20 jobs in 50 years

inspired by Wake Lloire's essay

On their brilliant and fascinating Substack, Wake Lloire recently wrote a piece about where they have worked. There are so many different types of jobs and such a wealth of experience. It’s a fascinating read, and has inspired me to look back over 50+ years of my occupations and outer workings.

My siblings are ten and twelve years older than me. My brother died last year alas.

The Stapler

When I was eight and well into my teens, my sister worked for a bank, a series of banks. I used to meet her there, travelling from Mississauga on my own by bus and subway and navigating downtown streets to her office. Whilst there, I was given the task of stapling. So my first job was that: the stapler. Back then there was a lot of paperwork in a bank. I remember flimsy hand-written pink and yellow papers in triplicate. This first skill, stapling paper together, came in handy much later in life as a small press publisher and yet I have never quite mastered the long stapler that is used for chapbook stapling.

Girl Friday

My brother worked for a customs broker with offices at the Cargo area of the Toronto International Airport. I worked there at about ten years old. I think both of these “jobs” were simply ways to keep me busy while my mother and father were working at their factory jobs. We cleared Dire Straits through customs, which involved paperwork only alas. We cleared gold shipments too. More paperwork. I also answered the phone, always getting the name mixed up. It was the names of three partners and a true tongue twister, resulting in creative spoonrisms. I think I did some filing and ashtray emptying, but my favourite part of the job was to wander around the cargo and terminal sections of the Toronto airport and pick stuff up. This term, Girl Friday, is obviously out of date now, thankfully, but I still love the idea of running errands and picking stuff up for people. As long as I can do it by foot and not have to be in a moving vehicle.

Velcro Factory Worker

The father of a high school pal ran a factory that made velcro. At the time velcro was relatively new. He claimed to have invented it, which I doubt, but we’ll give that to him, I guess. The family were Pentecostals and I went to church with them too, but that’s another story for another time. He hired his daughter and her friends to pack up boxes of curlers with velcro straps on them. I remember they were pink and plastic. It was dreary work but we had fun because we spent the entire time laughing together.

Fry Trap Cleaner and Dining Room Hostess

At sixteen I worked at the Burger King at Rockwood Mall in Mississauga. I remember making $2.45 an hour, which included a free meal: chicken sandwich and coke. The manager, Tony was a jerk. I was on cash at first, and he kept ordering me to smile. My face hurt at the end of my shift. If I was short, he demoted me to the fry trap where I had to clean out all the grease from those awful and limp fat sticks. Shudder. Or he would put me on dining room, as the “hostess,” which meant cleaning up all the gross stuff in the dining room, all the spills and garbage, then going outside at the end of my shift, which could be two in the morning or later, to the parking lot to pick up garbage. I hated it. I hated the brown polyester uniform and hat. I hated having to deal with the customers. I hated the rush of it and I loathed the greasy, tasteless as cardboard food.

Assembly Line Worker

My mother worked at an office supplies factory in Mississauga. I went to work there the summer after graduating from high school to make money for tuition for the University of Toronto Victoria College where I would major in French. It was a union job, so I made $11 an hour, enough to pay for rent in my second year and also tuition. It was a boring job. I used a hydaulic press to cut corners on duotangs and I packed red, yellow, black and green binders into boxes, then put the boxes on a skid, then the skids were taken away. If we were lucky, there was music. I remember rocking out to Electric Avenue in the summer heat. Once I remember the emergency alarm going off. Someone had caught their hand in one of the machines. My mother worked in the lacquer room with heavy toxic chemicals that caused her arm to swell up. Then later in her fifties, she applied to be a fork lift operator and got the job. She was really proud to achieve that. There were these old men who worked as book binders in their special room, separate from the rest of us. My mother took me there to show me their work. Black hard backed books with gold lettering. Foreshadowing an interest in books and their physical creation, perhaps?

Self-Service Cashier at a Gas Station

A friend of my mother’s got me a job at a self-serve gas station run by her son, who was a hockey player that had retired or something like that. I worked the 3pm to 10pm shift on Saturday nights, doing my German homework and handling the purchases, cleaning the bathroom and talking to customers, often all dolled up for their Saturday night dates. At the beginning I kept forgetting to put the night’s take into the safe. Early one Sunday morning I was called to the phone. The owner asked me if I’d put the money in the safe. For a change, I had actually remembered. It turns out they were robbed that night. So the only money the robber got was the $50 float. phew! I met my first husband here. He arrived one Saturday night with problems with his motorbike, a little 80 cc blue Yamaha. I had no idea what to do about it, but called my dad, who used to have a motorbike. The guy with the motorcycle problems heard enthusiasm in my voice so he came back the next week and then we went out.

More Factory Jobs

We moved to Kitchener-Waterloo after my second year of university at the U of T, which I began referring to as the University of Terror or of Tears. I worked at a circuit board manufacturing plant, after convincing the manager that I could handle the job, even though he said it was a man’s job. Har har. I did the nickle-plating of circuits. A group of women inspected all the circuits, and some experienced dude got to do the expensive gold etching. We wore gloves, but the chemicals made my skin itch. I also had to clean the kitchen and wipe down the lens of the giant camera. I had a few other brief factory jobs at the time too.

