Every Job I've Ever Had, Ranked

Read to the end for a movie I liked

I have been unemployed, or at least underemployed, for about 18 months now. It can be very unmooring. I have no routine, no obligations that repeat day by day or week by week. On good days, I find myself exercising, writing, hanging with friends, taking walks, reading books. On bad days, I sleep. Sometimes I sleep and watch TV.

But with all this time to just. . . reflect, I have been going over my old jobs to tease out what I liked about them. You see, a vital piece of Alex Goldman lore is that even though I have been doing radio for the last 15 odd years, I have had a lot of jobs. Like a lot of jobs. So I’m going to list them all below and rank them from best to worst, listing what I liked about them. Should I include internships? I’ll include internships.

I often had several jobs at once, so if you see more than one appearing in a given year, that’s why. Ok, here’s my list of jobs from best to worst.

Delivery Driver, Knowles Flower Shop (2002) - Absolutely unbeatable job. I got paid $7.00 an hour to drive the delivery van and deliver flowers to people. With the exception of funerals and memorials, everyone was always super happy to see me because they were getting something nice, and they’d occasionally tip me. I would burn CDs from the college radio station and listen to them while I drove around. Also I got paid hourly, so I would do things like drive down to the creek and lay on the bank for a half hour and then tell my boss traffic was bad. Nothing you can say to me will make me feel guilty about this.

Paperboy, The Ann Arbor News (1989) - This was my first job. And as first jobs go it was pretty good. I mean, it was an hour a day, and I got paid @ $120 a month. I later realized that translates to $4 an hour, so I’m not quite sure how it was legal, but it was cool enough to have a job when I was 9 that I didn’t care. Can you imagine have $120 a month at age 12 to do whatever you want with? I was a menace (I hung out at the arcade and ate a ton of Laffy Taffy) I hung on to that job until I was 14, though my work ethic got worse and worse as time went on. Eventually I was fired because my band had a show and I completely forgot to deliver my papers one day. Oh well.

Host/Producer, Reply All (2014) - Whatever it was fine.

Intern, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (2002) - The CBLDF is a non-profit that is dedicated to defending comic artists from spurious claims of obscenity or copyright infringement, and at one point had the mandate of almost every major comic artist and writer in the industry. It was located in Northampton, Massachusetts because Peter Laird (co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) lived in Northampton and donated a fair amount of money to the organization early on. The place had suffered years of mismanagement by the time I showed up — the office was a total mess and it was unclear what they were doing for the industry at the time. Still, I got to meet Frank Miller and Rick Veitch, and a couple other amazing artists, I got to handle amazing original pieces of art and I wrote a couple articles for their newsletter. All in all, pretty fun.

Clerk, Encore Records (2001) - This one barely counts because it was a couple weeks of pickup work while I was home for summer break, but this was life changing for me because it is my favorite record store in town and a ton of local musicians I really look up to worked there. I am, in fact, wearing an Encore Records t-shirt as I write this.

Clerk, Video Store (1999) - I took a big paycut (from $6.75 an hour at Subway to 5.25 an hour at the video store), but the work was so much more fun. Even in 1999 the video store I worked at was an anomaly, a ma and pa business that stocked cult and foreign movies and pornography in a world of Blockbuster Videos editing movies to be more palatable. You have to understand that in the pre-digital world, cult and foreign movies had extremely limited production runs for cassettes and could cost upwards of $300 for a single copy of a movie. That the store I worked at had such a good selection was a testament to its commitment to this mission of making harder to find movies available. It was a super fun job, and I made great friends with all my co-workers, but I could only afford to live on $5.25 for so long. Also the owner kinda sucked. It closed down in the mid-to-late 00’s and the storefront is now home to a lingerie/smoke shop called Bongz n’ Thongz. Seriously.

