My College Job

Okay, I'll tell you about my job that I referred to below. It was the coolest job ever. It was at a press clipping service.

Companies, or famous people sometimes, want to know what's being said about them in the press. So they sign on with a press clipping service. The service clips any articles they find and mails them to the client.

I was assigned all of the newspapers in Washington. I would scan these newspapers, looking for key words. Good ones were any names of over-the-counter of prescription drugs, anyone famous, any company name, or a name of an association. If I suspected that a key word belonged to one of our clients, I would type it into my computer. So, let's say that I came across the name "Axl Rose." I would go, "Hmm. I wonder..." and I would type his name into my computer. (Actually, Axl Rose really was one of our clients!) And the computer would say whether he was a client, and if so, what kinds of clippings he wanted - whether from larger cities or all cities, whether from the newspapers in the west or the east, sometimes if he wanted clippings on just one topic, etc. So, I would read the article more carefully, and if it fell under Axl Rose's criteria, I would mark it and send it to the clipping department. I got paid minimum wage, plus extra for every clipping above, like, twelve per hour. So if I got 12 clippings in an hour, I just got paid my minimum wage. But if I found ten extra, I got paid more per clipping. Like 30 cents, or something. I don't remember.

Eventually, I got promoted into the big time - magazines. You make tons more money in magazines, for some reason. It was hard to get promoted when I was working Washington, because you can't get as many clips in Washington as you can in a California newspaper. California readers always got promoted quickly. But I managed to do it, but then I was on the low section of the magazine totem-pole: the random, random, random magazines. Like I said in the post below - Wire Rope News. Shopping Cart Weekly. Mailbox-Makers Monthly. The craziest stuff. Kay, I made up the mailbox magazine. But the other two definitely existed. So it was hard to get clips in those mags, but I eventually got promoted from Random Magazines to Food Magazines. It was much easier to get clips in those. Once, I accidentally got a wine magazine put into my box, and I thought, oh, okay, wine goes with food... and I scanned it and got like a million and one clips. I was so excited! It turns out that there is a wine magazine reader, and boy, was he mad at me. I explained that I didn't realize there was a wine magazine reader, and that it had been put in my box. He eventually forgave me for making like five bucks off his mag.

It was the greatest job ever, because you could make your own hours. As long as I got 20 hours in per week, I could come in whenever. So it worked great around my busy college schedule. And the company had a killer Christmas party. :) So that was my cool job. Except for the kid who sat in the next cubicle over. All he did was hock loogeys into his garbage can. I'm not kidding. He did that all day. I seriously couldn't figure out why. And it made me want to throw up. I should have written him a note, like, "Stop hocking loogeys! Just swallow them! Or go see a doctor! Or get on Mucinex!"