First Jobs, Worst Jobs

I get asked quite often, "So, what did you do before you joined the Navy?"


My answer is always: "I've had some crazy jobs. I mean crazy."

My very first (paying) job was detasseling corn the summer before I turned 14 years old. I was actually crazy enough ~ and poor enough ~ to not only stick this job out for a whole summer, but do it for an entire summer the following year too. I was hired by a guy who was a contractor for Pioneer, and his crews worked in the cornfields around Constantine and Sturgis, MI.

It was the dirtiest, hottest, sweatiest, most miserable job I've ever had. I worked mostly with other kids my age on the pulling crews (because kids that age are the only ones who need the money badly enough to do this kind of slave labor). I worked Monday thru Saturday, usually 13 or 14 hour days, and made about $8 an hour plus bonuses at the end of the season.


We started work around 6 or 6:30, and work entailed riding through the rows of corn on a big tractor-looking thing on stilts, that had two long arms coming of either side to hold hanging baskets. We would all stand in the baskets and pull the tassels of the tops of the corn plants as we rode by them. We would be drenched from the dew in the mornings, and then after the sun came up it was usually sweltering hot by 10 or 11. We were muddy, sweaty, sore, dirty, and covered in bug bites and "corn rash" from the leaves of the plants hitting us all day long. (If you don't know why the hell tassels need to be pulled out of a corn stalk and you'd like to know, click here to read a good article about it.

My first real job was working at Coney Island Hot Dogs. The restaurant is something of a local mecca in the West Michigan area, and you'd be surprised how many people from all over are fanatically devoted to coney dogs.

I cleaned counters, made milkshakes and french fries and gyros, and of course served up hot dogs. I polished the brasswork. I decorated the signs for the weekly specials. I worked at the food festivals in the summertime whenever the restaurant had a booth there.  There was never a dull moment at that place.


The family that owned (owns) this place was Greek. The parents were straight from the old country, and the kids ~ who were all in their late teens and early to mid-twenties when I worked there ~ were a bunch of little shits. They wouldn't show up for their shifts on time, and occasionally not at all. They would consistently "borrow" ten or twenty bucks out of the cash register.

The parents and the kids all fought constantly, and I picked up quite the smattering of Greek curse words during my stint there. They also had a long-lost cousin from Greece named Dennis who worked there and barely spoke any English at all. Dennis never really seemed able to pick up on the American way of doing things in food service. If a customer walked in during his smoke break, he would simply walk around back behind the counter with his cigarette still in hand, set his cigarette down, make their dogs, and then resume smoking his cigarette. Needless to say, I never ate anything that Dennis had made.

After a year or two at Coney Island, I decided I needed to make more money so I could save up for a car. I jumped off the hot dog bandwagon and got a job down the street working at another local food joint called Chicken Coop when I was about 15 years old. Same deal, just chicken instead of hot dogs, and it paid better.

This was my most eye-opening job. Chicken Coop was basically a local, family-owned version of KFC; it was a step above fast food but not really a "nice" restaurant. I battered trays upon trays of chicken. Fried chicken, fried shrimp, fried catfish, fried okra, fried gizzards, french fries.... you name it, I probably fried it. I had grease burns all over my forearms. I waited on customers behind the counter and at the drive-thru. I wiped tables down. I mopped floors and cleaned out coolers. I scooped coleslaw and potato salad. I reeked of fried food and grease when I came home, and my clothes were so saturated with the smell that my mom used to hand me my bathrobe and make me take my work clothes off in the garage before I came inside the house.

Ironically, even though Chicken Coop was owned by a Christian family ~ and many of the adults and teens I worked with went to church or attended the local Christian high school ~ I was exposed to more "worldliness" than I ever had been in my sheltered life thus far. My parents would probably say that this was where I started going wrong. In fact, they actually forced me to quit this job after an during my senior year of high school.

Short version: They were out of town for the night, and instead of coming straight home from work like a good little doobie, I ~ a fifteen year-old ~ went to a college party (gasp!) a couple blocks from my house that one of the guys was throwing with his roommates. I had a few drinks, hung out, left the party, tried to pull out of a tight carport space I had parked in, and ended up obliterating the passenger side wheelwell of my dad's Caddy.


