I had about 40 houses on my route, a route in which I had to hike about 3 miles through thick woods, up steep hills, and down long stretches of unscenic pavement every day to complete. It seemed like fun at first, like some jobs do, and a great source of exercise (this happened to coincide with my brief and embarrassing stint on the high school track team).

But the honeymoon didn't last very long. One big problem involved money collection. Most of the time the customers weren't at home when I went around begging for money. Occasionally people were inside but in the throes of a heated domestic crisis, which I would gladly listen to through the front door, but never had the balls to interrupt. Frequently it would take four or five weeks before I caught somebody at their abode and willing to answer the door, and then they'd be all pissed off since they had a sudden overdue $18 newspaper bill to contend with (and therefore they wouldn't tip).

Every Friday night all the newspaper boys had to meet with Kay, the chain smokin', big tinted glasses wearin' newspaper collection lady. She parked her car at some predetermined spot and we'd all have to pay her the cost of all the newspapers we've delivered that week, regardless of whether we collected enough money or not (see above). Even back then I thought it was kind of seedy and weird for a bunch of pubescent boys to meet this gravel-voiced older woman at her car and give her a chunk of their hard-earned cash.

Pretty soon the original 40 houses got bumped up to 60 houses. Carrying 60 of the huge Thursday edition papers was well nigh impossible, if not just completely painful. But I couldn't bear to split the route up into two trips, since it would take way too long to circle back to my house to get the second batch. So I just dealt with it, possibly causing irreparable damage to my spine. Around this time winter started happening, meaning slipping on ice and snow and spilling papers all over somebody's front yard, which was always an uplifting experience after a long day of being bored senseless at school. On one fine day Rockland County suffered a terrible hailstorm, starting without warning halfway into one of my delivery runs. By the time I scampered all the way home the papers were wet and shredded, and the back of my neck was red and throbbing, having been beaten with countless balls of ice falling from the heavens.

Mustering the energy to continue with this job would have been impossible had I not the burning desire to obtain some new music equipment, since all I had at my disposal then was an upright piano and a classical nylon guitar made in Korea which cost $50 new. After getting an extra $300 during Christmas (thanks to the convention of tipping heavily this time of year) I saved up enough to purchase the musical tools of my dreams. With great joy I blew all my earnings on a Gorilla 30-watt amp, a "Spitfire" Fender Strat copy electric guitar, and a Casio CZ-101 keyboard.

With this goal met, I gave my notice. Shedding this job did have one drawback: Every Sunday my mom and I would deliver the Sunday papers together. It would have been well nigh impossible for me to do it alone, since I could only carry, tops, about 10 of the monster Sunday editions at a time. So mom drove me around the neighborhood in the family wagon with the hatch open as I assembled papers in the back and hopped out to drop them off one by one. Thanks, mom. Anyway, this halt in employment meant an unfortunate end to this pleasant familial bonding experience. Sigh.

By the way, five years later the Gorilla amp shorted out, creating a beautiful shroud of sparks and smoke. For $30 I sold it to a workmate who tried to fix it but due to some clumsy electrical engineering he only succeeded in burning half his kitchen down. The "Spitfire" guitar neck eventually became warped beyond playability. Before I got around to fixing it, my brother, Ben, assumed I abandoned it and gave it to one of his friends without my permission. I still have the CZ-101, though, and it still works despite years of severe abuse. Chalk one up for Casio.

Back to the story..

I enjoyed a nice hiatus from employment before I faced the ugly parental pressure to get work the following summer. I wandered around local malls scanning for "help wanted" signs. This effort yielded nothing. To this day I have yet to get a job by inquiring about a "help wanted" sign, answering a classified ad, or submitting an unsolicited resume. But that's neither here nor there.

On one fruitless job hunting excursion I stopped in the local Baskin Robbins to get a shake. The owner of the franchise, Rich, served me, and I broke through my usual shy nature to ask if he happened to be hiring. He wasn't, but asked me to fill out an application anyway. I gladly did so, and a few days later he called me in for an interview. I guess he liked my vast and varied qualifications.

