Inside of me

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Top 5 Favorite Jobs

1. Boat renter

 

The government paid me a dollar above minimum wage to rent paddleboats and kayaks at a lake near an Air Force base in Michigan. It wasn't as demanding as it sounds. I had about two or three customers a day. When not distracted by these customers, I sat around reading books or watching the osprey dive for fish.

 

2. Tech writer, WordPerfect

 

Has any Hollywood screenwriter depicted the corporate environment as a moderately pleasant place to work? A typical screenwriter would present my old WordPerfect job as a hollow, soul-sucking corporate experience, as in Office Space or the hilarious first 20 minutes of Joe Versus the Volcano. It's true that working for a computer company can be the boring, drab job shown in movies -- I've been there -- but it can also be richly fulfilling.

 

WordPerfect was an odd company. It was in Orem, Utah, right in the heart of conservative Mormon country. You'd think a place like that would be filled with a bunch of stiff clones who wanted to discuss kitchen remodels and their 2.3 children. But for some reason, the Publications department attracted a bunch of creative, witty, iconoclastic sorts. Some of them are still great friends of mine. Another is my wife, who continues to fascinate and delight me.

 

Here's something funny about WordPerfect. The lobbies on each floor had men's and women's bathrooms, but the wings where everyone worked had only men's bathrooms. You see, in Mormon country, building planners understood that men are providers, and women stay home. It's the little things.

 

3. Tech writer, Adobe

 

This is where I work now. I get to figure out cool software and then write about it in ways that alternately confuse and baffle the customer.

 

4. Lifeguard

 

Being a lifeguard at the lake was pleasantly boring most of the time. People swam, you made sure they didn't drown or dunk each other, and that was that. It was rare for something interesting to happen during a typical month, but on one day, two memorable things happened at the same time -- the lifeguarding equivalent of Butch chasing Marcellus into Zed's pawn shop.

 

A man was using an unconventional method to teach his daughter how to swim. When she lifted her head wrong to breathe, he yelled at her; if she didn't keep her elbows up, he slapped her in the head. I was on the far stand, and my crazy friend Brian was on the stand closest to the abuse. (When I say "crazy," I don't mean say-outrageous-things crazy; I mean break-out-of-the-mental-instituation-and-knock-on-my-window crazy.) Brian warned the guy once. When the guy hit her again, Brian threw a fit, jumped off the stand, and strutted towards the guy with his fists clenched. I hopped out of my stand to back up Brian, and that's when we heard cries of "Help!" A kid was yelling near the anchored raft. Brian dove in the water and started swimming towards the new trouble. I blew the whistle and told everyone to get out of the lake -- something I should have done much earlier. A drunk guy who was trying to help must have suddenly realized he couldn't swim, so he latched on to Brian. The kid was still yelling for help. "HELP!!!" I dove in and sprinted past Brian and the drunk guy to where the kid was, my heart pounding. It turned out the kid wasn't the one in trouble; he had one arm on the raft and he was holding the hair of a sunken guy who was very much in trouble. I dove under and pulled him above the surface. His eyes rolled back in his head. He wasn't breathing. Shit, shit, shit. I threw my left arm around his chest, propped him up on my hip, and started sidestroking towards the shore. This guy was big and muscular and HEAVY. When I got close to th