.
The gig was to call random businesses around the USA and say, 'We're your packing tape supplier, would you like to re-order?' The vendors would reply, truthfully, 'we don't have a packing tape supplier.' That's when I was to go into the spiel about how if they ordered a box of tape from me, I could send them a free clock radio.
I hated the lying and I saw a pile of index cards with leads stacked a foot high on my desk and I told the boss I wasn't feeling good and walked home and never showed up again.
A classic maneuver. I once quit a bad retail job the same way, to play an unpaid trio gig with two musicians I loved. The start time of the gig overlapped with the end of my shift so I just left during lunch, texted that I'd run into an "emergency" and never spoke to those people again.
I did this same gig and also left at lunch on Day 1 and never returned! I knew it was trouble when they told me not to use my real name because it was "too memorable"
Right after the economic crash of ‘08- 09 I went to work in a call center that was selling real estate leads on seized properties(basically properties that were cheap).
After a couple of months on the job our paychecks started bouncing. The doors closed.This made the local news in Austin. The company apologized and set up a meeting for us to go and get legitimate checks. The news watched this carefully. The 2nd round of checks bounced.
I've been working since age 15. Here's a chronological list of jobs I've had :)
-ice cream stand at local pool
-babysitter
-gymnastics coach
-steakhouse hostess
-waitress
-record store clerk
-Alzheimer's/Dementia caregiver
-MRDD caregiver
-Greyhound Rescue Ambassador
-Pharmacy/Non-Foods Assistant Manager
-Travel Agent
-Market Research
-Piano School Administrator
-Foreign Language Coordinator
My least favorite job was at the piano school. It's still weird to type that because I was beyond excited to get the job offer. I left a cushy corporate job in marketing for a career in music. The owner was a sadist who got off scaring students, other teachers, and her admin staff. I only worked under her for 11 months, but I'll never again underestimate the toll a toxic workplace can take on one's mental health. Being smeared, rumors, gossip--no thanks! It still makes me cringe to think of that environment. I truly hope she got some help.
My favorite jobs were at the record store and my current one. At the record store, I memorized a ton of bands. I was 16 and worked with college students who taught me all the cool music :). Now, I manage a document translation department. I get to contract with hundreds of interpreters from all over the world in my average-sized midwestern town. I've learned so much about culture, languages, religion, taboos, and our shared humanity from the comfort of a small business. It's far from perfect, but it feels so good when my clients trust me...even when we don't speak the same language.
Worst side job: Selling the services of a company that makes those business pamphlets that sit in a little plastic stand on the counters of dentist's offices or whatever. Driving around a county in Ohio, selling literally nothing because it was 2010 and who still needed a specialized company to make a pamphlet anymore? It just felt pointless while also sort of discouraging, haha
Best side job: The Solid Waste Management district in the county where I grew up hired me to put on an inflatable aluminum can costume and stand outside of box stores spreading the good word about recycling. I was like 16-17yo. It paid really well, the can costume had this remarkably adorable face on it, and I was completely mind-blown at how well-received I was by literally every person entering/exiting the stores. Kids would hug me, families would want a photo, dudes high-fiving me. Haha, it was just solid positive vibes and I did literally nothing other than shuffle around, waving, and doing my best to imbue a giant inflatable can with something like affable warmth and infectious enthusiasm. A friendly can en route to being recycled but keeping a good attitude about it. An existential lesson for all of us.
:) "Just solid positive vibes and I did literally nothing other than shuffle around"
I was working as the site superintendent for a large general contractor. We were rehabbing former military buildings after the base had returned to civilian ownership when the military withdraw. I’m in my office working on some bid sets for potential future projects. Then I realize I can’t hear anything, and this is a site with approximately 100 people on various subcontractors and our own crews. The power is on but still no audible cues of activity. So I go out to have a look around, and after about ten minutes found all 100+ standing in front of the building, but looking opposite.
Across the field is a noted historical building that predated the base by over 300 years. And in front of it were a dozen Victoria’s Secret models having a photo shoot.
We didn’t get much done that day.
I worked for a silk screen t-shirt company while attending the Cooper Union art school.
The creative director was a follower of Sung Yun Moon. I had to endure sermons from time to time.
However, the entire operation was a front for laundering cocaine dealing. One day I showed up for work. The place was surrounded by cop cars with their lights flashing.
Time to look for a new job.
Right now… call center work with micro management on steroids is pretty annoying.