I got hired at $3.75/hour which, believe it or not, happened to be above the current minimum wage. Of course, I also enjoyed the "hidden income" of free ice cream, a benefit which I believe the employees took advantage of a little too much, as evidenced by their horrible complexions and noticeable weight gain, but whatever. Training involved me watching one movie about the inside "scoop" on ice cream, and another movie about how to count change and treat customers with respect. I got my brown Baskin Robbins shirt and began my career as a glorified shovel.

The night after my first day on the job, my left foot broke for no good reason. Really. It just broke. So I arrived for my second shift with a cast on, unable to walk without crutches. My dad came along to plea with Rich to maintain my employment despite this unfortunate turn of events, and he was cool about it. So for the next three weeks I hopped around on my right foot. The height of the ice cream freezers concealed my injury from the customers, who in turn looked at me funny as I bounced on one leg back and forth between the ice cream bins and the cash register.

The kids who worked there were a motley bunch: Debbie the bubbly assistant manager, Lisa the suburbanite, Nicole the popular girl with sprayed hair, Jeff the Anthrax fan, Jamie the boy with the missing chromosome, Jason who made vodka milkshakes, Chris the deadhead who sucked on all the near-empty whipped cream cans to get a rush, and Chris's half-sister Shari who was a fellow moody Cancer. Shari and I spent many late shifts working together while bitching about this lousy job and listening to Jethro Tull tapes.

Speaking of late shifts, I had to work many of those, even on weekends, which sucked once I started trying to get a life. There I stood, stuck at the goddamn store, a dork with braces and a face full of zits, covered and stinking of warm milkfat and fudge. I anxiously waited to serve the girls I had crushes on waffle cones with rainbow sprinkles if they ever happened to swing by during their thrill-a-minute super-social Saturday nights, but you know what? They never came.

Instead I served the infinite crowds pouring out from the movie theatre down the way. The line would stretch out the door, and in a daze I'd dig and dig into the ice cream, all the time wondering why I even bothered. One night it got so busy I didn't realize I lacerated my thumb and handed a sundae topped with my fresh blood to a shocked customer.

The pay and the hours never really increased, and it got more and more depressing to watch Rich's franchise slowly go under. One night somebody (who shall remain nameless but it wasn't me) turned off the freezer by mistake. The next morning Rich found $200 worth of cakes melted and dripping out the freezer door onto the floor. This kind of crap kept happening, and slowly, painfully drove him out of the business.

But before Rich threw in the towel and became a shoe salesman I wisely abandoned ship. However, I lept out of the frying pan and into THE FIREY PITS OF HELL. Through my friend Mike, I got a job as a senior counselor at the brilliantly titled Day Camp in the Park. We both ran the computer camp portion of this entire operation, meaning we had to babysit 20 freaks of nature who would rather spend all summer inside a hot, stuffy cabin playing dumb games on broken Commodore 64s than step one foot outside.

What a miserable experience! All of these children had significant social/mental problems, as you can imagine. Every morning the main camp would give us a schedule about when we should go swimming, go play volleyball, go get lunch, go on a hike, etc. These kids would have none of that. Each morning they'd start by trading software with one another, and continue until they had to go home. Sometimes they'd try to sneak out and hide in the woods, usually when Mike and I were busy looking for some other kid who snuck out earlier. Any attempt to get the whole group to participate in a physical activity was met with vehement vocal (and sometimes physical) opposition. Just as well, since the one kickball game we finally got going was an impressive demonstration of how uncoordinated a human child could be and still live.

Mike and I gave up pretty quickly and let the monsters do whatever the hell they wanted. In all honesty, we did have two or three normal children in our group, which I gladly took out sailing on the lake or to the basketball courts. However, my attention usually had to be planted on the miscreants who, if left unattended, would invariably get into bitter disputes with one another. Within the blink of an eye these disagreements escalated into angry shoving matches or worse. One fight involved the flailing of homemade fishing poles, eventually leading to me having to drag a whimpering child all the way across camp to the nurse as he got a hook jabbed deep into his thumb. Another fray led to one kid being pushed down onto a rock, sending a metal hinge from his retainer clear through his own cheek.

