A while ago, I compiled a list of every job I’ve ever had. I don’t know why I did this. Perhaps because I have a really lousy memory and might forget entire swaths of my life if I didn’t keep lists, pictures, and other triggers around to remind me of what I’ve done and who I’ve been. Perhaps I had some time to kill and was feeling nostalgic. Who knows.

This list is a bit long because I went through a period of time between the ages of, say, 15 and 23 when I never kept a job longer than three months. They just got so tedious, you know? So I’d stop going. Like the guy in Office Space. His concept wasn’t particularly novel to me, and I couldn’t figure out why he spent most of the movie debating whether or not to stop going to a job he hated. Just stop going, dude. It’s easy. (Though, admittedly, he was an office dude, and he’d gone to college, so his job was less disposable than all the clerk jobs betwixt which I flitted more flitty-like than a honeybee in a clover field.

So, without further ado:

1. lawn mowing kid
2. video store clerk
3. ice cream store clerk
4. convenience store clerk
5. TJ Maxx clerk
6. Burger King clerk (2 weeks)
7. grocery clerk (produce)
8. plastic container factory worker (1 day)
9. convenience store clerk (different store)
10. street sign changer and tree trimmer
11. apprentice woodworker
12. Barnes and Noble clerk
13. convenience store clerk (different store)
14. gas station clerk (graveyard shift)
15. convenience store clerk (different store)
16. driver for furniture designer
17. bike messenger
18. van messenger
19. temp worker
20. Tower Records clerk
21. focus group participant (intermittent)
22. driver for demolition company
23. recording engineer
24. indie-rock bass player
25. lightbulb changer
26. graphic designer
27. textbook typesetter
28. bookstore clerk again
29. assistant bookkeeper
30. Thrifty Nickel layout guy
31. Visiting Foreign Lecturer
32. Business Analyst
33. Senior Financial Engineer

You think you can tell where in there I finally finished college, but you’d be wrong. I actually finished college just before “bookstore clerk again.” There was a little lull in there, and the job market in Santa Fe, NM for liberal arts graduates wasn’t the best. I couldn’t find a full-time job to save my life. So I found four part-time jobs instead.

That's pretty impressive, I'd have a hard time labeling many of the things I did. Like what is the position for collating papers in Dunn's attic? Napping while supposed to be assembling machined widgets by hand in Mitter Tompin's garage? Having a paper route for one of the free papers but not delivering the papers? Taking the rolls from the bread baskets of departing diners and putting them in a big bin to get recycled into future diners' bread baskets? Throwing cans of paint forcefully into a huge trash compactor and seeing what kinds of patterns can be created? Good times.