Music Director, WMUA 91.1 FM (2001)- Ok, so this was my college radio station, but I got paid for 9 hours a week at $7.25, if memory serves, so it was still a job. I was responsible for intake of all new music, talking to promotion companies, and making sure the DJs logged all the music they played. I would also write short reviews of albums on nametag stickers and slap them on it before I filed so people looking for music to play knew what they were getting into. These days a lot of that work automated, but at the time we had to write down every song we played to ensure the artists and the record companies got their royalties. The station also sent me to the College Music Journal Music Marathon, which is sort of a less successful SXSW that takes place in Manhattan. It was my first trip to NYC, and I got to see James Chance and the Contortions, which will forever be an experience I cherish. The hardest part of the job was that the station allowed both students and “community members” (read: any schmoe off the street) to have shows on the station, and there was a lot of tension between these two factions. One community member in particular would re-shelve CDs I had shelved in different locations. Like he insisted that the band A Flock of Seagulls go under ‘A’ in the filing, whereas I, using common sense, said it should go under ‘F’. He also wrote a negative review of a Blue Cheer CD and stuck it over my more positive review of the CD, calling them obnoxious jocks. He was later banned from the station for similar behavior.

Sandwich Artist, Subway (1996) - The subway I worked was in a food court in the basement of the University of Michigan student’s union, and they were allowed to use their meal plans there, so it was always packed. I have no way to confirm this, but I was told by the owner it was, at one point, the busiest Subway in the world. On Sunday nights when the dining halls were closed they would schedule 10 people to work, and we’d be nonstop for like 3-4 hours. There were a lot of perks to that job. I used to steal tons of produce to cook at home, we traded food with the rest of the restaurants on the food court, and it made so much money that our boss didn’t care much about our demeanor, so we could be annoying and silly and no one minded. We had a little boom box on the shelf above the prep table and we would listen to music all day. That’s where I got into rap. Also, on my last day, my band played a show behind the counter (my bosses were not consulted on that).

Intern/Producer WNYC (2010) - I remember the first time I heard This American Life, I was on my way to take my SATs, and I sat in the parking lot waiting for it to finish, because I had simply never heard anything like it before. I didn’t realize that a seed was planted in that moment, but as journalism school went on, I got more and more into public radio, and by the time I moved to New York in 2005, I was fully obsessed. But owing to inertia, lack of self esteem, and depression, I spent five years working tech support and dreaming about working in journalism until I bit the bullet and applied. Amazingly, I got it. At the time, WNYC didn’t pay interns, and instead offered them a $10 a day “travel stipend,” which if you think about it is almost more insulting than not paying them anything at all, but I was still hooked. I learned a ton on this job. I learned the technical art of editing audio. I learned pro tools and later Ableton. I learned the thrill of hearing your work on the radio, even if it’s just a sentence or two that you wrote. I learned how to pitch a story, and how to write around tape. I also learned that there’s no job, no matter how desperately you want it, that can’t be ruined by a bad manager, one that constantly undermines your self-esteem and personally targets their staff and tries to manipulate people into doing what they want, instead of just asking. I learned about how non-profit organizations frequently cut corners with their most vulnerable employees, asking them to do unpaid work, stay late, do more. I learned about the egos of on-air talent and vowed to never exhibit that behavior myself. WNYC has gone through a lot since I left, most of it bad. They have shuttered their podcasting unit, they have laid off tons of people I knew and respected. My awful manager somehow remains.

Gas Station Attendant, Amoco (2000) - My shift was 10PM to 6AM, which is brutal. But the owner also operated a repair shop out of the gas station, and that was the real revenue, so he didn’t really care about the convenience store part of it. Also, on my first day he came in while I was listening to his favorite band (The Kinks), and after that, I kinda got away with murder. He didn’t care that I would take cartons of cigarettes and listen to rap super loud. In fact, he didn’t even mind when I accidentally locked the bathroom key in the bathroom and tried to do like Bender in The Breakfast Club and climb on the ceiling tiles to retrieve it, only to come crashing through the ceiling. Much like bender. I made a terrible mess of it, but he kept me on for some reason. After calling me an idiot like 15 times. It was a fine job, but the hours were untenable, especially on Saturday mornings when the University of Michigan football tailgaters started coming in, they were insufferable. Also one time a very belligerent man wearing a leather jacket with fringe hit me in the face with a phone book when I told him couldn’t use the phone to make a long distance.

Seasick Records (2003) - This was a fun and easy gig. The store was small and I was the only person there most of the time. Unfortunately the owner was just starting the business and was extremely stressed all the time and that made it less fun. What I remember clearest about it is that I feel like the only thing we sold was this Bright Eyes Box Set and the Shins album Chutes Too Narrow, both being music I really didn’t like. It closed down maybe a year or two after I left.

