BS: Your former odd jobs

Subject: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Jan 18 - 10:32 PM

It was fun to learn Rachel Maddow used to be a bike messenger.
I worked at a A&W Root Beer stand.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 04 Jan 18 - 10:36 PM

I spent a couple of weeks working for a commercial museum in a ghost town.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Joe Offer
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 02:50 AM

I'm a part-time Latin tutor. Does that count?

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 03:09 AM

I have been:-

a paid baby-sitter
a dog-sitter
a part-time nanny
a sales assistant of children's vests and pants in Littlewoods
a canteen assistant for Littlewoods staff canteen
a short-order chef in a cafe
a dish washer
a temporary auxiliary nurse
a cleaner

I actually enjoyed all of these, but the nursing was the best and most interesting. (I was only 19 at the time)

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Rusty Dobro
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 03:42 AM

Bo Foaks, much-missed Cornwall folkie and stalwart of the Tenterden Folk Festival, (and who introduced me to the Mudcat), once employed me to ride his drag-racing motorbike in the days before he had his own driving licence.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Will Fly
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 03:50 AM

Seaside photographer
Washer-up in seaside cafe
Production line worker in linoleum factory
Gardener's labourer
Barman
Busker
Traffic census enumerator
Shop assistant in men's boutique

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 03:56 AM

The job itself was quite normal - Computer specialist - but I once had to install some computer gear in a massive tiled ex-bathroom in a Victorian built lunatic asylum!

DtG

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Iains
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 04:17 AM

I had a part time job for some years making gnomes(garden)

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 04:59 AM

A Saturday/school holiday job as a milkman;

Handing out toys to kids in a Christmas grotto before they went on to see Santa.

DC

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 05:54 AM

For a short time I was one of a group of volunteer planetarium operators during an exhibition.

Robin

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 07:20 AM

I was a complete nitwit when I was young. (Husband would say, no change there then!) I had some right disasters when doing my 'odd jobs':-

I once let the potato-peeling machine run on for too long, and the thing grated and grated until the spuds came out the size of peanuts.

I put far too much artificial cream liquid in the big whisker, and it beat the stuff into a massive foam that flowed over the entire kitchen and engulfed everyone up to their knees.

I collected up the false teeth for the geriatric patients and cleaned them all beautifully. But I didn't make a note of which were whose. So had to go round trying them all in different mouths. I bet several got someone else's teeth!

And selling children's vests etc in Edinburgh, I wasn't familiar with all the different Scottish banknotes, and happily gave change for £10 for every £5 I was handed. No wonder I had a lot of customers!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Iains
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 07:52 AM

Senoufou. Welcome back!

Your post had me laughing all the way through. I think we can all claim similar disasters but are extremely reluctant to fess up.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: DMcG
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 08:03 AM

I spent some time as a brick unlayer.

It was a site where people were taught to be bricklayers and my job was to take all the walls etc to pieces and restack the bricks for future use. Ditto the 'cement'.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 08:26 AM

Hahaha DMcG!! Hope the people didn't see your demolition!

When I first started teaching, we were told to show the girls how to knit, and once they had made a small square, to unravel the whole thing, roll the wool into a ball and save it for the next class. I did this in secret, as their little faces fell doing it in front of them.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 08:35 AM

My most memorable experience of all was helping the theatre orderly in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. I was very nosy and wanted to know everything. One day, I found a gangrenous, blackened leg sticking out of a steel bucket in the 'prep room'. I actually picked it up (!!) carried it towards him and asked why it was so black, how it had been cut off and what should I do with it? He gasped and spluttered and told me to put the bloody thing back where I'd found it. (In fact it was destined for the Medical School next door)

I won't go into detail, but I still smile at Sister's stern instructions on 'How to give Men a blanket bath." I'd never seen 'a Man' before, and hadn't a clue what to do with one. She actually demonstrated on an elderly chap. I didn't know where to put my face!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: DMcG
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 08:57 AM

Because of obscure laws, shops with a sign that overhangs a street can claim ownership of the land underneath after a period (or could do some 40+ years ago). So councils would charge 'peppercorn rents' off the legal owner of the sign just to assert in law that the council owned the land.


