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Job hunting in the time of Covid


Guest Brando
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It's so weird. I have three different resume's. One for my teaching career which is about 15 years and has been in the same school district so it's short. Then I have my food service management career and I used to get head hunted for that all the time but I haven't updated it in about 15 yeas so I guess recruiters stopped but that resume goes all the way back to my fifteen year old self so it's 35 years of work history. The one that gets the most buzz is my dumbass call center resume. A few years ago my phone second job made me apply for a position but I had to create a linked in profile and upload a resume to get my promotion to level II customer care services. So I made a resume and put it online and got my promotion. I make about $18 an hour at this job and it's been great to me but that call center experience is apparently in high demand. Like I don't want to talk to ladies buying pants online who get them and are shocked that the XXL is not going to fit their size 26 body and want to return it in the time of covid and didn't read the fine print. NO THANKS QVC! Or the flip side, banking services like Chase Bank. If I could pass the Spanish test an extra $1 an hour comes my way!

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Ive worked for 10 different places. And technically under one corporate entity I worked for 3 different companies, but Im counting that as 1.

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I missed one job. If were going with titles/specific jobs:

 

Boston Market - 2 jobs

Public library - 3 jobs

Bank - 2 jobs

Restaurant

1 church

2nd church

Campus library

Pharmacy - 2 jobs

State Farm - 4 jobs

Horrible insurance company

State - 2 jobs

 

Plus I technically owned my own company repairing computers in the late 90s / early 2000s so add that in.

 

So.. 21 if I counted right

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uhh...I have no idea.

So before the age of 24, I probably had like 15 or more.

Since then, 3 full-time and, right now, my 4 part-time "jobs". "Jobs" because I technically earn money from them but half of them really feel like highly compensated volunteer positions. Oh and if we're counting volunteer positions, I have like 7 that I don't get paid for. Plus there's that whole full-time mom and homeschooler thing which costs more money than all of my "jobs" actually bring in.

 

We've been doing a lot of talking lately about both of us going back to school and then getting better jobs. So it'll be fun to put together a resume with all of this.

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Schlotzsky's making bread.

Olan Mills setting phone appointments for family pics

Some weirdo school picture place where I stamped the photographers logo in gold foil on the back of pictures.

Baby sitting.

Taco Bell for 20 plus years - 1 time for the main Taco Bell company until they started breaking them down until franchises and then it was a total of 3 franchises.

That one summer my senior year where my brothers and I made a bet to see how many jobs we could get fired from over the course of the summer. I worked 53 fast food and random places that included Astro World, several grocery store chains, Taco Bell, Schlotzsky's, McDs, Long John Silvers, Wendy's, a mexican restaurant, Subway, a snow cone shack, a couple of different movie theaters, KFC, Pizza Hut, Dominos, a store in the mall that no longer exists that sold tapes and vhs cassettes, Blockbuster, a book store, a mini golf and video game place, a car wash and some of them were repeats because we'd get dumb managers who would hire us back again after a few weeks. My brother won by 54 jobs fired from. He was fired twice from McD's in the same day. I think the best firing was when I told some lady at Long John Silvers to Arrrr walk the plank when she came up to complain about the size of her fish. No bells were rung that day for me!

Hardee's for 3 years in college making morning biscuits.

Krystal's where I learned what a grit is.

Barney's Coffee and Tea Shop where I learned how to roast coffee beans and make espresso

Walmart - which I got fired from for shaking a kid who threw a bounce ball at the ceiling and caused that bike rack thing to fall down from the ceiling.

Some fried chicken place in Georgia I can't remember the name of after I got fired from Taco Bell for telling an Indian from India that a bean burrito doesn't have meat because it's a bean burrito and apparently had it with my sarcastic tone and reported me to every number he could think of. It was not BoJangles but I can't seem to remember the name.

Waitress at Shoney's where I got fired for chasing a group of old people who ran me ragged complaining about there being too many ice cubes in their water to the butter pat being to cold and complaining about portions even though the clearly ordered the senior plate which is smaller portions because it costs less and then left a 50 cent tip for a bill over $100. I went out into the parking lot and gave that old man Bible group leader the fifty cents back stating he clearly needed the money more than me.

Waffle House where I was a waitress that got fired for not being able to call out orders correctly at 2 am in the morning.

Selling Peanuts at the Braves games in the early 90s. When I got old enough I moved up to beer. I had thighs that could crush but walked away with $500 in cash every night but had to walk to some random weirdo empty lot at the end of the night where my car was parked for $2 that if my Dad ever knew I did that he would have been super mad. Eventually I got to work for the 96 Olympics venue for Track and Field selling peanuts too.

More Taco Bell but now in Texas where I became GM.

Dishwasher at some weirdo restaurant.

Domino's pizza delivery driver..

Substitute teacher for 5 years while I finally hunkered down and started taking getting my degree seriously.

Teachers assistant for Incarnate Word Statistics professor who eventually leveraged me into taking a lot of her classes at the same time. I ended up breaking my foot with a giant slide rule moving it to the new mathematics building from an old closet in a Nun's old housing section.

Pulling beer tap at Spurs games in the Alamo Dome.

Secretary at a cement wall builders offices for a Jewish guy.

Krystal's when it opened in Texas for the brief period before the franchise when bankrupt due to poor - NOT ME - management.

