Jobs I don’t put on my resume

Inspired by this post, here are some jobs I had when I was young that I don't put on my resume.

• My first job was at a small upholstery business run by a friend of my mother’s. I was maybe 14 or 15 years old at the time. I got paid under the table to pull all the old staples out of chairs, sofas, car seats, boat seats, and anything else that was coming to the shop to be reupholstered.

• My first real job was in the paint department at Sears Roebuck and Company at the Great Lakes Mall. Sometimes I helped out in the hardware department too. Saturdays were never any fun because the store was always so crazy busy. It was overwhelming at first, but I eventually found my groove. My boss, Edith, taught me a valuable lesson that has stuck with me ever since: Just read the paint cans. If you read the paint cans, you’ll be able to answer most of the customers’ questions. She was right, and her advice has proven useful in every job I’ve had since.

• I left Sears to go across the street to General Cinema at the Mentor Mall. I mainly worked behind the concession stand, which was a messy, gross job. I left every day smelling of popcorn. But the perks were great, I could see any movie any time I wanted for free! It’s still the best job I ever had. ^[1]

• I don’t remember why I left General Cinema, but somehow I ended up at a Sears Paint and Hardware store, a short-lived concept that Sears launched in the late 80s.^[2] It was a crappy job, mostly because my boss was a jerk, but it was close to home and relatively easy work.

• During my first year at university, I had a job delivering newspapers for the student-run The Lantern. I (and two other dudes) reported to the printing facility every weekday morning at around 3:00 AM. We loaded the bundled newspapers onto a box van and then drove around campus distributing them to classroom buildings and dorms. I quickly learned that getting up at 2:30 AM was not compatible with my social schedule and quit without notice. Not my best set of choices.

• During my first and only summer home from college, I worked in a small factory for Murray Corporation, which manufactured replacement automotive parts for NAPA. We made mostly thermal fan clutches and accumulators, but there was other stuff too. I worked second shift, which was nice in the summer because the factory wasn’t quite so hot. It also left my days free to do whatever. It was the only time in my life that I belonged to a labor union, the United Auto Workers. I got some of the best life and work experience of my entire career there. It was the last non-IT job I ever had.

• In 1991, I took a part-time job (not an internship) at OCLC, where I managed a user test lab and did various “other duties as assigned” in the software quality department. In 1993 I got hired on full time in what was became my very first “real” IT job.

• During my undergrad years (1993) I worked in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Ohio State as an operator.^[3] I actually listed it as “assistant system administrator” on my résumé at the time. My job was to deal with routine student problems like printer jams and password resets, and to swap tapes in the backup drives. Mostly I got paid to do homework.

• The last student job I ever had (1997–98) was as a grader in the CIS department. I worked with a professor to grade laboratory assignments for a systems programming course. I’d sit down with students to grade their labs in real time using weird edge cases (e.g. empty input files, bogus inputs) that they may not—but should—have anticipated. I’d then try to help them work debug and resolve their issues. I learned a ton about software development this way.