So one of my flatmates in Uni days had a vacation job to ring up CEOs of multi-million pound businesses and demand a few pence off them.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 09:44 AM

Oooh, I bet they were reluctant to cough up!

This thread has awakened all sorts of funny memories of my youth.
I can still hear that Scottish Sister on the geriatric ward saying, "Mind now, nurrrse, always rrretrract the forrrrreskin!"

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: DMcG
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 11:21 AM

I am afraid the normal response was 'Why are you wasting my &@&@% time?"

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 01:33 PM

Besides being a 'paper boy' (during the Korean war) and being a grocery clerk during high school & college, I have
worked in a library shelving books,
sold scrap metal and 'other stuff' at a surplus store,
put up pipes & drapes & banners at fairs for a display company,
done various jobs (carpentry, painting, etc.)in the building & grounds dept. at my college,
sorted mail and proof-read Federal Register articles at the EPA,

routed incoming supplies at Beech Aircraft warehouse,
worked at an 'adult' bookstore for 3 years,
been an 'analyst' for a software company and worked in a cabinet shop for almost 5 years.

But, I can also claim that I was a genuine bean counter! I was cycle inventory person at a Stokely Van Camps cannery. I also counted the cases of peaches, corn, Gatorade...etc.

I also made $4000 in 2 years as a graduate teaching asst. in Philosophy. That was supposed to be my "career", but things, as they say, didn't work out. :>(

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 01:52 PM

'an adult bookstore...' Hmmm. Fifty Shades of Grey?

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Joe_F
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 06:12 PM

I was a meter calibrator.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Jan 18 - 07:01 PM

Senoufou ... mostly red & yellow.. with LOTS of pink.

>this place I just started there and didn't know about the interview for awhile. I 'think' it happened before I started but just didn't published right away.

   There are many distortions in the piece, but it WAS different and they actually did have some club meetings for a short while. Both of the owners were very intelligent and educated women and I have some funny stories about the place.... a bit different from counting beans. ?

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Donuel
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 08:13 AM

It may not be in your case Bill but getting a PH 'all but dissertation' has driven lesser people mad.
Today many if not most dissertations contain plagiarism. They are all warehoused in Ann Arbor Michigan. I think the rules for publishing have changed. I do not have a phd so my tangential knowledge may be wrong. Seeking PHDs can be a pisser that keeps on pissing.

I did circuit board assembly at IBM back in the moonshot days until I did a TINY mistake and went back to SUC Fredonia music school.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: fat B****rd
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 08:42 AM

During school holidays; Change boy and slot machine "mechanic" on the prom at Cleethorpes. That's when I discovered that grown-ups said F*** and nearly got mistakenly "filled in" by one of the boys off the Dodgems.
Left school
Dogs body in clothes shop
Clerk x 4 various offices
Concrete shipper
Clerk in accounts dept
Paint stripper in telephone factory
Degreaser       "    "       "
Press operator "    "       "
Storeperson    "    "       "
Temporary in foam factory!
Picker/packer/truck driver etc in domestic spares warehouse
Invigilator at local college
Layabout

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Phil Cooper
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 08:58 AM

The first job I had as a kid was picking strawberries. After that I taught guitar lessons, worked in a printing plant, worked in a mattress factory for all of two weeks, worked at a department store camera and house wares departments, back to the printing plant full time, substitute teacher until 1985. In '85 after only having three days of teaching jobs in the month of February I took a part time job as a park district janitor. That wound up turning into full time. They were very good about letting me take time off to play music, so I wound up staying for 28 years and formally retired in 2013. These days we substitute teach again, but have pension income as well. So all the jobs had their odd bits.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Jackaroodave
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 09:19 AM

Donuel, as a holder of a doctorate and former university teacher whose mentors, colleagues, and friends wrote dissertations now on file at Ann Arbor, I'm surprised and would like to know your evidence that "many or most" of us are plagiarists.

On Topic: One summer I was the mouse-killer at the Detroit Institute of Cancer Research. Actually, I tended, monitored, and cleaned the cages of the mice bred for susceptibility to cancer, but once a week I'd go through the population with a big jar of chloroform and toss in the ones to be sacrificed or discarded. Got a lot of karma to work off.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Donuel
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 10:03 AM

To further qualify claims of plagiarism I only have anecdotal evidence.
There are minor issues such as incorrect or absent sourcing and footnote mistakes , then there is the wholesale Melania type copying. Add ghost writing and other issues like overseas translations all together and it is significant but never 'most'. There are probably fields where cheating is impossible.   
I have no aim to disrespect the accomplishment but when Human nature has a will there is a way. The number of people involved in the agonizing process prevents most wrongdoing.

