48 thoughts on “Nice Work If You Can Get It”

  2. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    I really hit the world of work in 1971 when I graduated from high school. I immediately discovered that if you were female, the males in charge expected you to make coffee. I did not want to do that. Who wants to be tethered to the coffeepot in an insurance office? Not me. Why would the fact that I am female influence this as part of my work responsibilities?

    So when it came around to my turn I made the worst pot of coffee imaginable–mostly water and weak. No man in that insurance office asked me to make it again.

    What they did not know, is that I had been brewing coffee for my dad since I was 9 years old (he had MS and could not make his own). I knew more about making coffee than anyone there which is how I knew how to make a really inadequate pot of the stuff.

    That skill just had nothing to do with my duties as a key punch operator.

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  3. The first day I worked as an outdoor magazine editor I was sent out to catch a fish that we could photograph for the cover. In fact, I often had that assignment, although I generally shot cover photos by working with guys who already had caught a fish that I could photograph. That was anything but wacky.

    The first shot I took that became a cover photo involved my dog Brandy and a taxidermy grouse. It made a great cover. You couldn’t tell that the bird was “stuffed” or that we shot it on a boiling hot day in summer nearly two months before grouse would be in season.

    The wacky stuff was all the tricks we used to make cover photos more exciting. I remember an afternoon spent photographing a man pretending to fight a rainbow trout. A fellow just out of the frame of the shot would throw a boulder in the river to make a splash while another fellow would throw the fish at the same spot a millisecond later. The photo was supposed to show a rainbow trout leaping out of the water. All our work yielded 60 pictures of an obviously bored angler fighting an obviously dead trout and some good pictures of the boulder entering the water.

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  4. i used to enjoy the hosting of social outings as part of the sales promotion with buyers when i was a young up and coming salesman. i always had a good time, lots of drinking golfing playing cards going out to eat and finding something interesting to do after or before. often the shindigs were in a remote location where a hotel on a highway in a town of 15,000 was the base and then you build from there. it makes chicago or las vegas too easy. choose how you want to get steered and then put yourself in a position to surf the moment, ride the wave of where you are.
    i was in a boat in sausalito where we were hanging out between sessions at a conference and a 3 foot long shark was caught
    i was told we were catch and release fishing but the guide got very excited when he caught the shark and wanted to take it home to his dad to smoke on the grill
    i’m not a good one to take on a fishing or hunting trip. i’m a buzz kill for the predators

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    1. ball games , plays , museums, bars with good music or touring former stars (i used to say i’d be in trouble in chicago because there is something you just can’t miss every day there) comedy clubs, architechtual tours, bowling, sports bars, ski trips, cigar smoking,
      if you had to do something interesting today what would you use as your go to basis for choices
      aaaahhhh sales…

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      1. Boy, I’ll bet she was surprised when that came out of the water, Renee!

        One that comes to mind was in the Kindergarten room, when Kevin M. said “I have a good idea – let’s make paper airplanes”, and for some reason I agreed with him, and that’s what we did that morning.

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        2. i think all baboons should make a paper airplane right now

          paper airplanes is one of only a few things that always brings a smile

          blowing bubbles

          hot tub

          and a couple more

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        3. Yes, that morning it did. It was probably one of our more chaotic mornings – I think Kevin had just learned to make them, but most of the other 39 kids didn’t know how, so there was a lot of waiting involved – never a good idea with 5-year-olds.

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        2. You should have clarified that earlier, tim. By now I’ve already eaten three paper airplanes trying to find one that was tasty.

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  5. Oh, I’ve had so many wacky things as part of my job. Theater will do that too you.
    Back when I worked as a stagehand, I was ‘dancing flower #2’ (hidden backstage except for the waving flower I was holding) during a tour of ‘Whimsey’s House’.
    This summer I built a ‘goat room’ for one scene of a movie.

    I know there’s more… I just have to remember them.

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  6. I have so many weird things that I do as part of my job. It’s what comes with being in customer service which is what my job primarily is. This past summer I had to research if a woman could pump breast milk and have it shipped home from Russia. Quick answer to that is no. But also in my bakery life I had fun. Once I worked on the team that made a six foot tall cake that looks like a Schlitz can.

