What is your job?

Robinson

Though, whenever I have to put "occupation" down on a form I write "musician." Then I go to the bathroom and weep silently in a stall for a few minutes.

Civil Servant then?

[Me too (IT - Sociology degree, MA in North American studies)]

Ditchdigger was the best, I think. I'm not kidding.

I'm also on the radio and work on political campaigns, do a bit of freelance PR and web design occasionally. I have a BA in history and a BA in broadcast communication, although I think being smart and having a good work ethic have more to do with my success.

Oh like THAT'S a job. Back in the kitchen with you.

How are his benefits these days?

We work together?

I may be getting a new client soon — a car collectors' club magazine based in the plains states. I'll know in the next month or so.

Fell into it sort of by accident. Before this I was a publications generalist. Mostly writing and editing, but also putting on the hats of a designer, production person, and circulation manager. I worked for a hodgepodge of trade magazines, association newsletters, an "alternative weekly," and for assorted government and nonprofit entities.

When I got my decidedly second-rate bachelor's degree--in English & philosophy, no less--my expectation was that I would be flipping burgers for the foreseeable future. So I consider myself lucky to be able to write for a living, and I don't mind not being rich and famous.

-- you people and your friends are fake (theundergroundhom...), August 9th, 2005 1:30 PM.

You're Marissa Marchant?

Hey, don't forget Doncaster!

(and they even manage to run trains as far as Scunthorpe, I think)

I'm writing cover letters tonight.

I would be amazed if this turned out to be true. It's subscription-only, except for some copies distributed at various stock shows. It's not barcoded or ISBN'ed at all, and it's small potatoes compared to Sh0w C!rcu!t, Nati0nal L!vestock Exhibit0r or Purple C!rcle. But stranger things have turned out to be true.

Only when I'm working for talent pay.

I had the job as an internship last summer, but come the fall I just kept coming in every week. Eventually they hired me full-time.

how i got there? i have a degree in music.

i also spend large amounts of time trying to figure out what other worthless degree(s) i should pursue.

in my free time i enjoy djing at a radio station, booking shows and writing a bit. i also enjoy sleeping and fine dining.

i have an MA in english language and literature, but the most useful thing i did at university was get involved with the student newspaper.

20 years on I work (1) on an organic dairy farm, (2) do lab testing at a wastewater treatment facility and (3) wtf - sell used cars. Small, part-time venues, all.

Silly me, though. I'm happy.

Oh, and we've got a sleek '98 Dodge Stratus with 85k and only a few minor chinks if you're interested...

I am doing this under duress and extreme stress, and if I dont find a new job soon, I am going to either develop alcoholism or have a breakdown, or both. I plan to go see my boss next week when I'm back on day shift and tell him either I go back to the role I was hired for, or I will be leaving. Maybe.

I also have some cheffing skills, and keep returning to it part-time, no matter how many times I tell myself I won't

Before that I taught sociology at the university level, and before that I was in the music business, and can't seem to really shake that one, no matter how hard I try-- I always have a hand in.

How did I get there? Two MAs and a Ph.D.
I didn't sell out son, I bought in!

Translation: ever wonder where those $2.00 ATM fees go?

Why are you so interested?

I don't really know how I got here. I have a half degree in Art and Public Communications (what they used to call Media Studies back in the day before Nu Media). I tried being a pop star for a while but I wasn't very good at it. I tried being a trustafarian, too, but the money ran out.

I kept having to take menial dayjobs doing data entry to support my lifestyle - my dad and brother were both computer programmers so I had a basic idea of how to hack. So I started hacking the databases I was doing data entry on to make it easier, because I was lazy. So some bright spark thought I should be the database admin instead, to teach me a lesson. I taught myself and turned out to be quite good at it.

So here I am wondering how the hell I ended up with this fancy, cushy, lucrative job.

Either way it means I do a mixture of cataloguing, labelling, tidying, enquiries, user induction and general admin, in the context of a language resource centre.

I'm also on the editorial board of a poetry journal, and write reviews for it. Sometimes I get paid for writing/performing poetry, but not in any way that troubles my bank balance.

