CURRICULUM VITAE:

I got fired today, which is about 10 hundred different kinds of awesome. The best part was that I got fired for not turning in my time card correctly, which also kicks so much ass I can barely stand it. In light of this recent development, and since I’ve got some extra free time now that I’m suddenly not working at my former job, I present to you...

Jobs I’ve had:

Age 15: I get my first job at a medical equipment supplier. Mostly my job involved cleaning off rented medical equipment, which is even grosser than you can imagine (“here take this razor blade and scrape the clumps of hair off of that wheelchair”), but it also involves throwing the granny three-wheelers into jack rabbit mode, and racing around the block. Also, I learned the fine art of electric wheelchair wheelies.

Age 16: I get a job at the food court in the Lloyd Center Mall. I work with a buddy of mine, and much of our time is spent building forts out of boxes in the storage area so we can hide out instead of doing actual work. A girl dropped an entire bucket of hot grease on her legs and had to wear these weird therapeutic anti-burn socks. I got fired for fucking around and making random structures out of straws and curly fries. I blamed Anti-semitism for the whole fiasco, even though I'm not actually Jewish.

Age 18: I worked at the grocery store down the street for an Italian family who had run the place since forever. They got sued for firing a Black guy, and the place got picketed. I worked with a dude named Terrance who came out with a rap album under the name “Cool Nutz”. I bought his tape, which had a picture of him on the cover and was called “Deez Muthafuckin’ Nutz”. He is now a producer and Portland Hip Hop promoter/label owner who does shows around town. The Italian family sold the place to some Koreans about a week after I left for college.

Age 19: After I got kicked out of school I started working for a packaging and shipping place with a buddy of mine who’s now one of my roommates. Our boss spent most of his time dealing with a messy divorce, which meant we had plenty of time to hang out and play video games. So much good stuff happened during this job, that it’s hard to describe. Among the highlights: getting super fricken high and subsequently lost during delivery runs, an $8,000 fine from OSHA for an ill-advised forklift incident, fun with the sprayfoam liquid styrofoam machine, and the invention of plastic wrap garage baseball.

Age 20: I was living overseas for much of this time, and spent a lot of hours building chicken coops and working in cotton fields. Dragging 100 foot long sections of pipe out of a muddy cotton field sucks seriously hard, but the food for the field workers was way better than at the cafeteria. Also, I spent a lot of time perfecting my Elvis impersonation while doing industrial sized loads of laundry and washing dishes for 400 people.

Age 21: I lived in a postage stamp-sized dorm room on a resort in Sun Valley, Idaho. This is the town where Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, and eventually shot his own face off. I spent my time there drinking like an idiot, and getting in the occasional fight. Also, Katarina Witt called me a gentleman, I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger’s kid get caught shoplifting, and I met Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks seemed very powerful, even though she was in a wheelchair. She had this sort of hard gray look that made you think that it’d be a bad idea to bet against her in an arm wrestling match.

Age 22: I got a work-study job at school working for a scientist. She specialized in dating fossils by the types of pollen found clinging to them. My job mainly involved cleaning up after her cats and typing up note cards to summarize and catalog her email. Most of my time was spent fucking around with science-type equipment, and by the time I got around to typing up the note cards, I did such a half-assed job she asked me if I was dyslexic.

Age 23: I got a job working at a yuppie sandwich place. Foodservice brings you into contact with the colossal underworld of customer/douchebags, which was decidedly non-awesome (I asked for triple foam. Triple, dammit! LET ME TALK TO YOUR MANAGER!!). Also, I learned to appreciate David Bowie. The David Bowie appreciation mainly arose from drinking about 80 ounces of beer stolen from the tap while on the closing shift, but I still appreciate Bowie while sober.

Age 24: I found a weird job working the night shift at a shithole hotel in a part of Portland sometimes known as Vaseline Alley. This meant a lot of chasing out junkies and meth heads, and tons of dudes trying to check in at 4 in the morning wearing nothing but assless chaps and feather headdresses. The first thing they showed me when I started was the baseball bat behind the front desk -

“Here’s the baseball bat, the computer, and the registration cards.”

“Wait...what?”

“The registration cards. Any questions?”

“Uh yeah, about that baseball...oh never mind.” -

I only had to break out the bat once. This was probably the best job I’ve ever had or ever will have.

Age 25 and 26: I spent these two years living and working in Chicago. I spent weeks at a time on the road, and our office manager stole something like 60 grand.

Age 27: I got a temp job working for some stockbrokers. I had to get up ridiculously early to be at my desk in time for the market to open in New York, but they left me alone, and I got to surf the web a lot.

Age 28: I found a job working for the city. The job was pretty cool, and I met a lot of people, but they let me work from home for the most part. I discovered that working from home, in my case, mainly means a lot of hardcore slacking and waaaaayyyyyy to many drunken bike wrecks.

Age 29: I get fired.

This list, unfortunately, does not include the multiple random temp jobs that round out my resume. These include: Cleaning out garbage trucks with a pressure washer, manning a plastics press making bits of random stuff that were eventually assembled into Reebok Cardioslides, washing dishes in a sorority (OhmiGawd! I shouldn't be eating this!!!!), unloading giant burlap bags filled with iron chains, and cleaning 8 floors of a flour mill in 100 degree heat until my ears were caked with flour/sweat dough.

As you can see my credentials are extensive.

- posted by Aaron @ 10:44 PM