Areas of Unrest

20 December 2005 - On the Job

I managed to upload one of the chair racing photos. So here I am looking silly by spinning rapidly five times on a tape x in an office chair.

I was feeling ill enough to stay home from work today. So, in lieu of doing anything worth writing about, I figured I'd pick up on another piece of that meme that has people writing about four of something. Of course, I can't limit myself to writing about just four jobs I've had.

I don't suppose it counts as a job when your parents pay you to do chores, but Dad used to pay us to do certain seasonal tasks. The thing that sticks in my mind the most was getting paid 50 cents a bag to rake leaves. My Mom, on the other hand, just told me to do stuff and never offered cold hard cash.

Mom did share out some factory piecework that she did for extra money. The factories in Island Park were confined to a couple of blocks, immediately behind the street we lived on. (A vitamin factory opened later on, on a much larger plot of land.) The most memorable of these factories produced the sort of phonograph records that were advertised on late night television. Anyway, some of them sometimes farmed out packaging as piecework and Mom brought home a bunch of little gumbies (Gumby, Pokey, Gumby fish and so on) that we folded and put into plastic balls to go into vending machines. I think they paid a penny a gumby (or less) and we could keep the defective ones.

In high school, I made money tutoring math and physics. I did free tutoring via the honor society, but got paid jobs tutoring people who didn't go to my school. I even got a couple of jobs by putting an ad in the Pennysaver.

My major paid work as an undergraduate was working desk at the dorm. That mostly meant answering phones. I liked doing the mail because you got paid a full hour for it but it only took about 20 minutes. Of course, that was 20 minutes of solid time, while sitting at the desk gave you lots of time to study, read, or do needlework. The best part of working desk was always knowing all the gossip about who was dating whom. During the summer, the dorms got used for conference attendees and working desk was more challenging in some ways. I also did maid duty during the summers, which is a truly dreadful job. All of that was good motivation for getting my degree.

As a grad student, most of my support came from a fellowship (my first year) and a NASA traineeship (the remaining years). But I also had a part time research assistantship, which meant that I got paid for doing my thesis research. The most memorable thing about that is that the University of California makes all employees, including graduate assistants, sign a loyalty oath. It wasn't a big deal, but I remember being surprised by it.

So now I've been working in the "real world" for over 20 years, at the same company, in a few different jobs. As a member of the technical staff in the engineering group, I mostly did computer simulations and wrote reports. As a section manager in the engineering group, I theoretically spent 25% of my time on management and the rest on technical stuff. In practice, the management part was variable, but usually less, since I mostly had pretty senior people who didn't need a lot of supervision. The problem with that is that the part of management that I liked was coaching and mentoring, which I didn't get to do very much of.

Then I moved to a program office and spent all of my time traveling to the contractors and going to meetings. And then I've been in my current job for nearly 3 and a half years now. I usually describe myself as being a sort of geek to English translator, explaining the technical issues on the program to senior leadership. I spend less time on the road and more on the phone than I did before. And the pace of things is very uneven.

It's still a lot better than changing sheets on dorm beds or stuffing gumbies into plastic balls.