Too bad executive office does not require advanced degrees or any degree for that matter.


First jobs like paperboy does stay with us. It does with me.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Jackaroodave
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 11:13 AM

Thank you, Donuel,

I understand that you didn't mean to point a finger at anyone, and that any field has its scoundrels.

Let me add some reasons (not all distinct from yours) why I think it's unlikely that a given dissertation is plagiarized.

First, reasons of prudence:

In my field, English, at any rate, doctoral students who teach part-time spend too much of their time detecting plagiarism and deciding how to deal with it to feel it is worth the candle: Plagiarized portions of a paper written by a novice are obvious to an expert, and this can be expected to hold at the graduate--professorial level as well as at the undergraduate--doctoral student one.

The writers of dissertations are expected to master--and cite--all the sources that provide the background for their original work. They can expect their dissertation committee to have an even broader and deeper knowledge of the relevant literature. Consequently the probability of discovering a source which is simultaneously a significant, original contribution to the field, but is unknown to one's committee is not large enough to risk.

A student writing a dissertation has already put in from three to umpteen years pursuing a narrow specialty. The benefits of successful plagiarism--if any--are slight, and the possible penalties--loss of years of work, the end of job prospects, banishment from academia--are enormous.

As you point out, the dissertation is eternally preserved at Ann Arbor, so for even the successful plagiarists, the possibility of detection and disgrace remains throughout their careers--most likely at the breakthrough moment when a hiring committee considers a candidate seriously enough to take a look at their publications.

Psychological reasons:

As I suggested above, graduate assistants and ABD teachers are occupationally conditioned to detest plagiarism and other forms of academic cheating. Plagiarism is to academia as perjury is to law: Not only a serious offense, but one that undermines the foundations of the entire institution. For a would-be career academic to base their career on a forgery would involve considerable cognitive and emotional dissonance.

Finally, dissertation authors generally choose their topics: They write about what interests and motivates them. After laboring in the vineyards for years, they have an unprecedented opportunity for them to express THEIR ideas and feelings about what is truly important in the field that they hope will be their life's work. To surrender this opportunity to a covert source--without even getting the credit for discovering it--is something I believe would stick in the craw of most academic egos.

I agree that much plagiarism--probably most--at the undergraduate level is unintentional, and it's on us teachers to do a better job of explaining the rules and conventions--which vary from community to community.

And I also realize that my arguments cannot refute credible testimony of numerous instances of plagiarism. However, a huge number of dissertations are written every year, and I feel I have provided grounds for believing the vast majority are genuine original work.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Donuel
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 05:35 PM

People like this
feed the prejudiced opinions.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 06:13 PM

The first job I got paid for was to produce some drawings of steam locos, side elevations, for my late father's book "Railways round Exmoor" (recent new edition I notice but they didn't tell me about it!).

So I started out as a "Technical Illustrator", which, I suppose, connects to my models that I sell now from time to time on ebay (look up millimodels.co.uk).

Robin

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Jackaroodave
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 06:14 PM

"People like this
feed the prejudiced opinions."

Beautiful! As West Virginians say about certain relatives, "She's one of ours, but we don't claim her." A perfect instance of the exception proving (probing, testing) the rule.

Sorry for the thread drift in response to an off-hand comment.

Back on track, during my misspent youth I was a

hot-dog vendor
gardener/groundskeeper
apprentice operating engineer
mouse killer
factory hand
dishwasher
dry cleaner
truck driver
nurses' assistant
homesteader and herb vendor
house cleaner
migrant academic laborer

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Mooh
Date: 06 Jan 18 - 10:50 PM

Besides my 3 major careers in building maintenance, labour relations, and music...

church verger/caretaker
paperboy
litter collector for a general store
babysitter
retail sales clerk
gardener
carpenter
demolition labourer
tree planter/junior ranger
union shop steward

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: mg
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 12:13 AM

my best job ever was selling carpet samples on a saturday morning. owner of store was also gold prospector. wanted to keep store open, would only let us take names of customers and sell dollar samples. might average 3 per morning. right next door to wonderful deli. right at time great folk music shows came on.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Mrrzy
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 01:01 AM

Hmmm... as the only American adolescent in Abidjan who wasn't sent away to anglophone boarding school, I was not only pretty much the only babysitter, I was also (when needed) the Easter Bunny, Santa's Elf, and, every weekend, the ticket-seller to the Embassy movies.

