Confession of a Contact Addict
I'm a job hopper. At 32, I've already held somewhere between 50 and 100 jobs. It's a fact that I used to try to cover up, scared my next employer would find out and not hire me. But as I get older I realize it's something that makes me uniquely me. Really, it's the thing about me that makes me most employable. I've worked with such a broad variety of people, and at all levels of the labor hierarchy, from mop boy to manager. So my experience helps me to be a sort of workplace expert. And the training I've gotten along the way has been priceless.
Despite what some may think, I'm not the guy who can't keep a job. It's just that I love to start new jobs. I thrive on it. I'm addicted to new adventures, new experiences. The thrill of first contact. Meeting new people gives me a rush.
I don't know where this addiction started, but I think I've traced it back to the fifth grade. That was the year I moved from a rural village to a big town, or rather, to a suburban tract on the outskirts of a big town. But in my mind, I had reached the big city. I'll never forget it. All at once I came to this realization that there there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of other kids out there, my own age, and the possibilities made me feel alive.
Most significant during this year was my exposure to the PBS program 3-2-1 Contact, which was to become an eye-opening weekly staple of school life for me that year. The theme song is still as vivid in my memory as it was the first day I heard it: "Contact, it's the reason; it's the moment, when everything happens." That program, that song, did it for me. The show was about science, but what drew me in most was all the talk about people, population trends, and all the variety of humanity there was out there in the world beyond Virginia. And I wanted to make contact with all of it.
A couple of years later, I met my first "foreigner" while living there, in Winchester. He was a Japanese kid from Okinawa who used to thumb through a tiny leather-bound bilingual dictionary, stumbling over every word he said. His dad had somehow got involved with an American woman in the military while still in Japan, and moved to the area to be with her. Keiyu would become my best friend. He played the trumpet, listened to Chopin and ate Ramen noodles, not Oreos, after school. I was so jealous of him (except for the noodle thing). I remember dreaming of what it would be like to live in another place; I imagined being transported somehow to another time, another culture, another state of mind.
Then, as I got a little older, I started to get interested in work, mostly because I thought it would be an interesting new social scene. But also because it was the only way to earn money for a car, or to buy a ticket to get out of that town, which was quickly growing too small. I wanted to find a new place, somewhere else. Make contact with more foreigners. Or better yet, become a foreigner myself.
I remember I wanted to work at Tony's Supermarket, which sponsored my soccer team. But I was too young, they said. So in another town, down the road and a few years later, I finally was able to get a work permit and landed a job at the local Dunkin' Donuts--this was back when the walls were dingy yellow, stained by the 24-hour smoke of a thousand donut eaters. I hated it. Scraping the vats of sugary fillings to make sure no bugs actually made it into the final product was my primary duty. This lasted two weeks.
In high school, I worked at the local McDonald's and Hardee's fast food chains, and eventually I worked midnight shift at Turkey Hill Mini Mart. I worked as a dishwasher at a local nursing home. Later, I was a camp counselor at two different camps, and I worked in after school daycare and as a van driver for the local YMCA. Once in college I worked at a Sheetz convenience store, and cleaned the gas pumps for a few weeks before being promoted to sandwich maker and then cashier. And I did time in a coffee house and a couple of restaurants along the way; training at T.G.I. Fridays and Houlihan's helped me learn to relate with people, artificially at least. And eventually I landed a gig writing press releases in my university's public relations office, and later edited the new for the student-run newspaper, The Penn.
There are probably at least a dozen jobs I didn't mention up to this point, and that only takes me to the age of 25, at which point I finally broke away for a while and made my way south, to Miami. I continued to job hop, and worked at Denny's before getting a job at a telephone relay service for the deaf and hearing impaired. And along the way, I worked for a few telemarketing companies; my experience in reputable places like Time Life Libraries and Dial America in Pittsburgh led me to a few shady "phone rooms" in South Florida before I wised up. But I don't regret these or any of my experiences, because they have become part of me.
Since then, I've held some pretty cool jobs. I've been an ESL teacher, a desk editor with a significant British trade magazine, and managing editor of three local weeklies in New Jersey. But I'm still yearning to make contact. So if you'd bet against me sticking with my current employer for too long, the odds would be in your favor. Give me two years, at most. But who knows. In any case, I'm not ashamed about my past, and won't be ashamed to move on from my current post if it means being true to myself.
