First Seven Jobs

So I'm going to jump on the #firstsevenjobs bandwagon and blog my first seven jobs. Actually, I've realized that there's a lot of overlap here because who needs just one job, right?

#1 Babysitter - I worked in the John's Creek United Methodist Church nursery for my first steady paycheck but also freelanced through middle school and into high school. Even after I had other jobs I will fill in for Cara when she couldn't make it.

#2 Lawn Mower - I mowed the lawn at the Farmbrook neighborhood pool in high school. This was a gig that only lasted the warmer months: me, pushing the mower down the hill to the pool, mowing it, and then pushing it back up the hill again. Getting it back up the hill I remember being harder than the actually mowing. This overlapped with the previous and the following income sources.

#3 Stockboy - I got this gig at Kroger the summer between my junior and senior years, the first summer I was 16 and thus old enough to get a real job in the eyes of the state of Georgia. I worked there in the afternoons/evening that summer, overnight (to make more money) the summer after I graduated high school, and then when I came home from college for Christmas break I got another 2 weeks in.

#4 Chemistry Lab Assistant - Basically I washed things. Sometimes with acetone. Sometimes with soap and water. I admittedly hadn't washed a large number of dishes before this, and I like to think this is when I became proficient at it. I also made up a song about how acetone was my favorite solvent. I was taking organic chemistry at the time so it was appropriate. I also realized I didn't want to major in chemistry, so the job was not available to me my second semester at PC.

#5 Writer/Editor - I wrote articles for the Presbyterian College Net Publication (PCNP) about things like genealogy and Nunavut being split off into its own territory. And got paid for it. In fact, I was so good that I got promoted to editor at the end of the year. This was the first job where I had an office. This was also the job that got me started in web development. It was before webhosting existed, so we had a unix machine named Frankenstein that was hooked up to the network an old dot matrix printer (the paper with the holes on the side to feed it through). I still feel bad about leaving the editor gig when I left PC for the totally unrelated reason that I wanted to take physics classes and the professor who supposed to teach them got hit by a truck while biking and was going to be out for the year.

#6 Yard Maintenance - This was actually concurrently with my editorship of PCNP. I was taking summer classes at PC at the time. It was for a local company called Earthscapes. I still remember how my boss knew a place in town where he could get a beer to go with lunch and drink it on the way to our next job. This ended as well when I left Clinton and PC for Atlanta and Georgia Tech.

#7 Server - I got a gig waiting tables where my little brother had worked as a busboy that summer, La Paz. Georgia Tech didn't start until like the end of September or something so I had like a month or so of full time work after my summer courses at PC ended and we left Clinton. This was the first of several jobs waiting tables. It's good money, fast paced, and I would recommend it to anybody starting out. I continued working there through my first year at Tech. My first car died in their parking lot. I left this job to get my weekends back and I had a couple TA jobs (CS & Math) by then at Tech.