Emily's CV

My friends always laugh at me when we are talking and I bring up yet another weird job I have had. I never used to think these jobs were that odd, but after having some distance from them, I can't help but laugh. So in case I ever need to recall my FULL job history, here it is:

Babysitting from the ages of 12-28. Experiences include:
--having a child throw up all over me twice and having to raid the mom's closet for a shirt
--going to Sea Island on beach weeks with families
--changing approximately one million diapers

Smoothie King for two weeks. I was tired of babysitting and thought I wanted a "real" job. After having to work weekends and then realizing how much money was taken out of my paycheck for taxes, I went back to $10 an hour (cash) babysitting.

The Atlanta Mart for a clothing show. I basically unwrapped purses, hung clothes on hangers and ate all the food that I think was intended for vendors.

Anthony Smith Advisors on school holidays. I have a vivid memory of being in a tiny office, facing a blank wall and collating financial statements for a whole day. It was then that I decided I didn't like the traditional idea of work.

Moose Head Ranch during the summer between sophomore and junior years of college. It was the most fun (but hardest) job ever. There were 11 cabin girls and 9 wranglers, all between the ages of 19-22. I cleaned toilets, changed beds, swept and mopped three days a week and then waitressed breakfast, lunch and dinner. I have a horrible memory and was a really bad waitress. On the other three days I was the prep chef for the cook. In case you didn't know, chefs don't like people to talk in the kitchen, so you can imagine how well I did with those orders. The other prep chef and I would have to hide out in the supply closet to talk. We basically laughed our way through the summer-- one time some girls and I had so much fun talking while we cleaned a room that we stripped the bed but forgot to put sheets back on it. We didn't figure that one out until the guests were getting ready to go to bed. Oops! However, as payback, we were assigned the task of figuring out why the supply closet stunk so much. The supply closet was actually a bathroom that was filled to the top with cleaning supplies. Once we emptied out everything that had been stacked up in the bathtub we discovered two inches of human waste in the bottom. Turns out the pipes had been clogged and backed up into the bathtub. I had to wear green rubber gloves that went up to my shoulders to clean it out. Yuck.

Nantucket Island Resorts for the summer between junior and senior years of college. I was a reservationist for their four hotels. It was at this job that I realized I should never be in sales. My boss could listen in on calls and she said, "Emily, you are one of the nicest reservationists we have ever had, but you don't close the sale!" I worked on commission, but I thought the rooms were too expensive so I kept trying to help people save money by bringing in roll-aways or doing other things. Everything you did on the phone was timed, so they even knew how long it took you to go to the bathroom (because you were logged out). This was one of my least favorite jobs. My southernness did not fit in with that area and it was a really lonely summer.

After college graduation Kyle and I backpacked through Australia and New Zealand. We made the mistake of wasting money on work visas when we really should have just broken out of the American mentality and realized that it is OK to vacation and not work for awhile. We got jobs at Leo's Budget Accommodation in Cairns, Australia, working from 8am-2pm in exchange for room and board. I was a maid while Kyle was the groundskeeper. Imagine cleaning up after a bunch of cheap, drunk and horny backpackers. Beyond being gross, it was also hard to change sheets on a bunk bed. Some of the worst experiences there where when we had to fumigate a room because it had bed bugs in it and cleaning the boys bathroom. However, by the grace of God I was usually able to avoid that job. The worst though was when the washing machine maintance man came out and told us we had been washing sheets in an industrial washer for two weeks without any soap going into the machine (the soap was supposed to dispense automatically, but the tubes had not been hooked up correctly). So we had basically been soaking dirty sheets in water and then putting them back on the bed. Click here for reviews of the place.

After Kyle went back to the States, I stayed in New Zealand and WWOOFed (Willing Worker On an Organic Farm). Again, I worked in exchange for room and board. In such a small world, I ended up working for woman who was from Columbus, Ga., and had married to a Brit. She was 8 months pregnant, so I ended up helping her around house more than doing any farm stuff. They had chickens so I fed them each day, chopped some wood and worked on the compost pile.

Next I was off to the Wilderness Lodge of New Zealand (in Arthurs Pass). This would have been a nice job except for the fact that I had to room with the craziest person I have ever met. Truly, I don't know exactly what her illness would be named, but she was anorexic, had to eat in a dark room by herself, would get up at 2am and cook all the food in the refrigerator and then just leave it out, believed that whoever saw the dishes first had to do them (this was convenient when she would cook in the middle of the night and then I would get up to work the breakfast shift, making me the first one to see them), ripped the phone out of the wall when I was on it, accused me of stealing, threw all of my food out into the rain one day, and then actually took a running start and kicked me in the butt. Besides her, every other employee was wonderful there. In between living in fear of that awful girl, I waitressed and cleaned the rooms.

I returned to the USA after 9-11 and had a lot of trouble finding a job because of the economy, which led me to work even more odd jobs. Over Christmas I worked at one of those mall kiosks. I was supposed to be selling framed drawings of the main attraction on each college campus (like the Arch at UGA) but again I thought they were a little expensive so I didn't really sell too many. That was a really boring job, but at least I enjoyed people-watching at the mall.

My sister owns a wonderful dating service called 8at8 Dinner Club. I have helped to host lots of happy hours and dinner groups for her. Throughout all of those I learned the plight of singles in Atlanta and met many great people.

The I worked at Ground Zero (yes, that was the name) for one month. This was a temp job and I was the only woman in the office, among eight men who basically only seemed to know one another's names and nothing else about each other. Of course I took it as my personal mission to help them learn each other's birth order, family history and love language.

Some other temp place that I can't even remember. I do recall reading some of the e-mails of the girl that I was subbing for (they logged me into her Outlook for the day). She was black and it made me laugh that her business e-mails were all professional and then her personal ones were "Damn girl, you a ho! What you be doing there?"

After that I works at about five other temp places including an ad agency, a commercial real estate firm and a paper supply company. Ironically enough, the paper supply company was very similar to the one on "The Office." I had to wear ear plugs and a hard hat to go through the factory to get to the break room and I remember doing mundane work and thinking, "Is this all there is to life? Am I really going to be doing this from 8-5 for the next 40 years?" No wonder I was depressed during that time.

Luckily, I soon got a job at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. I was supposed to start as an intern and on my first day the girl that I was shadowing got fired, so I quickly became an assistant. I mainly did office stuff and helped plan networking events. It was a really fun job because you weren't actually tied to the desk the whole time. However, with event planning you are also cleaning coffee pots in a suit and re-arranging tables at 6am for breakfast meetings.

After I got married I moved to Montgomery, Ala., to be with Kyle. I got a job at Auburn University Montgomery doing event planning and working with continuing education classes. After I had taken the job, my colleagues showed me around and reminded me to be nice to the custodians or else they would hide from me when I needed to get a room set up. When I asked about why that wasn't reported to their boss, they said that someone had complained about it to the boss and he responded, "They only make minimum wage. What do you expect?" The person that had complained was then black-balled by the custodians and could never get anything set up. This is why I spent almost as much time working as I did bribing the custodians with food. There was never enough money to have a professional caterer so I made many, many trips to Sam's Club and usually ended up wearing food-handling gloves and arranging the store-bought food myself.

Now that I have been in Belgium, I have continued my tradition of finding odd jobs. I have helped a few people relocate here, have taken notes for business meetings, have starred in an infomercial and of course I still babysit. But most importantly I think Kyle would give me glowing reviews of being a pretty good wife. Maybe this is what I should have been doing all along.