And the jobs I shouldn't have bothered taking

• The second time working as a box clerk at a grocery store (the first time worked out so well!)
• The second time working at a cannery (The first time, I was a Cherry Pitting Machine Quality Control Technician, among many other delightful tasks. The second go-around, I left after one day. Ugh.)
• Guy Who Hands Out Free Five-Minute Phone Cards, at a local college
• Saw operator and wood sorter at a dysfunctional mill

That last gig could have been at the inspiration for Lemony Snicket's Miserable Mill, except I think that would be unfair to the Baudelaire's former workplace. The mill where I worked once produced Lincoln Logs, but had moved on to slats for cribs, Jenga blocks and other wastes of perfectly good trees. What a dump.

The best/worst part was working on the green chain (sorting wood as it came out of a saw and landed on a weird sort of conveyor system). Every day, the equipment broke down at some point and prevented us from reaching our production goal. And every day, our supervisor said something like:

"OK, we need to do 20,000 board feet today. Yesterday, we didn't even get to 15,000. So today, we need to haul ass!"

Wow, great pep talk! Especially on the seventh consecutive day of the same spiel!

Did I mention the place was a wretched dump? But it is also an out-of-business wretched dump. :)