Best/Worst Short-Term Job

[Pangloss62]

Between junior high and 35-years-old, I had about a dozen or so jobs of varying degrees of satisfaction. Now that I have fallen into a steady gig, It's amusing to look back at all those crazy jobs. Describe your best/worst job from your early working years (or perhaps best/worst is what you do now). I'll start with my best:

Right after I completed my master's in history and got divorced, I was broke, in debt, and without a job. Rent was due. I had no time to wait for my perfect history job, so I took a job as a security guard at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I had my own golf cart, two-way radio, and a cadre of other guards to goof around with. Boy, did we take advantage! The place was huge, with paths and roads everywhere. Talk about "tooling around." We even went off-road and made a cool little course in the woods. Our boss was a mean fat-ass, but he just stayed in his office and barked orders over the radio, so we had a lot of freedom. When we weren't racing around on our carts we went on "foot patrol." On foot patrol all you did was walk around the garden and tell people "You can't picnic there" or tell the kids "Don't play in the fountain." It was a joke and I loved it! I got some reflector shades and an earphone for my radio and looked like a total tool, but the joke was on everybody else because I knew I looked that way. I even had a brief romance with a German intern who worked in the greenhouses. This was crucial because I had just gone through my divorce. We could pick up extra money by working the Bar/Bat Mitzvah parties that took place after hours. Damn, that was a great job, but the kind of job you know can't last forever, and would probably not be as memorable if it did.



Yep, that's me, Pangloss62 back in 1997