M Thomas Apple Author Page

What jobs have you had?

What jobs have I *not* had would be a better question.

Right…

• Lawn mower (right after I got my “working papers” at age 14, along with my social security number — this is now assigned at birth in the US)
• Pizza dough maker (seriously, that’s all I did at first)
• Pizza maker and deli worker (same restaurant)
• Tarred the school parking lot and roof (no idea what this job would be called)
• McDonald’s (who hasn’t? Both opening and closing, including cleaning the deep oil fryer. Ugh.)
• Gymnasium weight room staff
• Gymnasium pool cleaner
• Volleyball court setup and take down
• Softball umpire (all four work-study jobs at college with a max number of hours per week)
• Bookstore clerk (Barnes & Nobles)
• Dishwasher (summer time only)
• Short order cook (same restaurant as the dishwasher job)
• Stock boy (stationery store for all of two days)
• Temp worker (stuffing envelopes for three days, yawn)
• Blockbuster clerk (out of business video rental store—anybody remember VHS tapes?)
• Bookstore clerk (used bookstore in Ann Arbor, mostly stocking and organizing overflow in the basement, although I did help set up a comic book and gaming store annex)
• First year composition teacher (this was a paid TA job for one semester in grad school)
• Computer software store clerk (mall seasonal job—I got in trouble once for suggesting that a customer try another software store for a game series we didn’t carry rather than lie by saying we’d let him know when we got it; I hadn’t realized lying was company policy…)
• Computer salesperson (my first “full time” job—I lasted two months—definitely not slick enough to work for sales commish)
• Kinko’s (computer design department)
• Weekly newspaper (computer layout)
• A small H&R firm (computer design…you can probably sense a trend…)
• Assistant language teacher (the jump to Japan)
• Language instructor (late night after school cram school for junior high kids)
• Assistant Professor (both part time and full time contractual)
• Professor (it’s amazing now to see how I wound up teaching TESOL…)

This may not include some odds and ends here and there when I was in JHS and SHS. I worked a lot of summer jobs and Christmas/ New Year’s break jobs. I worked most weekends while I was a full time students, and most Friday evenings, too. I don’t recall the pay for all of them, but I remember the pizza dough job paid $3.15 an hour, and four years later McDonald’s paid a whopping $3.75 an hour.

You know, I’d be very interested to find out what jobs my colleagues have had. In college when I borrowed money to study abroad in Germany, my classmates wandered around Europe for the summer while I returned and had exactly $0 to my name and worked double-shifts. I wonder how many literature or history professors spent summer days getting burned on their arms with 400F cooking oil or getting yelled at by bankers because their document wasn’t printed fast enough…