The Twisted Path of a Job Experimenter

Posted: Thursday December 22, 2011 under Lead Myself

Back in the early 90s, in the first and only real job I ever had, I got some career advice. My boss’s boss told me I should try to change jobs every three years. Three years in any job was long enough, she said. After that it was time to move on. Do something else. Learn something else. Climb the ladder or move the ladder.

Because she was my boss’s boss, I didn’t tell her she was already talking to a master job changer—a job experimenter, we prefer.

I’ve always had rather iffy career aspirations. My mom got this book for my brother and I before we started kindergarten called “[insert your name]’s School Years.” One of the things you can record each year is what you’d like to be when you grow up…. Boys had a choice of fireman, policeman, cowboy, astronaut, soldier, baseball player, and ‘other.’ (It’s kind of an old book.) There’s no indication of what I wanted to be until the 6th grade — my last year of elementary school. For ‘other,’ I wrote in “duck farmer.” Now, I remember liking ducks (we lived on a little lake back then), and I’m not completely sure how duck farmers make money, but I’m guessing it doesn’t end so well for the ducks. Anyway, I could work that out with my guidance counselor.

By high school, I’d decided I’d rather kill trees than ducks. I was going to be a writer … a journalist, in particular. My brother and I started a little neighborhood newspaper called “The Toilet Paper Tribune.” The first issue was about four pages with little articles about our neighbors, celebrity news, bad jokes, stuff like that. Our next-door neighbor owned his own business, and we proudly handed him our first issue, which he agreed to take to work and copy for us. What we didn’t know was that our neighbor had his own iffy career aspirations, in politics, and he apparently wasn’t thrilled about our press coverage of he and his wife (who he was not actually married to at the time). He said the copy machine ate The Toilet Paper Tribune, thus ending my brief sojourn in journalism. He went on to be president of the state senate.

Over the remainder of my high school and college years, I had a nice array of job experiments. I call these my beer-money jobs. I could tell stories about each one but we’d be here all day, so I’ll just run through them.

• “Bottle boy” at a grocery store. (Back when Cokes, Pepsis, and RCs all came in glass bottles, I was the poor kid who hauled the empty recycled bottles off in a cart and stocked them in a cold, soul-crushing room at the back of the store.)
• Dishwasher at a night club
• Gopher for a flooring company
• Dishwasher (again) at a Chinese restaurant
• Mail sorter at the post office
• Medical records clerk at a hospital
• Door-to-door encyclopedia salesman
• Movie theater usher
• One-hour photo lab technician
• Graveyard shift at an insurance company data center (for three consecutive college summers, before you think I’m a total flake)
• Ad proofreader for the Yellow Pages
• Bookstore salesman
• Writing tutor for undergrads and foreign grad students

Between college and grad school, I spent several weeks in Europe where I took up journalism again, sort of. In southern England I heard on the news about a team that was conducting the definitive search for the Loch Ness Monster, so I hopped a train. I semi-pretended to be a freelance journalist, which got me a lengthy interview with the team leaders at a pub in Drumnadrochit, Scotland. They invited me back for the following year’s definitive search, but it wasn’t to be.

I thought I might go back to Europe after grad school, to live, but I took a quick temp job (for beer money) and ended up getting hired into that first and only real job. AT&T Universal Card Services was a new credit card company that had just launched in Jacksonville, and they hired me as a writer, first writing relocation materials for execs moving down from other states, then writing HR policies, then writing management training courses. I started as the lowest Level 2 manager and was a Level 6 manager when I decided to leave five years (to the day) later.

It wasn’t duck farming that lured me away from my blossoming corporate career, but it was close. I moved to the gulf coast to become a clam farmer. The short explanation is that you take very, very small clams and raise them to a size that can be sold to restaurants and other places for consumption. It involved scuba diving every day and lots of dirty, physical labor. Over the next several years, I learned a million ways to kill a clam, but I never really figured out how to keep one alive long enough to make any money.

Luckily, at the same time I was killing clams (and scraping barnacles off the bottoms of yachts for side money), some of my old AT&T colleagues had moved on to other companies and were offering me freelance work writing management training courses again. In 1997 I officially started my own little training business, and contrary to what my boss’s boss suggested to me back at AT&T, I’ve gone a bit past the three-year mark with this one. Although, every new project with every new client is a bit of a job change, and I get just enough exposure to the corporate grind to keep from running off and buying a passel of ducks.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments the better.” I think Ralph would have approved of my twisted path as a job experimenter. And, if everything were to go south tomorrow, I’d throw on a new lab coat and try something else, again.

Happy experimenting in 2012!