We all have jobs that we leave off the resume. Short term jobs. Survival jobs. Dead end jobs. Maybe even entirely different careers that just didn’t work out. I still have an expired Oklahoma teaching certificate in my files, after all. But even these jobs can have moments, or at least lessons, worth remembering.
I moved across the country to Portland at the worst possible
time. 9/11 actually happened while we were in transit. I saw the news coverage
from the breakfast bar at a hotel. Enron went belly up and dragged Arthur
Andersen into oblivion with it. The economy went to shit. Portland was
expensive, compared to Texas, and jobs were scarcer than hen’s teeth. I had two
small children, a hella big rent payment, and a husband who was suffering from
major depression.
My resume ended up in the trash at Nike and Columbia Sportswear and dozens of other local corporations, so after a lot of rejection, I found a local employment agency and went downtown to see what they could do for me. They had me take tests in MS Office and English. That was entertaining. Ever done a mail merge in Word? Well I hadn’t, but I stumbled my way through it. Apparently I was the first person who ever scored 100% on their English test. They were amazed. It wasn’t even that difficult, but whatever. They found me a part-time position with a local court reporting firm. I interviewed and got an offer. The folks seemed nice, the office was close to home, and I wasn’t in a position to be snobbish. I took the job.
The job was essentially to process depositions we had
transcribed and package them up for delivery to local law offices. In spite of the
ubiquity of computers, most local lawyers still wanted everything printed and
bound. My tasks included
running and troubleshooting a massive commercial printer, ensuring that printed
documents were correct and complete, binding, and labeling for delivery. I also
formatted, burned, and labelled the CDs for customers who wanted a digital
copy. It would have been deadly dull, but I amused myself (and wasted more than
a little of my employer’s time) by reading the depositions. Most of them I’ve forgotten
now, but there was one that included a pair of black g-string panties as an
exhibit. That one was a real doozy.
My office mate, Amanda, handled the court reporters’
schedules and served as the first point of contact for customers. While the
bulk of the work was recording depositions for law offices, we also did meetings
for public entities and closed captioning for locally produced TV shows. Printing out the minutes of the
local water board meeting wasn’t a very exciting part of the job, and I’m sure
the reporters found it dull too. The reporters were all independent
contractors, not employees, so they were free to accept or decline any
assignment, which made schedule management a little tricky. They didn’t all
live in Portland, either, so commute time and availability had to be taken into
account. Each reporter had their “regular” customers that they usually worked
with.
After a couple of months into the job, I got recruited to help
write a grant proposal to obtain funding to provide visual descriptions for
local PBS programming. We already did some closed captioning work, but visual
descriptions to make programming accessible to the visually impaired is far
less common. The proposal was a work in process, but there was still research
and writing for me to contribute to its completion. Sadly, after months of work
and waiting, the grant was not approved, and the hope of
building out an entire new service offering withered.
Sadly, like almost all administrative jobs, the work was necessary
to the running of the company but the pay was low ($14 an hour) and there was
no chance for the role to evolve or grow. No matter how key you are to successful
operations, as an admin you’re considered nothing more than a cost to be managed and minimized.
Getting the occasional Starbucks gift card or potted plant doesn’t compensate
for the endless grind of poverty and ennui.
I left that job when I left Portland, never to return except
as a visitor. The outdoorswoman in me loved the Pacific Northwest, but I needed
a future.