Qualifications: a BA in English, half of a masters in Information Studies. I got where I am (such as it is) by having to take rubbish admin jobs when I left university, and the third rubbish admin job I took was this one nearly 4 years ago. It has evolved a bit, fortunately.

The poetry journal involvement is pure nepotism (and talent).

I have a BA in journalism and an NCTJ in media law. I lucked out: around the time I graduated a big magazine publisher had decided to offer four trainee places on music magazines. I became a junior writer on the dance music mag, stayed for two years and then went from there.

I like my job, but unfortunately we're being relocated to Chiswick sometime in the autumn, and I don't think I'm going to go. I've started having to do documentation recently (I'm supposed to be doing some today but it's going slowly) which I hate, so that makes it easier to quit!

I don't feel at all senior, and it's more project management than advising.

shhhhh, beanz! :)

i did wonder whether to mention that bit. but i, er, was aiming for a strict word count. [coughs]

where did you do yr postgrad?

It pays suprisingly well.

(Previous employment: Baker, dishwasher, barman, short order chef, grill chef, tour guide, bouncer, roofer, site joiner, labourer, bricklayer, bailiff, maker of garden ornaments, civil servant, bar manager, assistant restaurant manager, one or two I've scrubbed from my memory)

I got here by studying German at Wesleyan and then moving to the Netherlands with the Dutch man who would turn out to be my ex-husband. After a few months there, I landed a job with a big translation agency housed in a former cloister in Utrecht. After 6 years, I had to come back to the States or be a foreigner everywhere. So I set up shop as an independent contractor.

I like it because I'm my own boss and control my work flow (except when biz is too slow, which it usually isn't). What I don't like about it is not having any co-workers and sitting on my ass in front of a computer all day.

well that sounded a bit haughty. I should say: it was the first job offer I got that wasn't bussing tables or working the register at a bookstore.

Postgrad diploma at the prestigious L0ndon Sch0ol of J0urnalism. What do you mean you haven't heard of it?

xpost to Grimly

I am also an unemployed, disillusioned journalist.

I have a crap BA in Journalism which is in the post I guess, a pass degree most likely. As a result, it seems I will live at home for the foreseeable future.

Maria, I could have written that paragraphy myself. Funny, I know someone else who does freelance translation work, incl. Dutch to English. (I don't know if he still does it, but he used to translate D!sney comics from the Dutch licensee for the U.S. licensee.)

and beanz, i was talking to someone the other week who was at the LSoJ as well. can't remember who, though :0

heheheh. do tell more ...

Work part time managing a group of student paralegals who take new client enquiries in a plaintiff law firm.

Also do a bit of music journalism.

i work two jobs, one a half-time secondment.

the first job is for a charity giving advice to other small groups (all voluntary) about how to get started, fundraise, governing documents, all that jazz. this is fairly new to me, and i'm learning a lot.

the other job is the Local Compact Coordinator. the Compact, if you didn't know, is the document that guides the relationship between the statutory and voluntary sector, for mutual benefit. i divide my time on compact stuff between my main office and sitting in the council's building. which is a weird experience. i got the secondment through my old job, apparently by being an expert about networking (in a noncomputer sense) the voluntary sector.

my background is a bachelor of general studies with a lot of random jobs in there (retail, restaurants, substitute teaching, marking exams, law firm) before i went back and got my MSc in 'Voluntary Sector Organisation.'

in the meantime I am looking for a job

The joy of writing an empirical dissertation is that I have many opportunities to waste time during the day while Stata does hard sums for me.

Freelance: Jack-off-all trades musician, producer, and songwriter for hire. I've written and sung jingles in just about every genre you can think of, done production and remixes for some small dance labels (mostly vocal house & trance), and am about to start writing with a young pop diva.

I have an honours degree in English and History.

Just picked them up from the printers yesterday... yeah, that's bone, and the lettering is something called Silian Rail.

And by play hard, I mean sleep a lot.

I was prepared for this vocation in no way whatsoever by my philosophy degree.

-- Dr. Glen Y. Abreu (dr_...), August 10th, 2005. (later)

Wow.