The Embassy also hired teens during the summer; I was the warehouse receptionist, I typed up a book on anthropology of local tribal women, which involved not only stencils and mimeographs but running around a table collating; this was before smart copiers. And one summer, when they had nothing for me to do, the secretary for the Japanese ambassador, who worked mostly in French. I got to where I could send and receive telexes in the Japanese syllabary without understanding a word of it.

I also painted a house one summer in college, in a failed attempt to learn to like beer.

Lessee, here, I worked in a mouse lab one summer, and I was terrible at sexing the newborns so they kept having unauthorized babies... oops. Oh, and while I was in grad school I tutored the football team, including such stars as Terry Kirby and Herman Moore.

Interesting to see what weve all been up to!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 01:06 PM

house painter. wild
roofer. hot
crawl space cleaner. ew

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 02:44 PM

You must be quite confident up ladders and brave with heights Donuel!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 03:52 PM

Not mine, but jobs some of my ex-patients had:
Chicken catcher - don't ask what happened next!
Banana ripener - loved his job, just had to keep turning them over.

Love Senofou's stories: I did work during vacation from being a medical student, on some of our hospital wards as what was then called a "ward orderly": might be "auxiliary nurse" these days. One ward was orthopaedics: elderly Jewish lady wakes up from anaesthetic after below-knee amputation. Her first question was , "Have you got it then?" "Have we got what?" says we. "My leg, my leg!" says she. Apparently, at least then in the 1960s, for those of the Jewish faith, any amputated parts had to be kept until the person eventually died, so that all parts can go together. So that's what all those things in pots were in our Pathology Dept!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 04:19 PM

Hahaha Tattie! I suppose one could have pickled their bits and pieces in formaldehyde and put them in huge carboys to display on their mantelpieces.

When working in the staff canteen, I was told to prepare several dozen salads (lettuce, ham, tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs), plate them up and stack them with aluminium rings between the plates. I started out on the counter top, and soon the stack was extremely high. I stood on a stool to keep adding to the pile. Then the canteen supervisor called through, "More salads please!" I seized the bottom plate and the whole stack (which reached the ceiling) teetered and swayed, then arched over and all the salads, plates and rings fell with an ear-splitting crash onto the tiled floor. I sat and sobbed...

Also, the supplier sent up a large tray of filleted fish pieces for the fryer. Instead of immediately putting them into the large commercial fridge,I left them on the side and completely forgot about them. In the hot kitchen, by late afternoon they began to smell dreadful, so I surreptitiously tried to push the whole lot down the waste-disposal machine, using the wooden poker thing. The machine whirred, then made a strange sound and stopped. Suddenly, with a deafening roar the thing regurgitated all the mashed-up fish like a volcanic eruption. The stuff sprayed over the entire area and the stench was unbelievable. People came running through to the kitchen, gagging and retching.
It was then I was sent downstairs to sell vests and pants...

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 05:03 PM

Hahahaha! (One more ha than you, Senofou!) Mainly cos I can't top that story!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Mrrzy
Date: 07 Jan 18 - 10:45 PM

Tattie, in order to get my gall bladder back when they took it out (I just wanted it in a jar), I had to pretend that my religion required all my parts... and they did give it back!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 08 Jan 18 - 05:44 AM

People usually only want to keep the stones as eveivence of all the grief they caused!

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 08 Jan 18 - 01:30 PM

Aged 20, I was a "special duties" orderly at an artificial limbs and appliance centre
for best part of a year while I got my head back together and applied to do a degree....
One of the best jobs I ever had.

No formal training, just handed a white cotton jacket, and told to do whatever the senior nurse told me to..

The job was mostly wheelchair pushing - but turned out the "special duties" was taking male patients to the toilet..
As I said - no training - I had to improvise when it came to double arm amputees..
Quite awkward when one proud old bloke insisted I accept a 50 pence coin as a tip.....