What can I say? I'm a job hopper. And I like it that way. It's not about escape, and it's more than just the thrill of connecting. It's about finding something. Finding that no matter how many jumps I make, or how often I make them, I will never run out of contacts.
Despite what some may think, I'm not the guy who can't keep a job. It's just that I love to start new jobs. I thrive on it. I'm addicted to new adventures, new experiences. The thrill of first contact. Meeting new people gives me a rush.
I don't know where this addiction started, but I think I've traced it back to the fifth grade. That was the year I moved from a rural village to a big town, or rather, to a suburban tract on the outskirts of a big town. But in my mind, I had reached the big city. I'll never forget it. All at once I came to this realization that there there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of other kids out there, my own age, and the possibilities made me feel alive.
Most significant during this year was my exposure to the PBS program 3-2-1 Contact, which was to become an eye-opening weekly staple of school life for me that year. The theme song is still as vivid in my memory as it was the first day I heard it: "Contact, it's the reason; it's the moment, when everything happens." That program, that song, did it for me. The show was about science, but what drew me in most was all the talk about people, population trends, and all the variety of humanity there was out there in the world beyond Virginia. And I wanted to make contact with all of it.
A couple of years later, I met my first "foreigner" while living there, in Winchester. He was a Japanese kid from Okinawa who used to thumb through a tiny leather-bound bilingual dictionary, stumbling over every word he said. His dad had somehow got involved with an American woman in the military while still in Japan, and moved to the area to be with her. Keiyu would become my best friend. He played the trumpet, listened to Chopin and ate Ramen noodles, not Oreos, after school. I was so jealous of him (except for the noodle thing). I remember dreaming of what it would be like to live in another place; I imagined being transported somehow to another time, another culture, another state of mind.
Then, as I got a little older, I started to get interested in work, mostly because I thought it would be an interesting new social scene. But also because it was the only way to earn money for a car, or to buy a ticket to get out of that town, which was quickly growing too small. I wanted to find a new place, somewhere else. Make contact with more foreigners. Or better yet, become a foreigner myself.
I remember I wanted to work at Tony's Supermarket, which sponsored my soccer team. But I was too young, they said. So in another town, down the road and a few years later, I finally was able to get a work permit and landed a job at the local Dunkin' Donuts--this was back when the walls were dingy yellow, stained by the 24-hour smoke of a thousand donut eaters. I hated it. Scraping the vats of sugary fillings to make sure no bugs actually made it into the final product was my primary duty. This lasted two weeks.
In high school, I worked at the local McDonald's and Hardee's fast food chains, and eventually I worked midnight shift at Turkey Hill Mini Mart. I worked as a dishwasher at a local nursing home. Later, I was a camp counselor at two different camps, and I worked in after school daycare and as a van driver for the local YMCA. Once in college I worked at a Sheetz convenience store, and cleaned the gas pumps for a few weeks before being promoted to sandwich maker and then cashier. And I did time in a coffee house and a couple of restaurants along the way; training at T.G.I. Fridays and Houlihan's helped me learn to relate with people, artificially at least. And eventually I landed a gig writing press releases in my university's public relations office, and later edited the new for the student-run newspaper, The Penn.
There are probably at least a dozen jobs I didn't mention up to this point, and that only takes me to the age of 25, at which point I finally broke away for a while and made my way south, to Miami. I continued to job hop, and worked at Denny's before getting a job at a telephone relay service for the deaf and hearing impaired. And along the way, I worked for a few telemarketing companies; my experience in reputable places like Time Life Libraries and Dial America in Pittsburgh led me to a few shady "phone rooms" in South Florida before I wised up. But I don't regret these or any of my experiences, because they have become part of me.
Since then, I've held some pretty cool jobs. I've been an ESL teacher, a desk editor with a significant British trade magazine, and managing editor of three local weeklies in New Jersey. But I'm still yearning to make contact. So if you'd bet against me sticking with my current employer for too long, the odds would be in your favor. Give me two years, at most. But who knows. In any case, I'm not ashamed about my past, and won't be ashamed to move on from my current post if it means being true to myself.
What can I say? I'm a job hopper. And I like it that way. It's not about escape, and it's more than just the thrill of connecting. It's about finding something. Finding that no matter how many jumps I make, or how often I make them, I will never run out of contacts.
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