Word Processor

At the University of Waterloo, I had an overnight job typing in the co-operative work term reports of students on a Xerox 860, an early word processing machine with two disks that you had to keep exchanging: a system disk and a data disk. There was no hard drive. The screen was the size of a piece of paper, and there was a cat instead of a mouse, a metal pad you ran your fingers over to control the cursor on the screen. I still remember the agony of typing in a business plan for a summer camp, complete with song. I would leave at around 5 am, and my then boyfriend and I would sing the camp song. He spent a lot of time on the couch in the office while I worked.

French Correspondence Marker

In fourth year at U of Waterloo I was given the task of marking beginner French exams. It was boring but I made a little money, which I needed.

French Instructor

I taught two sections of beginner French while doing my Master of Arts in French at the University of Waterloo. I remember very little about this, except that I shared an office with two really awful people who were quite political and jealous of my every move.

Temp Typist

When I first arrived in Ottawa the spring of 1984, before I began my studies at the School of Translators and Interpreters in the autumn, I worked at various temp positions. I remember having to do a table of contents in Word Perfect for one government department and not having a clue how to do it. I think it took me two weeks and I still got it wrong. I had another job that required me to track every single minute of my time. It was god-awful. I have never to this day ever wanted to revisit those cubicle days.

[skipping two week stint as telephone sales for mags and half hour i worked at a fast food Asian restaurant]

Junior Translator and Terminologist

While I was in translation school I got the coveted jobs, working as a junior translator at the RCMP and Corrections Canada. At the RCMP we had to use typewriters to type our translations. I also worked for the terminology department where I learned the idea of “fausses urgences” or fake emergencies, as my boss told me. Staff called us up to ask us to research specific terms for them. I enjoyed that a lot. I also experienced coffee politics for the first time, when I dared to drink coffee from the third floor coffee pot, when I was actually assigned to the second floor. My desk was on third because there was no room for me on second. Two women followed me to my desk and interrogated me over that coffee.

Documentation Room Librarian

I volunteered to supervise the documentation room at the School of Translators because I was always up early and I missed having an office. It was helpful to be in hte documentation room because there were so many dictionaries and terminology books for me to use for my assignments. The School’s director was an early bird like me. She even let me use the coffee maker. Eventually we got to talking and she hired me to work on the bilingual dictionary project.

Researcher/Lexicographer

For two years and shortly after graduation, I worked on the bilingual dictionary project, researching French and English terms, learning how to format dictionary entries, and contacting welding places and beauty salons to ask them questions about vocabulary. Once a week the director and I went to a nearby restaurant for lunch and Chardonnay. The project was housed in an old building at the U of Ottawa. My boss smoked a lot. It was not something anyone would experience today.

Postscript: found out that Roda P. Roberts, the former director of the School of Translators and Interpreters, and my boss at the Canadian Bilingual Dictionary project for several years died back in October. sad to hear. Roda was a force of nature. She taught me a a lot and we were kindreds in many ways: both early birds, both candid and driven by the work. sorry to hear of her passing.

Translator

After graduation, I got a job translating French to English for a local multi-lingual translation firm. The administrator was annoyed with the owner, who had hired me for ten bucks an hour. The group was highly dysfunctional. I was an early bird but the rest were all late in and late out. They played opera on the phone. It wasn’t a good fit. I passed my accreditation to freelance for the Feds and worked at that for a while. I hated translation as a job. School was quite fun. All of us students suffering together through the frustrations of a high stress program. There was a lot of theory and the practical assignments were highly engaged and specialized: science, legal, automotive. I loved it. But the work of translation quickly became routine to me and deadly dull, while being a lot of pressure too. I had some interesting private sector clients that I enjoyed working for, but they were few and far between. At the time, with the Translation Bureau, if you made one major error, you could lose your accreditation. I made 17 cents a word and I counted every damn word. If I had continued I would have had a nervous breakdown.

Gallicism Editor

One of my professors liked me and hired me as her assistant at the School of Graduate Studies where my main job was to edit the English version of the calendar for gallicisms (French words). The profs did not like this at all and I received a lot of resistance to any changes I suggested. I also did her filing, but not very well.

Business Administrator

My first husband was laid off and started his own engineering consulting company. He had to deal with a law suit early on by some joker sub-contractor who thought he deserved “half the profits.” We had to rent a photocopier and we copied a bunch of log entries and other documentation. I also had to help finish the work that the joker abandoned when he filed his lawsuit. For a decade I helped my first husband run this business, learning a little bit about human resources, bookkeeping and hosting xmas parties.

Writer, Editor and Publisher

This brings me to the current time. I created my own job as a volunteer editor and publisher and writer and have been doing that for over twenty years now. I’ve never been happier. It’s a great fit for me. I enjoy working with fellow writers, publishers and editors, promoting and amplifying the work of creators who are systematically excluded from literary and arts canons. I have written and created work that engages my mind and heart. I am now running an editing service to help clients to translate what they have in their minds to effective pieces of writing. I really enjoy being able to support people and help them achieve their dreams and goals of creating work they can be proud of. I’ve been really fortunate to be part of a supportive and friendly literary community and I always want to give back.