Remembering All My Jobs - Part II

I'm actually very grateful that in the US we work summer jobs and part time jobs while we are in school and still young, I think these experiences were really what threw me into adulthood.

Part II - college.

My second year at school, I was going to start living off-campus. Since my lease started in May, that meant I was going to be in New Orleans and that I also needed money. During the year, I had gotten an internship at Gambit, the alternative weekly in New Orleans. It was in the advertising sales department. I mostly interacted with some sort of pre-Salesforce lead/contact software, whereby I would enter notes about different local businesses for the sales team. I would go through the ads in rival publications and send them to whichever salesperson was assigned that account. This was my first foray into avertising sales. I was very impressed by all the sales people, they all had big personalities and were always on the phone and moving around, going to visit clients.

My school advisor happened to also be the head of the school newspaper, and he thought it would be a great idea to start an advertising sales department for the paper. Until then, he was pretty much just taking any interested ad-buyers as they came. We set up a media kit, established pricing across both our weekly paper and monthly magazine, as well as ad space in the stands where our papers were distributed on campus. He asked me to be the manager, and this included a weekly salary in addition to commisssion. I started doing some cold calling (I was way more comfortable cold-emailing) and got a few local businesses to run ads. This job was great because we also got to go to a conference every year in the spring where all the other college newspaper ad teams would meet. There was one in Charlotte and one in Los Angeles. For the one in LA, the other reps and I took a Grayhound to Las Vegas after the conference. That bus ride could probably be a blog post in itself...

One summer, one of my friends got me a job at a restaurant in Harahan, Louisiana. This is about a 10-15 minute drive from Uptown New Orleans, where I was living. Initially I thought I was going to get a job as a server. But when I went in for the interview, the manager said he needed line-cooks. Had I ever been a line-cook before? Nope! Pretty sure at the time my cooking repetoire included the typical gourmet college dishes like grilled cheese and spaghetti. Anyways, I was going to learn on the spot. How hard could it be. My first day on the job, the guy training me was pretty nice. He might have said that he was a former gang member. But I don't know if that was a joke or not. He quit a few days later. The head line cook was training me next. He wasn't very happy that I was there but I could tell he was also trying to test me with various tasks to see how I would respond. I didn't let him get to me.

So, I learned to cook on the spot. Mostly typical Louisiana restaurant fare, I basically lived on fried oysters and quesadillas. One of my buddies accidentally cut part of his finger off in the onion slicer one night. It was nice not having to be in the front of the house. When things would get slammed I learned how to not get flustered and keep working.

The summer after my last semester in New Orleans, I got an intership working for the adveristing sales department in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. This was through the organization that I went to the conferences with, I believe. The pay wasn't much but it was enough to live a few miles from the beach for a summer. Ft. Walton is a big military town - tons of air force people. I rented a room from a guy who lived in a mixed neighborhood with probably half military families and half civilian. This guy, my landlord, told me towards the end of my time there that he was in witness protection. That he had lived in Miami in the 80s and now he had a new name. Who knows. Anyways, the job was alright, the people at the office were nice and I spent alot of time riding around with the sales people. One of the top salespeople rarely every came in, and half the time he was in his golf clothes. He had grown up in town and knew basically everyone and their businesses. He was great at his job. I did make a few sales, and I managed to sell to some of the salespeople's clients without knowing, and that didn't go super well. It was a nice experience, but I realized there was no future in newspaper ad sales by then. I had just kind of fallen into it, but it didn't seem like the right time to try and make a career out of it.