Every Bad Job I've Ever Had

Cataloging my intensely weird work experiences

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This week’s posts have all been about how strange and difficult it is to be a creative professional, and today is no different.

I’ve had a lot of jobs. Some of them were even good! But most of them took an extraordinary amount of effort to get, then proceeded to make me feel like a dummy for wanting them in the first place. Every creative person I know has had some intensely weird work experiences—so I tried to catalog mine.

Every bad job I’ve ever had

• Actor at a theater in small-town Texas where the dressing room was disconnected from the main building, so sometimes we got rained on between scenes. The cast lived in a decommissioned hospital nearby.

• Intern for a film production company that tried to get me to write a monkey movie for free. The lady in charge said, “Animal movies are in—but not dogs. We need a monkey movie. We want you to write it.” Great! My big break!” Then she said, “Write the script, and we'll pay you if we make it.” Folks, I was a desperate young writer, but thankfully, I wasn’t quite “unpaid-monkey-movie” level desperate.

So young, so naive…

• Drama teacher at a YMCA summer camp run by two women who were basically less personable versions of Patty and Selma from The Simpsons.

• Blogger for a customer service website owned by a CRM software company. My job title really should have been Professional Spammer.

• “Social media assistant” at a law firm, where my job was to email the owners of various websites and ask to have links removed from each site. The reason this unbelievably inane work existed was because the firm had previously been using these links to manipulate their Google search ranking, so Google suspended their listing entirely. Classy bunch!

• Casino performer in Reno, Nevada. I assume this one doesn’t need further elaboration.

This was my job for a while.

• Office manager at a shipping warehouse where my boss did meth. This is not an embellishment. He would disappear all day, then rearrange the warehouse overnight so no one else knew where anything was. After I quit, they found it was because: meth.

• Singer in a show called Chuckleball, which was a musical revue of Weird Al-style song parodies about professional sports. So, for example, I sang a Maroon 5 song while dressed as tennis player Andy Roddick for an audience of ten people (on a good night). YEESH.

• Barista at an unlicensed coffee shop that also sold breakfast sandwiches, which I never learned to make properly. I apologize to anyone who purchased one.

• Barista at an upscale French bakery that made us keep pastries in the display case for three days before throwing them out. I apologize to anyone who purchased one.

• Social media consultant for a dentist who would send me pictures like the one below, asking me to post them on Instagram—but also make him look “fun.”

  

  This is a real photo the dentist emailed me!!! Gross.

• I once got paid $200 to pitch a hip, new cartoon reboot of Lassie. (This was actually fine, but the idea of a hip, new Lassie still makes me laugh.)

• Digital producer for a streaming quiz show produced by a sports gambling website. The enterprise was owned by a man named Jimmy Z, who can best be described as “a guy who Tony Soprano would whack for being annoying.”

• Writer for a globally popular children's cartoon produced in Russia. My scripts were translated into Russian for the director, then his notes were translated back into English for me. It went exactly as smoothly as that process sounds.

• An eye surgeon hired me to ghostwrite her TV pilot idea about a dystopian futuristic society that could only be saved... by an eye surgeon. After submitting my first draft, she instructed me to “show, don't tell” the story—after which I showed, not told, my resignation.

• Founder and editor of a mildly successful humor newsletter (Just kidding, this one’s great.)

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