What I wouldn't give for a preview button some days. Although with the amount of time I often have to spend wanking people's egos, it's a rather fitting typo. Time to update those business cards, then...

bump for an update

garment-dyer/inventory manager for a small clothing company. twice a year i am given a color palette for the two coming seasons and i have to figure formulas to make those colors happen. then once i've slaved over that, someone tells me they've changed their mind and they want to do these other colors instead. so then i slave over figuring new formulas. then they decide to go back to the original colors. the rest of my time is spent doing the actual dyeing.

9 years of college/grad school to be a chemical engineer. then i decided to make beer for a living instead. i'll be working until i'm 80, i'm afraid.

QA lead and sme for a smartgrid software product at a huge multinational company.

IT management in big law.

Marketing Communications Officer.

Law Cost Draftsman, I draft legal bills and then argue with people about the amount of said bill. Sometime the arguing will continue and a Judge will settle the matter in court. I have been fortunate in that I have never had to go to court yet. I have no idea how I ended up in this line of work.

culinary student, currently interviewing/staging for restaurant jobs and occasionally doing grunt work for catering companies.

Museum curator

how did you all get into your jobs (quals etc), did you always want to do it or something similar, and would you recommend it?

barely finished uni (with a lol BA in english lit), worked retail/hospitality exclusively, had no clue how to get a real job, had no skills apart from being able to (kind of) talk to people and work a cash register.

5 yrs ago i moved to the US and landed a crappy retail job for a clothing company. after about a year or so my boss recruited me to help "tidy up" the disaster that was the workshop, then she basically pass-agg'ed the then-current garment-dyer into quitting and in lieu of having anyone else available to do the job, i just fell into it. with about one or two days of training. i mostly just had to figure it out, but my boss is pretty stupid about a lot of stuff and seems to have no interest in hiring people who can do the specified job properly, so i guess that worked out ok for me.

but as it turns out, i am fairly good at figuring out formula colors (all the previous dyers had left little to no clear documentation of their formulas, so i really was winging it).

I'm an International Business Development Executive at a big publishing / education / media / whatever company. The pay is bad and most of the work is pretty boring but I do genuinely enjoy the relationship management side. I get to travel and can steal books, so there are perks.

It has nothing to do with my degree (law). I just started temping there to make money, got a permanent job and have been too lazy to look for another for the last seven years.

Recruitment advertising exec for a major paper. If it sounds at all glamorous, it's basically telesales.

garment-dyer/inventory manager for a small clothing company. twice a year i am given a color palette for the two coming seasons and i have to figure formulas to make those colors happen. then once i've slaved over that, someone tells me they've changed their mind and they want to do these other colors instead. so then i slave over figuring new formulas. then they decide to go back to the original colors. the rest of my time is spent doing the actual dyeing.

― just1n3, Saturday, June 29, 2013 4:32 AM (14 hours ago)

This is really interesting! Are the dyes pretty safe, or do you have to hazmat up?

my only qualification for getting into the brewing industry (other than a couple of relatively useless chem eng degrees) was a willingness to start at the bottom, working in poor conditions for extremely low pay. worked my way up from washing kegs to brewing, then got a head brewer job, and now i'm assistant corp. director of brewing for a growing group of brewery-restaurants.

xp well, like just about everything in CA, they have cancer warnings and stuff all over them (the dye labels). i think ~technically~ i'm supposed to use a full-on respirator when i'm mixing them (it's the dust that's bad), but tbh it's such a hassle (esp if you wear glasses) and i don't really spend that much time with the dust, that i just use something like a 3M dust mask.

the worst work-related injuries i've sustained have been from bleach - i have to bleach out all the washing machines after each load of dye, and i would get pretty bad burns/rashes on my forearms from it (my sleeves would get wet, so the bleach would be sitting against my skin for hours). this is because for years my boss would NEVER get me the right gloves. now i buy my own shoulder-length gloves and have her reimburse me.

i also work with soda ash which is pretty irritating to the respiratory system.

oh, and also the fucking HEAT - i work at the very back on our workshop, in a low-ceilinged area, with no ventilation of any kind (and lol @ the idea that my boss would ever install air-con), surrounded by machines filled with hot water and two commercial dryers. it's fine in winter but summer it is literally a sweatshop.

not_goodwin, glad to hear it, sounds like decent work. had horrible visions of you being permanently dolebound since the glory days of DWP debt collection. seems like a definite step up.

would be good if all the 2005 people could update their job situation now - if they're still on ilx, that is. what ilx archivists would know? pfunkboy?

