The Best Place to Learn

Weird jobs, gigs and work experiences

My favorite job came up in a conversation with a friend the other day and it inspired me to write about some of the most unusual and interesting jobs I’ve had and what I learned while I was there.

Here are my top five jobs/gigs, based on what I learned, not necessarily on how much I enjoyed it at the time.

5.

My professional life began in the cafeteria of LaRoche College. Then, it was a small institution of higher learning in the North Hills of Pittsburgh mainly known for their graphic and interior design programs. Now it’s a university with a pretty decent basketball team and array of programs.

I did whatever job nobody else wanted to do. At fourteen, my opinion didn’t hold much gravitas so I replaced the empty crates in the milk machines, wiped down the steam tables, and worked the dish room – which I didn’t mind because I could blast music and not have to interact with many people. Sure, it was hot and damp, but who cares when you can sing “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac at the top of your lungs without consequence?

Eventually, Betty, the head cook, took me under her wing and taught me how to bake brownies for a hundred and the secret of keeping massive amounts of baked chicken moist. And within a few years, I was helping with inventory and bookkeeping, which suited my evolving princess persona, who no longer liked to be a sweaty mess at the end of a shift.

What I Learned: How to argue with my father. One day we got into a dispute about whether white milk weighed the same as chocolate milk. He insisted it did. As the one hoofting the crates that contained the five-gallon bags of liquid up into the machine where the students got their milk, I vehemently disagreed. There was no internet in 1980 so we had heated debates about this regularly. The consensus online today is that they weigh the same, but my heels are still dug in.  

4.

After college, I couldn’t find a job in the public relations field. It was 1985, and even though I had a B.A. from a good school, Pittsburgh was still recovering economically from the loss of the steel industry and pickins’ were slim. Needing to pay the rent, I began to work part-time for a friend who was a magician. His girlfriend ran the business, and although she didn’t want to spend the money to pay me, he decided some marketing and PR would help him grow.

I designed flyers, wrote press releases, and came up with interesting news angles about his engagements to get local coverage. I also did a lot of the mundane administrative work the girlfriend didn’t want to do – typing, filing, making cold calls.

Looking back on it, I don’t think she liked me and I didn’t have a lot of experience with couples running a business together. I was woefully naive about how the web of personal lives intersected the complexities of a professional relationship. I honestly think she was insecure, and although I’d never expressed the slightest interest in my friend romantically, she treated me like I wanted to steal him from her.

I always felt watched. And judged.

I don’t have a concrete memory of how things ended, but the emotion I feel when I think about it isn’t positive. I enjoyed working for him, learning about magic, and seeing from the inside how a business could grow. But she did nothing to make me feel welcome or appreciated.

What I learned: Trust your instincts. I wish I could say I didn’t have to learn this repeatedly in my life, but I can’t. This was the first time, however, that I sensed things would end badly and chose to stay, gaslighting myself by insisting that I was imagining things. I wasn’t.

3.

After leaving my corporate job in 1998, I moved to Central New Jersey. I loved that there were beaches to the east and rivers and farms to the west. Looking for income and always a horse lover, I responded to an ad for a part-time ranch hand and, much to my surprise, was hired.

The owner had several of her own horses and boarded a half dozen others and I worked five mornings a week mucking stalls. She paid me $15 an hour, which in 1999 was pretty good money, but I wanted to hang with the horses, not just get manure all over my boots

In every job I ever had I focused on efficiency and it was no different here. I experimented to find the most expeditious way to clean out the stalls, replace the straw, and empty and clean out the water buckets and got excited when I clipped ten seconds off my time. All of this in hopes I could spend time with the horses.

Eventually the owner began to trust me, and I reveled in learning how to turn them out, put on a saddle properly and brush them. I enjoyed riding back then, but even more, I just wanted to be around them. There was always something sacred about their energy to me and I felt so calm when I got in my car to go home.

Unfortunately, this is where my issues with carpal tunnel began. Holding a rake and shovel with a tight grasp for a few hours multiple days a week made my hands numb, and eventually, I had to quit.

What I learned: Trust needs to be earned.

2.

My mom had a long career in HR and training and although I don’t remember how it happened, I’m pretty sure she helped me get a contract gig as an outplacement counselor for an international training firm headquartered in northern New Jersey.

My job was to go into a company after they’d laid off workers and facilitate a career transition workshop.  I was meeting people at one of the lowest points in their lives, so they didn’t have much trust or interest in what I had to say.

This is where I began to hone my stand-up skills. I realized if I could make them laugh, they were more likely to get something out of the workshop. They were scared and felt rejected, and often management had not been forthcoming, and a lot of times, the layoffs had come from left field, making the impact even worse.

There were scary moments, like the time I was instructed to press the emergency “help” button under my desk if someone tried to attack me. Or the day I had to be escorted out of the building by local police because the company had been so disingenuous that the employees were close to rioting, and they’d scheduled my workshop to start literally minutes after they made the announcement.

But I met the most amazing people, workers not management. Every time I listened, really listened, and they felt heard, their trust in me, as well as hope that things would be OK increased. Each time I made them laugh, a little more of the trepidation dissolved. It was one of the most powerful opportunities I’ve ever had to support people in their life’s adventures.

What I learned: Not every hobby is meant to be turned into a career. People can suck and you can’t change that. You can’t really move on until you process your feelings. Work is never like family, no matter how much they tell you it is.

1.

I’ve always had a nose for fragrance and love smelling good, so when I had the chance to apply for a position at the largest flavor and fragrance manufacturer in the US, I jumped at it. After weeks of interviewing and testing, I was chosen, along with eleven other women, to officially be a Scent Profiler.

What’s that you ask?

Well, the company knew exactly what the chemist used to create a fragrance. And consumer focus groups helped them determine whether or not the scent they’d developed for a perfumer or a company like Bath and Body Works would sell. But they needed a trained nose to tell them what the fragrance actually smelled like. Often combinations of two or more scents mimic a completely different smell. For example, orange and lemon mixed together can be mistaken for grapefruit. They wanted the specifics of the perception.

Over nine months, we learned every base scent in existence. From fruit and woods to flowers and aldehydes. We drew pictures, shared stories that involved the scent (lavender reminded so many of us of a lingerie drawer), selected colors to represent each one and discussed how the smell made us feel. At the end of every week, we each received a sheet of paper with twenty blank lines on it. Then Katie, our facilitator, passed around amber bottles, and one by one we had to write down what the liquid was. Trust me when I tell you that even after all the practice, it was still very, very hard.

The next step was to learn how to standardize percentages. This was a long and complicated process that often caused brain fog by the end of our day. All so we could say that a fragrance we tested was 20% apple, 40% vanilla, 30% lemon and 10% amber. This was gold for manufacturers because it told them what combinations were most appealing to consumers. It gave them the why so they could replicate it with slight variations.

We only worked eight hours a week because more than that would have blown out our noses, but during those eight hours, we bonded. Not necessarily as friends, but as collaborators and skilled professionals who were able to agree and disagree with vigor.

Eventually, the money allocated for the program ran out and the company chose not to reinvest, but to date, this was my absolute favorite job.

What I learned: What can be accomplished in a safe environment by a cohesive group whose members demonstrate respect for each other far outweighs what one can achieve individually. Even hard things can be learned if you invest enough effort. You can have fun and enjoy yourself while you work; it doesn’t need to all be drudgery.

What was your favorite job and what did you learn from the experience?

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