103 - First 7 Jobs

There's a Meme going around my Facebook neighborhood right now where you post a list of your first 7 jobs, and I'm having trouble with it...

As I thought back, I realized that I was the kid of child that they write Young Adult Fiction about, constantly coming up with and following through on various money making schemes.

My goals were the same as any 80's kid, I'm sure - make enough money to afford Ricky Stratton's Mansion, an Orangutan and a Robot.


I had intricate lists of how much work I would have to do in order to achieve each goal, which my parents gladly helped me prioritize. "You better get that mansion first, because I ain't living with no robot", "Have you considered that if you own an Orangutan, you also have to buy Orangutan food for it?"... It was decided that I would first get the Orangutan, who could then help me by selling stuff at a second location, which would then pay for the robot who could take care of feeding the Orangutan while I concentrated on getting my Silver Spoons Mansion full of arcade games and miniature trains.

So my first seven jobs, starting at I wanna say *four years old*, goes like this:

• 1. BOOK STORE: I took many of my children's books and comic books, since I couldn't read yet, and tried selling them for a dime each to the neighborhood kids as they came walking home from school. I had a real nice set-up in the ditch right along our rural gravel road, and I had exactly *one customer* (the only other kid in the neighborhood at the time), who somehow talked me into just *giving* him the comic books.
  
• 2. PROSPECTOR: Both of my parents were heavy smokers, so I had unlimited access to empty cigarette boxes. Each one had a shiny foil inner packaging that could be torn and crumpled up to look like REAL, HONEST-TO-GOSH Gold and Silver nuggets! Put those into the cellophane wrapper that had been around the box, it looked like a bag full of precious metals! I attempted to sell them for $500 each, sold on to the man next door for 50 cents.
  
• 3. REPORTER: Since we had both a typewriter AND a Polaroid Instant Camera, I decided it was high time that somebody publish a hard-hitting investigative newspaper in our neighborhood. Our neighborhood, btw, consisted of 10 houses spread out along two miles of dirt road, 8 miles out of town). The newspaper had a great picture of me at the typewriter on the front page, a plea from The Editor (me) asking for my readers to let me know if there were any "scoops" out there for me to report on, several comic strips that I had cut out of the regular newspaper, and about one bottle worth of Elmer's School Glue that I didn't bother to let dry. No time to let glue dry, this was NEWS! My readers needed timely reporting! I placed the wet newsletter into an envelope and, as an added incentive for people to read my work, I included as many grapes as the envelope could hold. I put my one and only copy of the newspaper (and the Free Incentive) in my neighbor's mailbox and waited. Never got a subscription, so I had to shut down the paper after just one issue.
  
• 4. FRUIT STAND OPERATOR: We had a giant Dansom Plum Tree in our yard (aka "Cherry Plumb", plumbs the size of cherries) that ALWAYS produced way more fruit than we could ever use. And so it was decided that every summer I would set up a card table, either in front of our house (where I could get up to three customers drive by each day) or at the little market on the other side of the highway from us, where I cold sell these plums. This was boring, tedious work and even though it made me the most money, I always spent it way too fast on comic books, Cokes and junk food at that little market.
  
• 5. SEED SALESMAN: My friend's Dad was a Captain of Sanitation (aka "Garbage Man") who was continually pulling awesome stuff out of the garbage for friends and family. One of the things he was able to pull for us, knowing that *my* Dad had a fairly large garden, was a giant box of seed packets from the dumpster behind a Hardware Store. Oh sure they were all expired and probably dead, but that didn't stop me from setting up my little card table and trying to sell them at the little convenience store across the highway. It wasn't till one of my customers said "Say, son... you know that these seeds are expired?" and told me that what I was doing here was technically FRAUD... told me I could go to JAIL for this... it was then that I decided to close up shop and never speak of seeds again.
  
• 6. DOOR-TO-DOOR SALESMAN: In the back of pretty much every Comic Book I bought back then, there was an add for "Olympic Sales"...
  
  I could earn valuable prizes OR cash (my choice!) for simply going door to door selling my neighbors Christmas Cards & Gifts (which practically sold themselves, according to the brochure). After my parents, grandparents and all 9 of our "neighbors" had been contacted, I had 3 sales - not enough to "cash in", so I gave up :(
  
• 7. COMIC BOOK GUY: Now THIS ONE was the start of something BIG! There was yet another comic book advertisement for "American Entertainment" which offered to sell new and used comics at bargain prices - the more you bought, the cheaper it got. Using the good old "Buy Low/Sell High" technique in an age where the closest comic book store was some 60 miles away, I sold hard-to-find comics to my schoolmates AND at the local "Shipwreck Day" festival in town. I made so much money off of this that it solidified what I wanted to do with my life - I wanted to own a comic book store :)

After those seven, I got *one* real job - McDonald's - before opening my comic book store. But that was only because you couldn't get a business license at age 16 ;)