Every Job I've Ever Had...

Every Job I've Ever Had...

If you're having trouble sleeping; have I got a post for you! A bunch of my friends have started spilling their job histories on-line, so I'm going to jump on the band-wagon.

Jr. High and High School:

When I was pretty young -- like 12 years old -- I started to baby-sit for this divorced lady in my neighborhood. It was nearly a full-time job. I had keys to her house and I would let myself in after school. Her son would come home about 30 - 40 minutes after me. I would make his dinner and put him to bed every night. Mom would get home between 6 - 11 depending on her date – but it was usually closer to 11 PM. On weekends I'd go over around noon-ish and stay until after Saturday Night Live. (Actually, the real name back then was "Live from New York, It's Saturday Night!") In the summer it was the same thing, except I was there all day, everyday.

I babysat for this little boy almost every day (except for two summers) until the end of my junior year in high school. At that point his mom got married again and they moved away.

The two summers that I didn't baby-sit for this boy, I worked as an Au Pair for one of my mom's rich friends at a swanky town on the Jersey Shore. I had never seen so much wealth. And to make things even better... there was intrigue. The mom was having an affair with the co-owner of the summer home. They were doing the nasty right under her husband's noise. The co-owner of the house also just happened to be an ex-boyfriend of the divorced woman I worked for the rest of the time. I felt bad for her because she would call me or come down to visit and pump me for information about the adults around me. I was so young and naive I didn't know what was going on until about 10 years later when my mom filled me in on the dirt.

The (maybe) best part of the Au Pair job was (maybe) meeting Linda McCarthy. One weekend some of their friends from out of town came to visit. There was a lot of whispering because they were going to bring along a friend of a friend named Linda. They told me that Linda was a wealthy heir to the Eastman Kodak fortune. It could have been THE Linda -- she was blond. But again I was naive and I didn't put the pieces together until later. The interesting thing -- at the time I was obsessed with St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I would sit in the corner and listen to it over and over again when I wasn't working. At one point Linda came over, sat with me, and started asking me about the music I was listening too... At the time I thought it was odd that a grown-up didn’t know who the Beatles were – it was 1978 after all. They were already classics!

My senior year in high school I took care of an autistic girl. I got paid good money for that because the mom couldn't find anyone else who could handle her daughter.

After I graduated high school, I got a summer job at the place where my dad worked. I put off-set aluminum printing plates into boxes. I had to work under yellow lights on an assembly line. I did this every summer for the next five summers.

While getting my undergrad degree I had the following jobs at various times:
-- Clerk at Woolworth’s
-- Librarian at the college Library
-- Internship / Teacher at a School for the Deaf
-- Substitute Teacher at a School for the Deaf

In Divinity School I worked in the Duke University Divinity School Library.

After I abandoned Divinity School, I decided to get a second BA in Comp Sci. I had all of the following jobs at the same time, while carrying a full-time course load of 16 credits. All of my classes were upper level math and Comp Sci:
- Librarian
- Computer Lab Student Assistant
- Resident Assistant
- Tutor for three learning disabled students
- Proctor for entrance / placement exams

I kept up that pace for three exhausting semesters.

I never finished my Comp Sci BA because I got an internship at AT&T. At the end of the internship they hired me to be a C/UNIX programmer. While working for AT&T I was a programmer, project leader, requirements analyst, and tester extraordinaire.

Somehow J&J got their hands on my resume with testing all over it. Ortho Diagnostic Systems, a J&J company hired me to set up a software testing department for them. I then moved into QA.

While working for J&J I started my own consulting business. The business focused on software testing, QA, and FDA Regulatory Affairs. At our peek, we had 15 full-time employees on payroll. Our clients included:

• Becton Dickinson & Co.
• Breas Medical AB
• Bristol Myers
• Coloryte RT
• Diagnostic Solutions
• Direct Access Diagnostics
• DPC Cirrus, Inc.
• Forest Labs
• Fuji Medical Systems, USA
• Gyrus-ENT
• Johnson & Johnson
• Medjet, Inc.
• Merck
• New Jersey Blood Services
• New York Blood Center
• Novartis Ophthalmics
• Novartis Pharmaceutical Corp.
• Organon
• Ortho Diagnostic Systems
• Pfizer
• The Blood Center of NJ
• Vital Signs
• Warner Lambert
• Wyeth-Ayerst

After awhile having my own business was just too much. So I walked away. I got a job working for a competitor -- CSSC, Inc. I was the Director of Operations and I managed about 80 people. There were some events in my home life that lead me to believe I was going to be able to fulfill a long time dream and become a stay-at-home mom. In hind sight, I realize it was pretty stupid of me to believe that. But what can you do? I had already quit the job.

I spent about six months living with my ex-mother-in-law. She had Alzheimer’s. They day after I moved in the electric, phone, and the cable were all shut off. In addition to taking care of her and Elizabeth, I did the leg work to sell her house and my house, and buy a new house big enough for all of us. I also settled her husband’s estate as he died about a week after I moved in with her. Doris had a privacy fetish and keen sense of paranoia. The Alzheimer’s made it much, much worse. I can’t tell you what a job it was to get her house packed up when it was time to move.

Before we were even unpacked and settled into our new home, it became apparent that my dreams of being a stay-at-home mom were going up in flames. So I started the job search. I got another job as Practice Director for another regulatory consulting firm. Less than a year after taking that job, my current employer called me up and asked me to consider coming in for a job interview. The rest, as they say, is history…