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  7. I think I’ve told you before about some of the things I had to make when I was building props for photographers, like the chocolate volcano that erupted chocolate chips and the fake charcoal fires for barbecue grills but did I ever mention the time I had to construct large spiderwebs out of monofilament and superglue for a TV commercial? I had to make two webs—one and a backup. The spiders came in from Hollywood in the company of the spider wrangler that had also handled the spiders for the movie “Arachnophobia”. Anyway, there was some uncertainty as to whether the spider would accept the artificial web, but with the cameras rolling the spider crawled across my web and hit all his marks. A success! I don’t even remember what the commercial was for anymore.

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        1. One of my friends in college had a tarantula. Fascinating, but not the kind of pet I would ever have.

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        2. The spider wasn’t a tarantula. I would have known what that was. I don’t know if tarantulas ever use webs. I don’t think so.

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  8. So many of the wacky things I’ve done as part of a job were really not requirements. It was my choice to do them in order to accomplish certain goals. The weighing of mouse testes was one of them. Another was transporting a cadaver from a morgue in Chicago to the SIU campus in Carbondale in the back of a pick-up truck. Only did that once.

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  10. OT. For those of you waiting for Archy and mehitabel for Blevins book club it just came to me in the library today so I’ll be picking it up tomorrow reading it over the weekend and should have it back to the library by Tuesday so if you’re not on the waiting list get on the waiting list.

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      1. Yep. I looked it up during book club to see if it was even at the library for everybody and when there was only one copy I quick-hit hold. I did tell everybody what I had done at the time.

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    2. Is there a second book in addition to Archy and Mehitabel for the October BBC? And where will the meeting be please? I can’t get to the BBC page on my phone for some reason, and don’t have access to my PC right now. ~Thanks

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    3. There’s an Annotated Archy and Mehitabel in the hennepin county library system – two copies, if I remember correctly. I ordered that one, figuring it would be less popular, and it is “in transit.” So I will get it tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day, or maybe ten days from now. But in plenty of time for the next book club.

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  11. I had a fun job in high school at the mann France Avenue Drive in picking up all the popcorn boxes and put in the speakers back up on their stands
    I turned out to make it a wonderful social gathering with friends that turned out to be real serious friends

    when the new boys would show up we would tell them that the mann France Avenue screen which one is the largest drive-in movie screen in the world was needing t be painted and tat job job that started next week
    we showed them how you would open the door in the bottom and crawl up through the scaffolding grill work inside to get to the top where we would tie a rope around their waist and lower them and allow them to swing back-and-forth with a 5 gallon pail and a brush

    The expressions on the faces while the gears were turning and they were trying to figure out how they were going to get out of painting the screen was priceless

    we had more than a couple of moms call in to talk to the manager

    mr. Welsh always get such a kick out of it that he would laugh and explain to the mom that it was just the other workers trying to find out if their son was gullible

    I don’t know why we went through so many kids that summer

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  12. Last year, I had to find out what a certain plant we have as part of our landscaping was because someone “accidentally ingested” it as they were walking past and it made them ill. Yes, an actual professional adult human decided to snack on one of our landscaping plants. We had to confirm what it was and then contact them because they were concerned that might have caused “permanent harm” to their body.

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  13. people who get concerned about doing permanent harm to their body shouldn’t be ingesting unknown plants do you live on the wild side things from the path you don’t get to be concerned about permanent damage

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  14. I once went on a lilac poaching expedition in the alley behind the flower shop where I work part time. It was the week before Mother’s Day and a customer really wanted lilacs. You can’t get them from flower wholesalers – they don’t last, so they’re not marketable. The customer was happy, and I think the mother that got the vase probably enjoyed them, at least for a day or two till they bit the dust.

    One of the designers at the shop once did a funeral piece that was supposedly from the family dog. It was a standing wreath on an easel and featured a ribbon-wrapped wreath form with dog biscuits tucked into the ribbon, adorned by flowers.

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