Jobs I've Had Part V: The Randoms

In between the lobbyist gig and my next job working for a temp agency, I had a few fitfull attempts at other jobs for a few days or weeks at a time.

In 1996, an environmental organization was trying to get a ballot question on the Florida ballot that would force the state to clean up and preserve the Florida everglades. The 'Glades had been polluted and harmed by sugar farming down there for decades, and the sugar industry was a powerful lobby in Florida. The goal was to create a constitutional amendment requiring the state to prevent future pollution and to clean up the past effects. The organizations had been trying this for years, but they finally raised millions of dollars to front this referendum and were mounting a serious campaign. In order to place the issue on the ballot, the state was requiring something like 500,000 valid signatures from registered voters, and the campaign had raised millions so that they could pay people $1 per signature to get at least 1 million people signed up. (These sorts of campaigns always build in a cushion to account for signatures that will be thrown out because they can't be verified or are repeats.)

To a college student, $1 a signature sounds like a gold mine...you just find a crowded place and you could have earned $50 an hour. We had heard stories of people who had gone to an outdoor concert or a county fair and made $200 in just a few hours. The $1 per signature was paid out when you turned your signature pad in, even if the signer turned out to not be registered in Florida or to have previously signed the petition another time. My boyfriend and I decided this sounded like a great way to make lots of money very fast.

(This experience gave me some insight into the problems with fake registrations during the 2008 election, as I was fairly certain that the people turning in those fake registrations had also been paid per registration and thus had a powerful incentive to abuse the system. Not that we ever did anything like that with the signatures!)

We got our clipboards full of petitions and headed to a parking lot of a strip mall to accost people heading into or out of the Barnes and Noble. We quickly learned that getting people to sign this thing was tougher than we'd heard, particularly when store management would come out and ask us to leave. We'd move to another strip mall and start over, but we were averaging only about 5 signatures an hour apiece. We discovered that many people had already signed and did not want to fill out the lengthy form to do so again. Others had started seeing the ads run by the sugar industry against the proposed referendum, and wanted to argue with us. After about a week we decided this job was a bust and we turned in our clipboards. I think we maybe cleared $50 each.

Gabe and I worked together on two other occasions with similarly disastrous results. First, we saw an ad in the paper for a telephone sales job and both showed up to the address listed to find that it was circulation sales for the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper. I lasted all of one night before deciding that I absolutely hated telephone sales and would rather starve than try that again. Gabe went back for the rest of the week, because he actually sort of liked pissing people off, but even he burned out by the end of the week. I don't think I made a single sale before I quit.

We also worked for a department store, I think Dillard's faxing sale advertisements to local public schools for a teachers' discount promotion the store was running. We each sat in separate offices in the administrative part of the department store for 2 days faxing the same 1 page ad to several dozen local schools at a time. However, because the department store had gotten in trouble for sending un-requested faxes before, we had to call each school and reach a real live person to get their permission to fax the notice to each one. This was almost as unpleasant as telephone sales, and made worse by Gabe's constant need to make everything into a contest. This was probably why we never worked together again after that 2 day gig. I also recognized that I was not cut out for a career in sales, and vowed never to try to take on that sort of job ever again.

After a month or so of these odd jobs and the fear of living without a steady income, I was thinking of going home to Orlando to work for Disney for the rest of the summer but I was afraid my parents would find out about my school issues. I decided to apply to work for a temp agency, which was where I worked for the remainder of the summer and the fall semester. That story will be a separate post.


Rusty's posts inspired this topic, and Garrett and Thomas are writing about their former jobs as well. Join in the fun, and I'll link to you too!