Kid Kingdom (1995) - Kid Kingdom was pretty chill as jobs go. We ate a lot of nasty pizza, played video games (they had The Simpsons game and a Spider-Man arcade game I never saw in person before or since), smoked a ton of weed, and vacuumed. There was a lot of vacuuming. They even had a specialized vacuum that would suck the balls out of the ball pit and wash them, in case someone barfed in it. I eventually got fired for locking myself out of my house, rendering my uniform inaccessible, and they were unwilling to give me a break. I will cop to not having been the best employee of all time.

Editor, Venues Magazine (2004) - At the time, I lived in a small college town in Texas called Denton, and a woman decided to start what was essentially a tiny alternative music newsprint mag for the town. Think like The Village Voice, if 90% of the articles, interviews, and album reviews were written by either me or me under a pseudonym. It was very cool to write for a magazine, because it gave me an excuse to interview bands I liked. While I was there I interviewed Deerhoof, Mates of State, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Captured by Robots, and a number of other great touring bands. But I was only making $500 a month, and when I told the owner I needed a raise, she shut down the magazine and stiffed me on $300. In hindsight, this should have prepared me for a career in journalism.

Landscaping/Christmas Decor (1999) - This would be my best job ever if I hadn’t stuck around for the winter and done the Christmas decor part of it. Landscaping was the best. The work is very incredibly physical, and incredibly rewarding! At the end of the day at a video store, all you’ve done is put the movies back on the shelf knowing that more will get returned tomorrow. It’s like the tide, movies roll out, movies roll in, day to day everything is exactly the same. With landscaping at the end of the day I had made something beautiful and at least semi-permanent (we planted a lot of perennials, trees, daylillies, that kinda thing), and our boss would sometimes take us back to his place in the country and let us swim in his pond. In the winter, the business switched to Christmas decor, which was exactly what it sounds like - rich families would pay us to put up their Christmas likes in a totally anodyne and uninteresting fashion where all the lights were of uniform distance from one another. Where landscaping was everyone working in relatively the same spot on warm summer days and having fun, Christmas Decor was usually one of us on a ladder on the opposite side of the house of the others. And it was cold. It sucked.

Catering (2000) - Probably the best paying job of my pre-college career, it nevertheless the hours were brutal and it wasn’t very fun. Also I had to wear a cumberbund and tuck my shirt into my pants, and after a while I was not down with that. I asked one of my co-workers out on a date to see the original Friday the 13th in the theater, and the part at the very end when Jason pops out of the water and grabs Alice scared her so badly she got mad at me and we never went on another date. Awkward.

Earthen Jar (1999) - Earthen Jar is a vegetarian Indian buffet owned by a family of Rastafarians. Just go to their website and check out the autoplaying reggae. This job was ok, but the pay stunk and the tips were bad, and the food was by the pound, and if I’m being honest, it required more complex mathematical equations than I was capable of making on the fly, which slowed me down. I really only worked for for a summer while I was simultaneously working at the video store and landscaping.

Direct Support Professional, Denton State School (2003) - The Denton State School is a state institution for the mentally disabled. It’s a sprawling campus of 20+ buildings, each of which has four suites with about 8-10 clients in each one. It is a terribly sad place in a lot of ways - there’s a field of unmarked graves in one corner of the campus for residents that died and had no one to claim them. The entire place feels run down and clinical and our bosses spent more on an animatronic Santa for the lobby of our building than they spent in a year for things like activities for the residents. It feels almost weird to put this job so high on the list, because as you can probably imagine, working at an underfunded institution that houses a vulnerable population, it is rife with official misconduct, neglect, abuse, the whole nine. And unfortunately, it’s impossible to actually call out that behavior, because the culture was such that if you report it, the other employees would circle the wagons and turn around and accuse you of abuse. Being accused of abuse or neglect trigger a whole investigation and hearing, and if you were found guilty of either of those things, that essentially meant you could never get a job working in a health care field again. I know, it’s sounds grim. But man, the clients I worked with were so amazing. Some of them had been there a couple years, some had been there most of their lives. Their charts were sometimes devastating to read, especially the folks who had been there for decades, as doctors tended to be a less clinical and more cruel with their diagnoses. But in spite of the oppressive atmosphere, in spite of their lack of resources, they managed to be incredible creative, kind, curious, and funny. And I say this as someone who worked on a behavior ward, where the residents could get violent. I only made it about 18 months at that job, but I still think about those guys all the time.

