Four things

Because I am suffering from a bit of a writer’s block, I shall steal this 4x meme from my favorite Irish blogger, Claire23. Then again, she is the only blogger I know from Ireland.

Feel free to steal the meme from me.

Here goes:

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. Aside from babysitting, my first job from which I received a W-2 was working in a fabric store while going to college. First it was Piece Goods, then it became Mae’s, and now I do believe it is a Hancock Fabrics. It was a couple of miles from campus, so I took the campus bus to and from work. It made for a very long commute, about thirty minutes each way, but at least I didn’t have to walk. I made minimum wage ($5.15/hr), but I really enjoyed my job. I was very anal about keeping the bolts of fabric properly draped, though our customers loved to mess them all up. I used to sing along to the Muzak in the store as well, and I was complimented on my voice quite a few times. I had very few bad experiences working there; the only bad memories I have were of the alcoholics that would come in and be rather aggressive with me, or the time we did inventory on Halloween, thereby pissing off all the mothers in the city of Williamsburg because the one fabric store in town was closed. Things got a bit worse the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college. I transferred my employment to the Chesapeake, VA, store while I lived with my real mom, and the manager that had been at the Williamsburg branch ended up following me. She did not like me; I don’t know why. Near the end of the summer she took me off the schedule without even informing me; I showed up to get my schedule and wasn’t even on it. I ended up transferring to the other Chesapeake location for the last two weeks of the summer so I could make enough money for my books.

2. The following summer, I got a job at a computer store in northern Virginia called MicroCenter. Boy, did I love working there! For one thing, I made much more money; I started at $7.25 an hour. Also, I was almost famous working there. There were very few young women working there, and none were as friendly as I was. I started out cashiering, and men who came through my line kept flirting with me. I felt like a celebrity. I also found my ex-boyfriend, a fellow employee there, which led to a rather nice relationship until I met Kurt. I was very proud of the fact that I was very rarely off with my money at all; if I was off, it was only by a nickel or a dime. I was then moved up to Customer Service Representative by the next summer, which meant both a larger paycheck and more money in my till. It was also more stress. I was yelled at on a near-daily basis by impatient, grumpy people. Sometimes it really got to me.

3. During the school year, I worked in my college library. I started out in Manuscripts and Rare Books, where I worked for a very, very, very old lady who had been in that department since the 1950s, and who chain-smoked cheap cigarettes. She was a spinster who lived with her cats. I think she was rather senile by the time I began working there. It was a really great job; I was given the task of reading old letters from the Civil War and coming up with a synopsis of each one. The eerie part was when I walked down to Bruton Parish and found these people’s gravesites. It gave me the willies, it did, because they were so real and so alive to me. My senior year the Manuscripts and Rare Books Department was moved off-campus in preparation for the renovation of the library, so I moved to Conservation & Preservation. There, I protected paperback books with hard plastic covers and repaired torn spines and end pages. It was a lot of fun, but it was very solitary work.

4. After college, I got a job at a small industrial hygiene company in Virginia Beach as a lab tech, which is amusing because I hadn’t had any chemistry since high school. The company made badges that change in the presence of a dangerous gas for people who work in dangerous industries. Again, I loved my job. I was given very non-technical things to do at first, and concentrated mainly on Quality Assurance, making sure the badges were put together correctly. Slowly I moved my way up as I proved that I learned quickly, until I was doing Quality Control (making sure the reactive layer in the badges were responding correctly) and also dabbling into Research & Development with new reactive layers and even some projects for the government. My bosses were fantastic and really took a chance on me. I worked my tail off in that job, always getting there early and staying as late as possible to get the job done. Once I even stayed till 10pm, learning this new machine that visually checked these little tabs we were developing for use with respirators. However, that job ended when the company imploded, and the entire lab quit en masse in protest.

Four places I have lived:

1. Virginia
2. northern Illinois
3. Nebraska
4. Washington state

Four places I’ve been on vacation:

1. Florida
2. upstate New York
3. Michigan
4. Ummm… We’re not really vacationing people. My father never went on vacation unless we had to go see someone do something — like when my sister graduated boot camp or when she was married.

Four of my favorite foods:

1. Italian
2. sushi
3. deviled eggs
4. Comfort food, like fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy

Four places I’d rather be right now:

1. Outside, enjoying the weather and going for a walk
2. Going shopping with Kurt
3. Europe
4. China/Japan/Korea (but only if Caroline can come with me!)