I only made about $900 for the entire summer which, if you include the long-ass daily commute, translates into roughly $2 an hour. On hindsight I have no idea why I put up with such horrible misery for wages well below poverty levels. I still lose sleep at night thinking about it.

After the Day Camp at the Park episode I quickly began my college career at the University of Binghamton. It just so happened my brother, Ben, who attended the University as well, held a managerial position at one of the campus dining halls. At this point I had no life, no friends, and no self-esteem, so all it took was a smidgeon of coersion on his part, and I agreed to join him and work for the respectable purveyors of fine cuisine otherwise known as the Marriott Corporation.

Once again I found myself trapped in exhausting employment for mediocre pay. I think I made a good $4.65 an hour. My duties varied on any given night, from "beverage-runner," to "dishroom." I usually ended up getting the worst jobs since Ben could threaten me with physical violence if I complained, unlike the rest of his employees with whom he didn't have that special "older brother" relationship. So while some people got to maintain the dressings at the salad bar, I had to scrape baked crud off pots alongside a wheezing septuagenarian named George Dingleberry.

The brotherly abuse didn't end at the selection of cruel and unusual tasks. By the end of many shifts my brick-red Marriott shirt would be caked with stuffed peppers, german chocolate cake, and other sticky foods which Ben launched at random times towards my unsuspecting self. He had no reason to commit such messy acts of aggression outside of the sheer joy he felt to behold the expression on my face which revealed shock and self-pity. One time I fell victim to a blast of compressed carbon gas which Ben released from a huge canister in my direction, causing me to fall backward about five feet and onto the floor.

Down in the basement lived these huge bags of pure Coca-cola syrup to be eventually mixed with seltzer water and piped upstairs into the soda machines. After I made this discovery I began the bad habit of pouring this raw syrup into a glass and chugging it down when nobody was watching. Mmmm. This provided the quick pick-me-up I needed to continue slaving the remainder of the evening, especially when working in the hot, steamy, loud, and aromatic dishroom.

This misery lasted but one semester, which was all I could stand for. How my brother survived doing this for four years is beyond me. I took the whole next semester off from employment, outside of landing a truly random gig playing bass in a local Methodist church's very low budget production of "Godspell." Everybody sing along: "Prepare ye the way of the lord.."

Freshman year ended, and I refused to look for summer employment. So my dad got a job for me, using his large network of professional contacts. I guess he didn't want to stare at my sorry puss for the next three months. So without much ado, I now worked for American NuKem, a large corporation which as a whole dealt with the collection and safe disposal of chemical waste. I think. It didn't really matter since I worked in the sales office doing gopher work.

Since the company just moved into a new building, a huge part of my job involved sifting through about 150 legal-size boxes full of papers, figuring out what they were, and sorting them accordingly. This may sound like a lot of fun, but the party really began when the company got audited, and everything had to be re-sorted. Outside of this, the many other thought-provoking tasks on my to-do list included making coffee, washing the coffee pots, buying office supplies, xeroxing countless documents, shredding countless documents, and going out to buy deli meats for the "sandwich club." I also happened to be in charge of making sure all the company cars were occassionally washed and always full of gas.

Did I mention this company was located in Mahwah, New Jersey? I had a 45 minute commute each way every day. At the time I drove a used car which my father bought for $1. It overheated frequently, a couple of times while I was on the New York Thruway. Boy did that suck. For half the summer I ended up taking surface streets all the way to work, which took an extra 15-20 minutes each way, but I saved 40 cents by not having to pay the Thruway toll. Boy, was I a cheap bastard.

Anyway, I made $7.50 an hour. For the first time I had a salary that could almost enable a normal person to survive in this economy. I made about $3000 that summer, all of which went right into a huge shopping spree at Sam Ash. I finally obtained some semi-pro equipment which I have been sorely lacking during the first 13 years of my musical career. Yay! The upshot of this was I ended the summer just as I started - completely broke.

