I wear glasses. I have worn glasses since I was in elementary school 2nd grade — the “aviator” style made of cheap plastic that I frequently broke during recess kickball games and then had to tape together so I could wear them.
I have never figured out how to keep my glasses clean in the subsequent four+ decades of my life.
But I seriously doubt this is “newsworthy.” Cringeworthy, maybe.
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…
I saw a baseball game last September. That was live. Does that count?
Oh. Do you mean “live” in the Japanese sense, i.e., a live performance by a musical artist?
As in a live concert?
At a club?
Or just that the musicians were alive and actually wrote their own music and played their own instruments rather than danced around and lip-synced?
Yes. I am a snarky Gen-Xer. Wave the flannel.
(FWIW I think the last live musical performance I’ve seen was in a Japanese club in Osaka around 2000 or 2001, and before that in mid-1999 in a club somewhere in Boston. It’s hard to get out when you have a family and need to actually go to work in the morning.)
My middle name is actually Thomas. I chose to use “M Thomas” as a pen name out of respect for my father, who taught me how to write. As a professional communications writer, he was responsible for lots of public documents for the NYS DMV, including traffic safety reports, driver manuals, press releases from the Governor, all sorts of “my boss will feel the need to edit this, so I will deliberately leave behind something for him to do so as he doesn’t screw up the entire thing” document.
I may or may not have adopted this strategy in my own professional work (I certainly adopted the attitude…)
Another reason is because I had a baby brother named Thomas. He passed away before reaching five months old when I was not quite 11. It had a major impact on me as a child (and indeed as the adult and as the father I am).
I have no sons. It bothers me that I may be the last Thomas in our family. For a while, anyway.
There is nothing quite like the feeling sitting in a busy place produces, when it is quiet. The sense of empty vacancy seems more restrictive than if one were crowded, surrounded by should to shoulder hip-grinders.
There is no vibe. There are no walls of personality off which to bounce your own. How else can one tell one is alive?
M Thomas Apple Author Page 