Then, like any other teenager who knows her ass is grass once her parents find out, I tried to lie and say I had accidentally scraped the drive-thru sign while leaving work. I don't think they really bought the story to begin with, and my dad put 2 and 2 together a week later when he was picking me up from work one night. "Hey Miss, you know what I just noticed? That drive-thru sign's not even high enough for you to scrape the car on. Huh." Oops.

I can't say they weren't right about the whole bad influence thing; this was actually when I started smoking, too. But them forcing me to quit my job was humiliating, and their attempts to control all aspects of my life only added to the angst and widened the huge generation gap of mistrust between us.

But that's whole different story. I digress.

After I graduated from high school, I spent the summer before I left for college working at plastics factory called Summit Polymers in Vicksburg.

This was the most boring job I've ever had. I worked in Quality Control, which is just a nice term for bitch work that nobody else wants to do. My job for the entire summer was sorting through thousands of plastic dash pieces that were destined for installation in Ford trucks; I made sure that the cutouts for the dash buttons were the right size by measuring them with a little square block of metal. If the block wouldn't fit into the slot, I had to file the plastic down until it would fit. Yeah......

The summer after my freshman year of college, I got a job through a temp agency working at Midwest Fasteners. This was my most uninteresting job. "Fasteners" as in nuts, bolts, screws, and anything else made of metal that would hold things together. I was a parts picker; I walked up and down huge aisles pushing a cart with an order list in hand, finding the parts on the list and throwing them into my cart. More fun.

That same summer, I had applied for some permanent jobs when I realized I wasn't going back to college for my sophomore year. Towards the end of the summer, I got a call from Wedel's Garden Center.

Wedel's was my most enjoyable job. I worked in the Floral Center as a flower delivery girl. I also learned how to design floral arrangements and doctor up houseplants. I spent my time creating displays, watering and potting plants, and delivering flowers and trees around town. I even learned how to drive a forklift and move pallets of potting soil around outside.

After working at Wedel's for a couple years, I got a job through my friend Ange at Maple Hill Auto Group. I started out there as a receptionist for the Chrysler store, then later moved over to the Volkswagen/Audi store. After a year or two of receptionist work, I became the cashier for the VW/Audi service department. Then I got promoted to the Audi Service Advisor. Booking appointments, assuring frantic people on the phone that their car would not blow up just because the check-engine light was on, taking care of customers, selling work that the techs diagnosed, coding warranty work, etc.

One day a young hottie with blonde spiky hair came in to apply for an opening we had for an Audi Tech. His name was Sean. The rest is history. ♥

After I quit at Maple Hill because of some office politics bullshit, I got a job at MPI Research in Mattawan. The company does biomedical and pharmeceutical research on animals. (PETA activist, I am obviously not. If experimenting on animals will save human lives, so be it.) I worked in the Primate Care department, taking care of monkeys. It was a crazy, fun, but shitty, dirty, smelly job.


I basically cleaned the rooms the monkeys lived in and twice a week or so, we would move them out of their dirty cages into clean new ones.  And by "move them" I mean "catch the smaller ones by hand while they bit the shit out of us, hard enough to leave bruises through   1/2" thick leather gloves."  The bigger ones had to be caught by their collars with little poles.


Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping in the morning quite like catching a 14-kg Rhesus monkey that has huge fangs and is twice as strong as a full-grown man with a little itty bitty 2 foot-long pole.  *shudder*

While I was working at MPI, I enlisted in the Navy. A few months later I got fired for being an insomniac late too many times. I wasn't leaving for Basic for 3 more months and I needed to pay my bills. In the midst of trying to get a temp job, Sean's parents decided they needed some help at their business and bailed me out of my unemployed situation.

I worked for them at Michigan Election Resources for a couple months, helping out with the ballot printing process. Sean's dad also owns and runs a small used auto business out of the printing shop, so I did some fun things like washing cars, running errands, repainting a forklift, fixing a broken saddlebag on a Harley, hauling scrap metal to the scrapyard, etc. Good times.

I left for Basic in January of 2008. And here I am now.