We had regulars who'd come in every few weeks to have another gangreenous toe amputated..

The young guys were mostly bikers, or soldiers who served in Ireland.
I vowed I'd never ride a motorcycle, or join the army.

It was while working there, I turned up to work one morning to hear on the radio John Lennon had been assassinated.

That was the turning point when I decided to definitely apply for a humanities degree.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Michael
Date: 08 Jan 18 - 04:37 PM

Th 'proud old bloke' probably felt that making it a business transaction would make you both feel easier about it.

Mike

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 08 Jan 18 - 05:51 PM

I'm sure all of us have been to some extent influenced by our former 'odd jobs'. I learned a lot during mine, but I was very young and naive, and jolly well needed to wise up and get with it.

Has anyone ever wished they'd stayed on the path they trod in those days, rather than progressing to different and maybe more challenging work?
I sometimes wish I could have stayed in nursing and become a Ward Sister.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Jackaroodave
Date: 08 Jan 18 - 07:20 PM

Me too!

When I was a nursing assistant, I applied to and was accepted by a nursing school, but at the same time I'd saved up enough to buy some West Virginia farmland, so I took that route instead.

Then New York State came out with one of the first distance degree programs, which cost almost nothing, so after homesteading for a couple of years I wound up back in school for the next 10 with an English doctorate at the end.

I often wonder about and sometimes regret that untrod path.

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Senoufou
Date: 09 Jan 18 - 04:24 AM

I think those are all equally attractive Jackaroodave. Nursing, farming and a doctorate in English - all interesting and fulfilling.

I have an MA in French and English Literature, involving Phonetics, Linguistics, Social Anthropology, Moral Philosophy and Psychology. I wouldn't have missed those studies for the world, but now I'm quite old, and reviewing my life a bit, I do wonder if Nursing leading to being a nun (!) and a missionary nurse in W Africa would have been better than a teacher. But naturally, as a nun I wouldn't have married my lovely Ivory Coast husband all those years ago.

I also adore living in the countryside in our small rural village, so farming would have been idyllic.
At least we had choices, which is more than can be said for many...

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Rob Naylor
Date: 09 Jan 18 - 06:00 AM

- Shop assistant in a fish and chip shop
- Production line worker in a "pop" (sodapop) factory
- Driver's assistant on a pop delivery truck
- Dustman (garbage collector) in the days when bins were galvanised steel and kept at the *backs* of houses
- Road sweeper
- Clerk in an office
- General labourer in a woollen mill
- Production line worker in an injection moulding factory
- Gardener's assistant for Local Authority parks
- Assistant school caretaker
- Muesli mixer in a catering supplies company

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 09 Jan 18 - 06:52 AM

Most life wasting soul destroying depressing jobs - telesales / marketing: office admin clerk; DHHS Benefits admin

Jobs which should have been best in my life but turned sour
by treacherous despicable back stabbing middle class bastards [men and women] - Famous adverising & fashion photographers's studio assistant;
art gallery education outreach team leader;
local social history exhibition audio visual technician;
Adult Education Teacher

Jobs kept secret from my family - Life model for 3 Prestige London Art Colleges; sperm donor....

Job I most wanted to grow up to be when I was a child but never did - marine biologist

Job I now think I might have really enjoyed and excelled at if I could live my life again
and had better eyesight and more consitent health - Army training corporal or sergeant;

Most enjoyable jobs - Special Duties Orderly in artificial limbs and appliance centre; summer washing up at Butlins;
Waste Paper Recycling lorry driver's mate;
Concert worker at Hammersmith Odeon; various voluntary sector roles as photography and darkroom technician and tutor;
Punk Band Guitarist...

So these are the jobs [paid, self employed, or voluntary] I can remember for now..
Last time I printed out and looked at my CV was about 20 years ago

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 09 Jan 18 - 07:10 AM

..how could I forget Industrial Museum Photo Archivist - one of my best ever jobs...

Subject: RE: BS: Your former odd jobs
From: Jackaroodave
Date: 09 Jan 18 - 07:21 AM

Senoifou, "At least we had choices, which is more than can be said for many."

Indeed, and the luxury of an old age from which to look back with wistful regret!