My History In Employment, Part 1

Here's an offshoot of My History In Education. It just made sense to do so.

1998 or 1999, I think, maybe some of 2000: Painter/Tutor
These were barely jobs, but when I needed some extra money in high school, my principal helped me out by hiring me during the summer to help paint the school before we opened. I don't even remember which year it was, and it was only for like two weeks. I was also hired as a math tutor for anyone who needed it, but I'm almost positive I never actually did any tutoring. I was available just in case, I guess. But they both worked well enough as something to put on applications as previous work experience.

2000: Intern for Troma Studios
After I graduated high school, I spent the summer first in New York, then in Petaluma, before starting college at UC Santa Cruz. While in New York, I arranged to be an unpaid intern for Troma. I only worked there for three weeks, but it felt like a year. Not because I didn't like it, it just seemed like my duties changed a lot, and I felt like I spent more than a week doing each part of it. My first day there, they asked me to be part of their daily web episodes, and they put me in a Sgt. Kabukiman mask, gave me a big, squirting dildo, and had me cum yogurt all over some girl in a mantis costume or something. I wish this footage existed somewhere, but as far as I know, it doesn't. I mostly did random errands for them, like buying fake guns from a toy store, getting cans of Diet Coke for Michael Herz' wife, taking out the trash, or holding up lights while Lloyd Kaufman did introductions for DVD special features. I was also an extra on their British tv show, Troma's Edge. Eventually, I settled in as an assistant to my friend Millie, who ran the shipping room, and this was awesome, because Millie was insane and hilarious, and it was work that I enjoyed. But then, for some reason I didn't understand, they hired an actual assistant for her who got paid to do exactly the same thing I did, even though the guy was a douche and Millie hated him. So I was moved upstairs where all the office work was done, and the web store was run, and I did a lot of menial work in Excel. I didn't even understand what I was doing half the time, but I found the repetition kind of relaxing, and apparently I was doing a good job, because the two guys who were my bosses at this time were sad to see me go, and wrote me a letter of recommendation.

I don't know when I slept when I was working there, because I remember my friend Randy and I going out a lot at night, just walking around and enjoying late night New York (we weren't even 18, so honestly I don't know what the hell we were doing for all those hours, since we weren't going to bars or anything) and not coming home until 8am. And then I would work every day from 10-6. I know I was drinking about 10 cans of Mountain Dew a day, plus a cup of coffee in the morning, so that may have had something to do with how that was possible.

The only friend I made in New York was Millie (Randy and I knew each other from high school), and we wrote each other for about a year, and she sent me frequent care packages of Troma movies and awesome promotional stuff, but eventually, we lost contact, as I tend to do.