Lists of Lists, Volume 5: Jobs Edition

Not this Jobs.

How many jobs have you had? Two? Three? I've had several. So many, in fact, that my resume was once three pages long, until a career consultant told me that a three-page resume is for braggarts and lunatics, and I've since found a way to pare it down to a pair of pages.

My lists in this post will concern some of my job history, for instance:

ADDRESSES OF THE MANHATTAN-AREA EMPLOYERS FOR WHOM I'VE WORKED

1. Two Park Avenue
2. 200 Park Avenue
3. 200 Madison Avenue (the same employer as 200 Park; the office moved)
4. 611 Broadway
5. Two Penn Plaza (on two separate occasions, at the same company)
6. Somewhere on either West 21st or West 22nd, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues 
7. 45 West 18th Street (the same employer as West 21st/22nd; the office moved)
8. 130 Fifth Avenue
9. 1176 Avenue of the Americas

Scanning that list of addresses, more than looking at my resume, makes me realize I've worn out a lot of shoe leather during my career. If they wanted to do a bus tour of All The Places Where The Anthony Show Once Worked, it would take about three hours to hit everywhere, not counting the lunch break at Gray's Papaya.


Without taking into consideration the actual jobs themselves, each location had its advantages and disadvantages. At 611 Broadway, right above Houston, I used to stroll into Soho or even Little Italy for lunch. Two Penn was convenient because it's right on top of Penn Station. And when I worked in Midtown I got to see more of the Naked Cowboy than one lifetime should experience.

I've worked at a couple of non-Manhattan jobs, too, so you've now got an idea of the number of places I've worked, and that's not counting the jobs I had while in high school, college, and after college while I sought a "real job." Interestingly, I haven't worked at too many places as a teenager, as the next list will attest.

JOBS I HAVE HAD PRIOR TO WHAT I GUESS I COULD CALL, WITH SAD QUOTES, MY "CAREER"

1. Paperboy
2. Custodian
3. Warehouse worker
4. Busboy/dishwasher

The papers I delivered didn't have
the word "iStockphoto" written on them.

I was a paperboy for my hometown paper, Newsday. The paperboy has now gone the way of the cassette tape, because people now have their papers delivered by an adult doing a drive-by early in the morning because they don't care to have their news arrive by four or five o'clock by an often unreliable teenager.

Being a paperboy sucked, for several reasons.

REASONS WHY BEING A PAPERBOY WAS LIKE ONE OF THE WORST THINGS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD

1. You had to work every single day, no matter what the weather
2. I never seemed to make any money
3. Collecting from customers was a drag
4. Sundays were a LIVING DEATH

This was the income arrangement: You pay the distributor every Saturday morning for the week's worth of papers, which was a discount of the subscription price. Then, when you collect from your customers, which was always a pain in the ass, you got to keep the difference, which was a combination of the markup over what you paid plus any tips.

The point is, it never seemed like I was making any money. Worse, price increases always screwed the paper boy out of tips. When I began my career, a week's worth cost $2.50, so I'd often get three bucks, meaning a 50 cent tip. A few months later, when the price went to $2.65, guess what most of my customers gave me? Right, three bucks.

The absolute worst part of the job was Sunday delivery. You get parts of Sunday's paper on Friday, then another couple of sections on Saturday morning, when you paid the distributor, who drove a van and looked like the kind of gentleman who would have a glove compartment full of candy and chloroform. Then, on Sunday morning at around 7am — and good luck if the delivery guy is late, or you get shorted — the "news" parts would arrive on your driveway in a heavy lump, and you'd have to assemble the paper as quickly as possible because your customers want to read their full-color Garfield adventures before they go to church.

The pain-in-the-ass-ness was compounded by the fact that my route was not on my block, but several blocks away, so Father of The Anthony Show had to drive me around every Sunday morning so I could complete the route before noon.

Yeesh...just thinking about that job wears me out.

THE KINDS OF JOBS I NEVER HAD AS A TEENAGER, OR, THUS FAR, EVER

1. Retail
2. Food service
3. Anything where I have to work a cash register

Not as easy to spell as, say, IHOP.

To be more precise, I did work in food service, for one evening. Allow me to explain.

I was living in my off-campus residence over the summer prior to my senior year at college with Girlfriend of The Anthony Show (who would eventually be promoted to Mrs. The Anthony Show) and another roommate, Girlfriend's friend from the dorms. Girlfriend, who was helping another friend clean houses for some cash, and I were extremely broke and (for the most part) too proud to call our parents for money, so we were reduced to playing "Which meal are we going to skip today?" in order to make ends barely meet.

Girlfriend's friend, who I'll call Roommate, was working at Perkins, which was the Western New York version of Denny's, only without the charm of Denny's, and suggested I try the night shift as a busboy/dishwasher. I thought that was a great idea, so I went for it.

After a brief interview with the restaurant manager, I spent like 30 bucks on a pair of suitable black shoes at Thom McAn, which also happened to be among the ugliest shoes that a man could wear, and began the night shift: 11pm to 7am.

Out of all my jobs, including when I had to clean vomit from a daycare rug and even the soul-eating job that I'm doing now, nothing was worse than that night shift. Somehow my dad was able to pull down 30 years on the UPS night shift, but he's made of stronger stuff.

My night at Perkins was very uneventful, though I probably would have preferred remaining out of sight, in the back with the hot angry dishwasher machine. Clearing off the tables is a pain in the ass, especially when you have asshole drunk college kids a booth or two away sarcastically complementing you on your table-clearing expertise.

I worked with some guy in his 20s who had another full-time job to go to right after the Perkins shift ended. He didn't appear to be as horrified about the idea as I was when he told me this.

IT'S LIKE THAT MOVIE INSOMNIA WHERE ROBIN WILLIAMS PLAYED A BAD GUY
When you work all night at an all-night restaurant, it's hard to tell what time it is. The lights are always on, and even if the place doesn't get too crowded, there was never a moment when Perkins was completely empty.

Still, when I finally left my first shift at 7am, I was startled by the rising sun. As I walked to my car I saw my co-worker in his vehicle eating lunch before heading to his next 8-hour shift God knows where. I arrived home, where Girlfriend was still in bed, and then it hit me:

I AM WORKING ALL NIGHT DURING THE

TIME I SHOULD BE SLEEPING

Once that should-have-been-obvious revelation registered in my exhausted brain, I concluded that never returning to that job would be work skipping a meal a day.

CODA
I didn't even call in to resign. After the next day, Roommate said to me, "You're not ever going back, are you?"

"Nope!" I replied.

About a week later, my paycheck arrived in the mail. It was around 45 dollars. We ate like kings (well, king and queen) for two days.