Cici's Pizza manager

Harland Clarke- taking check orders by phone then by chat and now by phone again still at this job to pay off debt from school.

Worked in the same school district now for about 15 plus years total. I taught math in a middle school and then quit to focus on Cici's Pizza because I made more money. Got fired from Cici's Pizza for being a burn out and went back to work in the same school district teaching in a charter school for language arts where I've been for 11 years and love it.

 

I may return back to food. But you can see where I was starting to lose interest and didn't care what I did and would get fired. So there's definitely a pattern. LOL. I don't even want to count those jobs.

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CiCis educates children. How to overeat and be American.

 

Mildly related, we used to go to CiCis after our Sunday evening Mass back when I was doing youth ministry. Depending on when we got there, they would sometimes just charge us for a drink and tell us to eat quick so they could clean up and go home. Theyd hand us paper plates that they didnt have to wash.

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HAHAHA. I never did that but we had a lot of youth groups come. I made 60K a year plus bonus and was working on becoming my own franchise owner. Probably why I got fired. I actually did a pizza education program for small kids where they could come in and see what all went into making pizza and they then got to make their own pizzas and eat them at the end for lunch. It was a big hit.

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We never did it with a big group, well, not the free stuff. But we would organize big groups, which was part of why they liked us. We would also plan in advance so they knew we were coming when it was big.

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I loved that. I also organized a big super bowl party event at Cici's the night that I think the Colts won the Super Bowl. It was huge. It took us forever to clean up and go home because the dining room was so trashed. We found poop in one of the Star Trek games you sat in to play in the game room. The one I worked in was near Six Flags so we always had end of year school kid buses leaving kids to eat so we'd make over 1000 pies an hour.

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First job in high school: worked at my mom’s photo studio. They did photography for Fred Meyer’s (an NW retail chain), for circular ads. I worked in the warehouse pulling merch and building all the toys that needed to be assembled.

 

Job two— a baggage boy for Greyhound. It was awful and I quit after a week.

 

Job three— worked at a digital service bureau through college, doing scanning, large format printing, minor design stuff, digital photo retouching, etc.

 

Job four - in grad school I was an in-house graphic designer for a hair product company

 

Job five— in house designer / art director for a radio syndication company. More design work, but on the job learned motion graphics and editing.

 

Job six — between college and grad school, and them again after the radio company job I did freelance design work. Lots and lots of clients, but I consider it one job I did off and on.

 

Current job —. Douchebag Hollywood screenwriter

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Foot Locker Outlet

Local soccer store (probably still my favorite job)

Natural Wonders

Engineering intern at small aerospace supplier that made actuators (2 summers)

Work study student machinist (worst job I ever had)

Assistant to the Director of Engineering Labs (work study)

Engineering intern at Kennedy Space Center

Big girl engineer at KSC for 2 years

Even bigger girl engineer at aerospace company for 9 years

Engineering project manager at aerospace company (I lasted 2 years before I was bored out of my mind)

Back to old group at aerospace company (almost 3 years now)

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Are we doing the listing thing? Okay, I have nothing better to do.

 

First job was in a deli making sandwiches, jumped from there to making sandwiches for a mobile catering company.

 

Got hired somewhere in there to be an event security guard for the city's arena. HANFAN got me the job.

 

In college, I spent three years managing and digitizing a department's slide collection (as in film slides), and one summer as the department's receptionist/secretary/librarian.

 

Just out of college I got an internship with an art museum, and a temporary job in the activities department of a nursing home.

 

The art museum hired me in as a project coordinator, and used me as an interim volunteer coordinator and docent program coordinator. I applied for both jobs, they hired someone else each time. I also spent 2 years on the front desk rotation.

 

I quit the museum to work for the media company in circulation, which basically means customer service with mailing duties. I also assisted with social media coordination and event coordination, and was the president of the social committee. This is the one I currently have the application in to be the receptionist for.

 

Got laid off when the company was bought by a bigger shark and the bigger shark eliminated my position. Spent 5 months unemployed before getting hired by an appliance dealership with the most toxic work environment ever. Lasted there nine months. Been unemployed for the past 5.5 months.

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lol I just got an emailed offer, directly from the recruiter and not through indeed or linkedin or anything, to ask me to apply for a position that makes about 15k less than I already do

Most of mine have been via email, they're getting smarter. Would you be interested if the pay was better? It wouldn't hurt to email them and say "Yeah, I'm interested but the salary is way too low." See what they come back with.

 

I feel like by the time you're getting real emails from recruiters, you're at a point in your career where you can negotiate.

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Here we go, in order:

 

Research Assistant in one department for a year,

Undergrad Research Assistant at another place for three summers,

Research Assistant at another university for a summer,

Graduate Teaching/Research Assistant at the first university for 4 years,

Various levels of Professor for 9 years now at another school.

 

I don't think there is any other sector I could work in at this point.

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Wow, its hard to believe youve been a professor that long.

 

I found that a VP from one of the companies I contacted looked me up on LinkedIn. So thats cool.

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It's hard for me to believe, too!

 

Even though I'm not looking for jobs myself right now, I have two PhD students graduating this year who will be looking for jobs and both of them want to go into academia. this market looks like it could be really rough for a few years again, even rougher than when I was looking. I am sure they'll find jobs of some sort, but they may have to look at either industry or government for the short term, at least.

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