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two bits
01/28/2006 = 05:13 PM

One of the great advantages to gluing my fat butt to the computer chair and forcing myself to throw brain confetti every damned day, even if I don't post it every damned day, is that just about anything I see turns itself into a writing prompt.

So, everyone's doing the list of jobs they've had over the years, and I really didn't want to do this, because my full list is just plain boring.

Doesn't mean it's not prompting me to write, though.

I will talk about my first job, because it was sort of a highlight in my vastly diversified life of working, and a hell of a lot more interesting than the bulleted résumé of everything that followed it over the years.

Come back with me.

The first job for which I was offered cash money, about two years before my first paid babysitting job, was a gig for my aunt's husband, who is so not my uncle that the light from "family" won't reach him for about five million bazillionookle years.

He would hand me a stack of technical articles and reprints, which required his initials and a date at the end, acknowledging that he had read them. Which he had not.

Over and over. MB 2/8/80. MB 2/8/80. Hundreds of them, because he let them stack up. He offered me a quarter for the stack.

I did the stack, and then, another one had built up, because he'd let those first ones build up for so long. MB 5/22/80. MB 5/22/80.

For the same quarter.

Which, incidentally, he never coughed up. He was as bad of an employer as he was of an employee.

When he got fired from that job, I was very sorry for my aunt, but, secretly, I and my aching hand rejoiced.

I was nine.

If you take the repetitiveness of writing someone else's initials and a long-past date on stacks of technical reprints for hours on end, and multiply it about a thousandfold, you'd have the interest level of talking about any of the other jobs I've done over the years.

Not of doing the jobs. My current job is fun and I think I'm good at it. But it's boring to talk about and even more boring to listen about.

No one wants to hear it when you like your job. If they did, Scott Adams would be forced to draw cute animals or precocious children, instead of doing the fun job, for assloads of money, of depicting everyone else doing our often frustrating, sometimes tedious, definitely lower-paying than what we deserve, work.

On the other hand, my aunt's husband (who is so beyond not being related to me in any way, shape, or form that I could more easily interact with a sold-out stadium of non-English-speaking weasel groomers) may not have read those technical reprints, but I read a bunch of them, and some bits of them stayed with me, even though I was only nine.

Enough so that I was able, nearly twenty years later, to go into a software company without yet having a degree, looking for a job as a receptionist or a typist or, really, anything that would please get me the fuck out of sales, and know enough about the company's programming language that they hired me as a technician.

Nothing you ever learn is wasted. Gee, where have I heard that one before?

(Hint: same lady who taught me that, if you put a spoonful of brewed coffee into homemade spaghetti sauce, it reduces the acidity without your having to add salt or sugar.)

That's worth the quarter I never got paid, any old day.

I've been nominated for the 2006 Bloggie Awards.

Which means I've turned into one of The Nominated People With a Graphic on My Page.

But I'm still not going to smacktalk my fellow nominees. Attention whore or no, I'd rather still like myself when this is all said and done.

I am nominated in the category of "Best-Kept-Secret Weblogs", which is way the hell down by the bottom of the page, thereby ensuring that I remain a well-kept secret.

Voting will be open till 10:00 PM EST on Tuesday, January 31.

drinking: diet cherry citrus fresca
listening to: The Strokes, You Only Live Once
wondering: what compound interest would do to that quarter, by now