I didn't work at all during my sophomore year, and the following summer I had real difficulties getting off my ass to better my financial status. My pal, Evan, was in the same boat, and the two of us spent a good chunk of June being total bums. We'd sleep all day and then get together at night to make dumb home movies, watch cable, and then maybe we'd go play "let's get lost in New Jersey," and not find our way home until 3:00am.

Finally it became clear that we really needed to do something with our lives, or at least try to convert some of this wasted time into cash. We both attended an informational/training seminar for R.G.I.S., pronounced "ree-gis." Retail and grocery stores around the country call on R.G.I.S. to count their inventory, either because they are too lazy to do it themselves, or they need an official "third-party" count to see if any of their employees are stealing more packs of cigarettes than the national average.

Anybody with a pulse who showed up to this seminar got hired, starting at $6 per hour. However, most people fled after one or two days on the job. During my first day Evan and I and a team of a dozen experienced R.G.I.S. auditors drove 40 miles to a grocery store in Westchester, and then killed five hours auditing every last item in it. We both got to count the freezer stock, and I have the fond memory of reaching into an icy bin containing bags of fresh fries, and yanking out one from the bottom to find it covered with frozen maggots. Once done with the frozen foods, we got to count all the pesticides.

So why did people quit so fast? Most couldn't hack the schedule. Since stores usually preferred to have their inventory probed while no customers could screw up the inventory by shopping, we frequently audited during non-business hours. This meant getting up as early as 4:00am, or staying up as late at 6:00am, and in some rare instances, pulling an allnighter between two separate audits. Imagine gazing at racks of compact disks until two in the morning, killing an hour or so at the local Dunkin Donuts, and then driving 60 miles out of town to count piles of jeans at a Gap. It's not as fun as it sounds.

Some didn't mind the schedule since we always had the option of declining upcoming shifts. But many slowly went mad staring at endless rows of canned vegetables and sifting through bottomless bins of batteries. It takes a stable mind to be able to glance at an entire aisle of pill bottles, knowing full well you will have to count each and every one of them over the course of the next four hours. All by yourself. While listening to muzak.

Evan and I stuck with it for the remainder of the summer. I ended up also getting a second job at the Rockland County Court House, thanks to my mom who worked at the County Clerk's Office. More office grunt work. This events of this short and meaningless job hardly got burned into my memory cells. Pretty much all I did was stamp, file, xerox, and enter data for six weeks. I do remember one three-day run of doing nothing but copying entire binders full of useless legal crap. That enriched my soul like no other task before.

Junior year rolled around and I had some play money for a change. However, my brother and I plotted to take a month off the next summer to explore the country by automobile. In order to save up some money, I called the Binghamton R.G.I.S. office and re-enlisted at a higher pay rate. Cool. So now my college experience was peppered with random jaunts to Elmira and Ithaca to count loose piles of stuffed animals at ungodly hours in department stores caked with inches of dust.

I ended up working for R.G.I.S throughout the remainder of my college days. Some may call me a glutton for punishment, but I had to pay off my debts somehow, and I could only eat so much ramen. In any case, my final year in college probably would have been a lot more enjoyable had I not been forced to wake up on random cold winter mornings at 4:00am, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Upon graduation I wallowed in Binghamton as long as I could before sneaking back into the parent's house. Pretty soon they (along with a couple credit card companies) got on my case about getting my ass off the couch and beating feet down employment street. I couldn't really live with this kind of pressure, so I worked a couple random temp jobs to save up enough cash for gas and headed out to Berkeley, California.

If you've been following this story so far, here comes the punchline. After settling in at my new apartment 3000 miles away from the parents, and spending a huge chunk of my remaining cash at Amoeba Records, I finally got the itch to find a way to make some money. Can you guess what I did? I called the local R.G.I.S office! I told the manager, all proud of myself, about my two years of experience working for the Binghamton and Rockland County offices back in New York. He responded, after a slight pause, "You mean to tell me you moved all the way from New York to California to WORK FOR R.G.I.S.??"

..Well the guy had a point. Why the hell did I move to California anyway? So I called ADIA since they were the first listing in the yellow pages under "Office Temps.."