Blind Prophecy

I got this idea from some dude who is hiding from the internet this week so I don’t have any obligation to credit him.

Since I’ve been polishing up my resume for the legal market, there are a lot of interesting ways I’ve prostituted mahself made minimum wage that didn’t make the cut for the 1-page resume rule.

The first way I ever earned money was taking care of the lawns of elderly people in our neighborhood. I hated it. One of the biggest reasons I never want to own a house is that I never want to be responsible for taking care of the lawn. I wasn’t even allowed to quit this job, because Mom made me do it. She also volunteered my services for free to some cranky old people because that’s apparently what barely teenage slaves Boy Scouts are expected to do. In fairness, Mom usually helped me the whole time.

My first jerb that involved a corporate payroll and IRS records was working for Lagoon Amusement Park in Northern Utah. At first, the only thing I did was make sno cones underneath the old wooden roller coaster (pictured). Eventually, they moved me into the fancy burger-and-fries shack across the way which was less noisy and didn’t attract as many bees. That was the summer my family left Utah and moved to Vegas, so I spent the last part of the summer living with Grandma and Grandpa and taking the bus to work every day. I got the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack on cassette that summer and listened to it every single day on the way to and from work.

During my senior year of high school I worked for a place called Pistol Pete’s Pizza (now owned by Peter Piper’s Pizza) which was a rip-off of Chuck E. Cheese pizza. Basically, I worked the register, prize counter, food prep and games attendant roles a couple nights a week. It was shitty work and I got yelled at a lot. I didn’t want to be there but Mom thought I needed to be saving money for college and it was run by a nice Mormon man she sorta knew. I think this was the last job my Mom forced me to take and stay at. I did enjoy learning to fix the old, stupid games that jammed up all the time and making crying brats kids shut up by giving them free tokens whenever anything went wrong.

Between senior year and the beginning of college, I worked for the private party catering department at Wet n’ Wild, a water park in Las Vegas that got torn down a few years ago. That was an intense jerb. I’d start my day at 8am, leave at midnight and repeat for 4-5 days a week. Lots of overtime. Lots of sun. The DJ for every corporate employee appreciation party played TLC’s “Waterfalls” at least once an hour. And then there were hunky lifeguards I’d stare at during my lunch break without acknowledging to myself or anyone else that I was gay. Funny story, although I didn’t meet him until 4 years later when I moved back to Vegas, my first love was one of those hunky lifeguards I’d lust after in my deeply closeted way. We both worked there that summer but I wasn’t ready to deal with my obvious queer desire and he was also lusting after the other lifeguards and paid no attention to the nerdy catering staff.

My worst job during college was a graveyard shift I took for a donut bakery. Our bakery supplied donuts to convenience stores all over Reno, so the bakers would finish baking them around 10pm and I’d be by myself in the shop until 4am packing the donuts into boxes for the delivery guy. If you enjoy donuts, don’t go behind the scenes at one of these big bakeries. Also, if you’re in school full time, working on campus, and participating in theatre during the evening, a graveyard shift is not a good idea. I spent a month hyped up on caffeine and flunking my classes. I think that’s the first job I quit by simply calling in “no longer interested” without giving notice or anything.

After college, I worked for a short time as lap dance test subject at a gay erotic dance revue. Okay, so 90% of what I did was take money at the door, operate the sound/light, and run errands, but whenever a new dancer needed to be trained in how to give a lap dance (as it turns out, they weren’t usually hired for their dancing ability), I got to be the lap dancee. Probably because it made me really uncomfortable and that was a good thing for the guys to learn how to deal with.

So, yeah, those jerbs (along with about a billion retail clerk jerbs … JC Penney, Gap, Nature Store, Gap, Macy’s, Gap… boring!) have been officially struck from my resume for all time.

Filed under: personal, work by Jere Keys