My first job was at a fast food restaurant. After lying about my age to the manager at the local McDonalds, I secured a cushy $4.10 an hour job, with no benefits and, unfortunately, no French fries. I worked the drive-through with my best friend, Kim. At 15 you don’t really appreciate the seriousness of a job; thus, my first write-up and near firing was for using foreign accents over the intercom while the customers tried to order cheeseburgers. It seemed harmless until the regional manager drove through on a quality control mission.
Since my time at McDonalds I have held many interesting jobs. I had a short stint selling hotdogs at Colorado Rockies games until I tripped, dropped some hotdogs, and got embarrassed—so much so that I could never go back. I even let them keep my last paycheck. It’s okay because I kept the uniform, a sweet Rockies jersey.
My next job was at a silk flower shop. I went to work day after day making floral arrangements and running the cash register. The only problem was that we never had any customers. Never. I didn’t think anything of it at the time (I was 17 and didn’t really care about much), but they always seemed to have lots of deliveries to other places. Must be lots of orders—I didn’t question it. My arrangements began to pile up and gather dust until that fateful day while, when watching the news, I discovered that the shop was merely a front for a drug-smuggling operation; it had been raided and shut down. I didn’t tell my parents. What was I going to say? Eventually, the owner of the fake flower store did call—like all good criminals do—to make sure I was “cool,” and since I didn’t know anything, he just wrote me a check, and we went our separate ways.
I then spent some time as a deadbeat teenager dodging work and responsibility, which got me kicked out of the house and living with Grandma, who, of course, wanted me to get a job. Sheesh. Since my early retirement wasn’t going over well, I landed a job working at the Circle Z, cleaning rooms with a spoiled rich girl on a sabbatical from Dartmouth—her parents’ plan to rid their daughter of her evil ways.
Things went well until it was discovered that my newly acquired friend from New Hampshire had other plans. She wanted to “discover the Mexican culture,” so we ended up in Mexico every night. I drank and drank and drank, while she discovered Javier or Jesús or whatever his name was. This life came to an end with her being shipped to Montana, while I took a ride with the cook to Wyoming. I lived on a mountain and cleaned rooms and cooked at yet another dude ranch, while moose ran by and it snowed in July.
By then I finally had my wits about me and took my newly acquired cooking skills home to Patagonia. I spent the next ten years cooking and eventually running restaurants, did some time at the Patagonia Market, and, well, most of you know the rest. These are all the stories I’ve always wanted to put on a job resume and couldn’t. Who would want to hire a drinking, hot-dog-dropping cook with a foreign accent who made flower arrangements for a drug smuggling operation?