Webmaster/content editor for a large metal record label that's not so secretly a division of one of the three mega-huge record labels. I interview the bands, post album release dates, tour dates, new videos, etc., etc. Qualifications: Freelance music journalist since 1996, editor of a couple of music magazines, including one metal title. I've also worked in retail/customer service, warehouses, etc. I can drive a forklift.

I've worked in pipeline construction for 7 years, mainly coating. By this time next month I will be a coating inspector.

I answered this in 2005 - I was correct in thinking I wouldn't stay in that job after the office was relocated, took voluntary redundancy early in 2006. Got job as database developer at website company (property portal), which got bought out by the Daily Mail and merged with another similar website company. Daily Mailisation didn't properly kick in for a few years so for a while that was a great job and I made some good friends there, some of whom I still work with at my current job, which is at another real estate-related website company.

i run grant-funded job readiness classes for the unemployed. my students have usually been out of work for a few years, so we get some tough customers, people who aren't sure if they'll ever work again, or want to. we do resume and interview prep, get them certificates in OSHA, first aid, forklift, and flagging, do basic math for manufacturing, blueprint reading, precision measuring, and projects in a manufacturing lab. most of the students aren't sit-in-class types, so once they're in the lab building and making, class goes better. i hire teachers, prep curriculum, reserve rooms, buy supplies, report on student progress, meet with partners, recruit, and present pubicly. at the end of a cohort we set them up with interviews and about half of them get jobs, which is a pretty good number considering when we did this a few years ago basically no one would get a job.

it's rewarding but very difficult and stressful. i like the students but they are often pains in the ass. they have a lot of barriers to employment, some of which feel insurmountable to me. getting a student out of living in his car and into transitional housing is one small but tough example. dealing with felonies as a barrier to employment is another.

i wouldn't have this job if not for ilx. an ilxor's husband mentioned to me at a party they were looking for a part-timer and i got in. 2 years later and i'm still here, more responsibility than ever.

sounds hard for sure but that's a v cool job

I work at a porn/leather shop bcz my friend was like "hey do you wanna work at a porn/leather shop" and I was like "uh okay".

I am currently looking for an additional (or possibly replacement) job that is more career-oriented, either in IT or with a non-profit or in admin or LGBT health, I don't know.

i love how short mine is now: teacher

anky that job sounds amazing. I love all aspects of the relationship between people and work. I wish I could come do an employment law presentation to one of your classes.

I'm an employee benefits litigation lawyer.

How it happened: English degree with meh grades, farted around for ten years, wanted to go to library school, decided to get a paralegal certificate to have recent grads/prof recs for library school, prof said I should go to law school, was like "Uhhh sure why not," went to law school focusing as much on labor and employment law as possible, graduated/passed bar in 2007, snatched a govt job as a workers' comp attorney out of the jaws of a terrible recession, really liked comp but (as well documented on ILX) hated the job, jumped ship to big law last September. I'd like to eventually take my comp/benefits litigation experience to a plaintiff's side firm to repay the karmic debt I'm incurring for all this defense work.

When I posted back in 2005, I was working at the Hanford nuclear cleanup site as a control systems programmer. Funding was cut, my final project there was programming bar code scanners for foremen to scan badges for time sheets. The writing was on the wall that counting radioactive mouse turds in closed offices would be my next stop. My father-in-law became ill, and so I found a job based in Seattle again - for a green startup that scrubbed landfill gas into pure, cryogenically liquified methane. I ended up in the largest landfill in California (Frank R. Bowerman landfill in Orange County, named for the guy who was a technical consultant for the movie Soylent Green) and got to meet a great handful of ILXors. The company was terribly managed. The next project was slated to be in the middle of nowhere in southern UT, and I did not want to have to be there for 3 weeks at a time on 12 hour 7 day shifts with 3 days home (as I had on the CA project). So I quit and went back to control systems consulting. I got kind of tired of freelance control systems stuff and was scraping through some on-line job site for the keyword SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) when I came across an ad for a software tester that had SCADA or power industry experience. I contracted to this company for 2 years (continuing with a few of my other control systems clients as well), then the lure of awesome benefits and eventual retirement convinced me to flip back to employee.

