Jobs I've Had Part I: High School

Rusty has been chronicling the strange and interesting jobs he's held through the years, and it inspired me to do the same. I'm going to try to break them down into 4 parts: high school, college, law school, and lawyerin'.

Babysitting

I started off in high school with a regular Saturday night babysitting gig for a family with one child. The parents were both actors, and the dad also worked full time as an executive at Disney. (He also played the airplane passenger who gets shot in the head by the hijacker in "Passenger 57," in front of Wesley Snipes.) Every single Saturday night for almost two years I sat for their daughter Alyssa, from when she was a few months old until she was two. It was decent money for a 14 year old, and since she had an early bedtime I basically just watched TV for a few hours. I saw every single episode of Twin Peaks this way!

Gift Shops

When I turned 16 and was old enough to work for real, I got a job working for a company that operated gift shops in hotels throughout Orlando's International Drive tourist corridor. I would usually work with another employee but sometimes alone, running the cash register, stocking the store, and sitting around for hours at a time. We had a service that allowed customers to drop off camera film and receive their pictures the next day, and when we got bored we would look through the photos waiting to be picked up. Most of them were your standard touristy shots of theme parks and beaches, but when a rainy day would hit in the midst of the Orlando summers, we always knew that a day or two later there would be a rash of naked pictures. It seems that when stuck in their hotel rooms because of the rain, tourists like to create a little amateur porn. It was very difficult to keep a straight face as people came to pick up their photos not knowing that I had just a few hours earlier seen them naked.

We did have one little bit of drama at this job, when one of the stores was robbed while another woman was working there. She had been suspected of having a drug problem and the owners thought she had either staged the robbery or set it up with friends as the robbers, and soon thereafter she was fired for skimming off the register so there might have been something to the suspicion. I was so paranoid about getting in trouble for my register being short that I routinely put change from my purse into the register if I was short a few cents.

Golf Stores

The next year I persuaded my parents that I could work part-time while in high school, and I got a job working at a chain of golf stores owned by a friend of my father's. The largest store was also on International Drive, but I worked most often at a smaller more pathetic one up near the former Naval Training Center. I was the youngest person working in the company, and there was a fair amount of resentment towards me for getting the job. The company was owned by a group of brothers, and several stores were also managed and staffed by members of another family. Most of them had been working there for years, and I think seeing their job done by a high schooler must have made them feel threatened. Ultimately I ended up being scheduled most often at the NTC store because it was not managed by anyone from that family, though one of the sons was trying to get the manager fired so he could take over. The actual manager was an incredibly nice but not so bright guy who was the sole breadwinner for a very large family, so I was constantly worried the efforts to force him out would be successful.

Despite having grown up around golf and enjoying watching the sport, I am actually a terrible golfer myself. However, I was a pretty good salesperson and after about 3 months of just letting me sell shoes, gloves and golfballs, they let me start selling clubs. The clubs carried a hefty commission so I tried to let the salespeople who relied much more on commissions take those sales as often as possible. I felt pretty guilty as a teenager taking a sale away from someone who was trying to support a family. Each store had a big net set up in back to serve as a driving range so people could test out the clubs, but the very small NTC store's testing range was really just a small room in the back where the net was mostly a formality. The wall behind the net had a few holes in it from being repeatedly pelted by golf balls over the years, and one day an employee of the furniture store next door came by carrying a golf ball that had somehow ended up in their store. We tried to patch the holes with duct tape, which looked really classy. We also had a small putting green, and when I got bored I would practice putting. I am still pretty decent at minigolf now thanks to all that practice.

When there were no customers in the store, which was often, we had a TV that we could watch but we were only supposed to have golf on at all times. We had videos of major tournaments past, and all the golf movies that had been made to that point (which pretty much consisted of Caddyshack, Caddyshack 2, and Dead Solid Perfect.) I have seen Caddyshack so many times I could probably recite it for you word for word to this day. But watching the same golf movie over and over again was still a better option to pass the time than talking to a bunch of men in their 30s and 40s, which was you can imagine was not a lot of fun for a 17 year old.

Golf, as you may or may not know, is a surprisingly sexist sport and industry. There were very few women working for the company and I always worked with at least one man in each store. One guy, who was in his sixties, used to talk about my breasts constantly while I was at work. When he went on vacation with his wife, he sent us a clipped out ad for the TV show COPS, that said simply "Big Busts." He addressed it to me. (I was already kind of chesty at 17.) Another salesman tried to kiss me in the stockroom, even though he was easily 20 years older than me and looked like fat Elvis.

But the worst was a guy named Vince who was an old family friend of the family that managed several of the stores, who got ahold of my home telephone number. At that time I had a private line installed in my bedroom, and one night I got a call from a heavy breather who asked me a couple questions like whether I had a boyfriend and whether I liked to fuck, before I hung up on him. I sort of recognized the voice, but it was the use of the phrase "y'uns" that really clued me in to who it was. This guy was from Ohio and was the only person I knew who used that phrase. I told my parents about it, and my dad called the owner of the stores. They said they couldn't prove it was Vince without a trace of the call, and told me to have it traced if it happened again. A few days later, I had to work with Vince at the NTC store. I'd told my manager about it and he promised to keep an eye on things, but about 3:00 he had to do the bank deposit and told me he'd be back in 20 minutes. I was working at the register up front, and Vince was in the back. A few minutes after the manager left, the phone rang. When I picked it up, it was the same heavy breather. But interestingly enough, another line in the store was also active. Vince had called me from the back room. I told my manager when he got back, and the company agreed that Vince and I would not be scheduled together anymore. They also told him that if I got anymore phone calls like that, he'd be fired. A few weeks later I found out he did get fired, for stealing company merchandise and selling it on the side. A real shady character, that one.

I was also working at a store on International Drive when it was robbed. I was working with two men, one of whom was at lunch while another was in the back working. A group of two men and two women had come in to look at Gore Tex rainsuits, but then had left. I was working on ringing up a big sale to two other customers when suddenly one of them said a man had come out of the dressing room, grabbed a stack of rainsuits off the rack, and run out the back door. I didn't even see him until he was gone, because I had been so focused on ringing in the sale. Apparently the rainsuits that we carried were retailing for upwards of $200, and so they had taken over $1000 worth of merchandise. I immediately called the manager in the back, and he called the police. There was a lot of worry and drama, but I don't believe the thieves were ever caught.

I worked at that golf store for the second half of my junior year, that summer, and all throughout my senior year until I graduated and had to get ready to head to Tallahassee for college.

Up next: college jobs