Intern, Tan Dun (2005) - There was a time when you could go on craigslist and find a job working for an internationally famous composer. Those days are long gone, but that’s how I got a job working for Tan Dun, who composed the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. My job was to show up to his brownstone in Chelsea every morning, and hang out in the basement editing articles for his website. I was one of four employees. Everyone was very nice, but I was the only non-native Chinese speaker in the room so I spent most of the time just spacing out, and getting paid $6.25 an hour. It was also my first taste of extreme wealth, which I immediately found uncomfortable and did not love. My most vivid memories of working there are winning tickets to see Devo off the radio, and helping him to set up a live performance of his Water Concerto, which was honestly pretty cool. It was a good experience to work for him, and it introduced me to John B. Hedges, who is an incredible composer in addition to just being a very cool person, but the actual work kind of sucked and was pretty lonely.

Vitamins Plus (2003) - This was a vitamin store on the side of a pharmacy I worked at in Denton, Texas, in 2003. The work was fine, but the boss was a power tripping little weirdo and we clashed immediately. I got fired after refusing to take off a baseball hat during the workday, but the writing was already on the wall long before that happened.

Network Technician/Account Administrator (2005) - This was half a fine job and half a terrible job. The owner of the company, an incredibly sweet guy, went to art school and knew a lot of people in the art world, so when he started his tech business, the vertical he had the most penetration in was art galleries, and non profit art institutions. And as a result, I got to see a lot of cool stuff! I installed a computer at the Roy Lichtenstein estate. I got to see a Mike Kelley installation in a completely empty art gallery. I got to see a bunch of pieces of art outside of gallery spaces, in back rooms. I even got to meet George Condo once. Because the owner was pretty artsy himself, he hired a bunch of part time artists and musicians, and had no illusions about where their hearts actually lay, and that was a lot of fun. But then about two years in, they promoted me to account manager, and suddenly my job went from being a grunt smashing RAM into motherboards under a desk to being the guy back at the home office getting yelled at by unhappy customers. That, I fucking hated. My girlfriend at the time would often say “You know, every Sunday you develop this terrible mood because you know you have to go back to work.”

Dishwasher, Ponderosa Steakhouse (1994) - Not a terrible job, but very solitary. People are just rushing in and out and tossing their crap on the counter for you. It was ok for a while because I would listen to my Walkman and be relatively left alone, but at some point my manager told me I wasn’t allowed to have headphones on, and then got angry at me when I asked why. I made it maybe three months.

Telemarketing (2002) - I had to call people around dinner time and have them yell at me for calling them around dinner time. The pay was shit with promises of commissions, but being human enough to feel guilty for bothering people was basically incompatible with closing sales. I didn’t last long.

The Brown Jug (1997) - It’s a little college bar and grill in Ann Arbor. I was the dishwasher, the boss was an asshole, I worked 4 hours and then walked off during my break.

Intern, AAM Music Management (2005) - I lasted two days at this one. When I was the music director at my college radio station, AAM always sent us the best stuff. I didn’t really know why I wanted to work there beyond just it seemed like the company had impeccable taste and everyone who worked there was a couple years older and very cool. However, when I got there, they stuffed me in a corner where I could see or speak to anyone and had me putting AAM stickers on CDs for 8 hours a day. And they treated me shitty, like it was a privilege to put stickers on CDs for free and not speak to anyone. Fuck that place.

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I watched a movie the other day called The Passenger, and spent like 20 minutes trying to identify the main antagonist, only to realize it was Kyle Gallner, who was in Veronica Mars and Jennifer’s Body. It’s a wild suspense movie about a kid who is kidnapped by a spree killer, and Gallner really delivers a wild performance. His character is going through a psychotic break and is written in a way that felt eerily familiar to me — a person who has logical complaints about the world that lead him to completely daft and confused conclusions. Violent ones. It’s a lot, but it’s really really good.

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Here’s a couple songs I like this week. Hope you enjoy