Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

So today is Labor Day, “a day off for the working citizens” or the unofficial end of summer. Karen, the girls, and I went to the Crossroads Market on our day off.

I was reading an interesting post on the Get Rich Slowly blog where the author was recounting Every Job I’ve Ever Had and I thought that could be fun. So here I go (I am going to include volunteer work too, since that is work even if there is no pay – I’ll indicate volunteer work with a (V)):

• Assistant Stage Manager, Hello Dolly (Community Theatre, is it really bad that I can’t remember the name of the community or the theatre just that it was in New Jersey?) (V): This was a lot of work, and my first non-school related gig. It made me really want to pursue technical theatre as a possible career.
• Assistant, Staten Island Children’s Museum (V): I worked in various areas, but my favorite was the broadcasting section where the kids could produce a news cast with the weather report and everything.
• Assistant, Children’s Science Program (V): One of my science teachers in high school did a workshop on Saturdays for kids where we did all kinds of fun science projects.
• Environmental Research (V): That same science teacher helped me become interested in the environment. We would go out regularly to take measurements to track the population of the Blue Herons on Staten Island.
• Night Desk Attendant: My first paid job in college. Signing people into the dorm since the doors are all locked over night. I had the 3-7 AM shift, so I didn’t sign too many people in or out. However, I did have to disarm the alarm and unlock all of the external doors. Disarming the alarm wasn’t a simple on/off you had to turn a key in just the right fashion, which is probably easy when you aren’t about to fall asleep. There was many a time I accidentally set the alarm off. Luckily I was usually able to shut it off pretty quickly.
• Dish Washer/Sandwich Preparer, FSA: I had a couple of shifts where I worked the dish room. Loading a giant dishwasher and emptying garbage cans. Hey it’s work. My other shifts were spent making sandwiches. Nothing too intricate although I got in trouble often for putting too much meat on the sandwiches.
• Mathematics/Computer Science Tutor, The Learning Center: My first “knowledge-worker” job. In addition to group tutoring I also did individual tutoring.
• House Painter, College Pro: Believe it or not this was a very enjoyable job. It was a nice feeling to have a physical completed result at the end of the job. I guess I was pretty good at it too, since more often than not I wound up on the clean up crew, where we would fix the mistakes of the previous crew.
• Computer Technician, Performance PC: My first “career” job. I spent five years at this job, learning a lot about computers and customer service. It was a great experience leading up to:
• Instructional Support Technician, Academic Information Technology, Help Desk: My current position. I love it here. My worst day at work is still better than most other days at my previous jobs. I maintain seven labs, five servers, and several campus-wide programs/services among other things. It’s a very interesting job, never a dull moment.