Workin' for a Living

Lately, we've been spending quite a bit of time at my house discussing careers. My older daughter just started her senior year of high school (sob!) and is looking at colleges - which means she's also trying to decide what the heck she wants to do with her life.

She's washed dishes at a local diner and now waits tables at a restaurant downtown. My kids seem to gravitate toward jobs in food service as my son worked as a busboy/counter guy/dishwasher/some-time cook at a local restaurant before working as a Dietary Aide at our hospital (which is a fancy way of saying he washed dishes and filled food trays :-)

Their job experiences had me thinking of the jobs I've held over the years. My first job was counting and wrapping change at a bank downtown. Really. They had this little room with a huge change sorter/wrapper where I'd work for a few hours a week. I had to cut open the bags of loose change (already sorted, thank goodness) pour them into the machine and then load the wrapped coins onto metal trays. The trays were then stacked in the safe.

My next job was at the same bank but as a teller. I held this position twice: once the summer after high school and then later right after I got married until I had my son.

I didn't go back to work until my son was a few months old. I put my cosmetologist license to good use and worked in a hair salon for all of three weeks before deciding my true calling was that of a stay-at-home mother.

When my kids were little, I worked for my father and two brothers in the office of their contracting firm. And let me just say that as much as I love my family, and though I stayed at that job for years, there is no way I'd ever work for them again. 'Nuff said *g*

Luckily, by that time I knew what I really wanted to be when I grew up: A Romance Writer! Today I'm blessed to be able to do what I love for a living and I hope to have this job for many, many, MANY years to come ;-)

So let's talk jobs! Here's my husband's list:

Hardest job - lawn care at a local cemetery. The mowing wasn't so bad but he had to trim around the 100+ headstones. And since this was before weed whackers, he had do to them all by hand *g*

Weirdest job - growing crystals that were cut in to wafers to make the chips for integrated circuits.

Shortest amount of time he held a job - 30 minutes. That's right. He'd just started a new job when he got the call letting him know he had a better offer at a different place :-)

What was your hardest job? Your weirdest? Most fun? And can anyone beat my husband's record for shortest time employed?