I like doing software testing a lot - I love solving puzzles (and have OCPD tendencies) and though the devs hate it when I cheerfully break their stuff day in and day out, we're a good team. I'm the lead QA person now, so I do less actual testing and more managing but it's an okay balance. Because I have a lot of power industry background (all sorts of generation) and did years of technical sales, I get to do customer-facing stuff too - demos, trade shows, on-site testing and go-lives. It's a good mix of stuff I enjoy doing and not too much of stuff I dislike.

I'm a systems auditor with the United Nations. I go around doing audits of country offices and suchlike.

I work in sales for a dvd distributor. Started out doing admin, and did that for 5 years, and then spent 5 years doing more IT related work for a large account, as kind of 'nerd backup' to the account rep. I really dug that. These days I'm kind of a floater for two or three departments, doing all kinds of stuff. Marketing, it, sales, bit of everything.

Company has been around since the beginning of the VHS days (30+ years). These days we sell to pretty much anyone who can't buy direct from studios and/or too big to just buy cheap retail. We've downsized a lot but the main reason I've stayed for so long is it's pretty nice place to work - we don't get as many studio perks as we used to when I started, but we still get free movie screenings and/or movie tickets now and then, some pretty fun trips and the people are friendly. And the office is right next to a state park, on the edge of a lake which makes for nice lunchtimes.

I kind of fell into it when I moved to the US. I originally had worked in publishing in Aus, but Sacramento didn't have a lot of opportunities in that area. This just happened to be one of the first jobs I applied for, since I needed to get work pretty quickly.

I also have a sideline doing some freelance writing for a group of free local magazines, which stops my right-brain from shrivelling up completely :)

I have worked as a sales clerk for a machine tool retailer, a house painter, a freelance ad copywriter, a technical writer and a school bus driver, but I have recently retired. I still pinch myself from time to time to see if this is true.

I forgot the job as a film inspector and shipping clerk.

What I mostly do is take files from print publications and format them for the Web. One of our magazines, for example, is a society mag featuring lots of portraits in their profiles. Our template online is more landscapey, so I crop and edit the photos where necessary. I'll also use photos that weren't used in the issue because of space and turn them into "expanded" galleries.

I basically copy-and-paste the text, but I do have to format that with bolding, bullet points, links, etc. I also have to rewrite the headlines since something like "Walking On Air" might work in print, but is lousy for SEO. We also publish digital editions online, those weird websites with the scanned PDFs of a magazine and animated "turning the page" movements. But those have low-bearing in the Google world, so we still do it the first way too.

I rarely report the news. I rarely take photographs. Some guy called me on the phone the other day to complain about something and he asked, "Well, aren't you a journalist?" and my quick answer was "I dunno. Hard to say." When I do write, it's usually for a feature like this one.

Today was my sixth anniversary doing this. I have no idea if this is the way it works at other publishing companies. Curious, though.

1. I loved that feature.
2. I need to read "One Cold Wet Night."

I run the exhibition installation department of a contemporary art museum.

Prospect researcher for a non-profit org. I compile biographical data about our members and evaluate their ability and interest in making financial contributions to our organization.

Spent a long time hacking my way through an English Lit degree. Last semester of college landed an unpaid internship at a different nonprofit, based on my familiarity with research databases and Lexis-Nexis and the like. The internship gave me a lot of working experience with the Raiser's Edge database, which is basically the monopoly standard in nonprofit development and was enough to land me an entry-level job. I moved up a little in the job, but the organizational structure here is pretty stagnant at the moment and I'll either have to move to a different org to get a higher paying job or go back to school to train for something different.

i'm a librarian at a research university. i collect faculty research and make it available in an open access repository. i also negotiate license agreements for electronic resources.

i'm editor of a digital entertainment website. it's okay.