When mystery-world creators delve into their past, astounding things wriggle up from the gardens of memory! I invited some of our crime colleagues to share their adventures.
Feel free to add your own in the comments section.
LARRY LIGHT: One summer in college, I worked in a chewing gum factory. My job was to manually lift cowpie-like hunks of semi-solid gum from a cart and put it into a hopper. Then it was split into long lines of gum so others manually cut it into plugs of the stuff for wrapping. I stank of sugar the entire summer. This was not a blessed state!
ALAFAIR BURKE: Between being a law professor, writing a book a year (ish), and hopefully being a dog walker again soon enough, I probably didn't need another job, but I went and found one anyway. One Saturday in June I spent a day as Guest Gelato Scooper for Mario Batali's Gelotto cart! Why would I want to scoop gelato, you ask? I frequently write at New York's Otto Pizzeria. I even have scenes from the Ellie Hatcher novels set there, starring Dennis the ( real ) bar manager. With the NEVER TELL book tour about to start, I knew I'd be away from New York for much of the summer and homesick. Spending a day in Washington Square Park, making people happy with gelato, seemed like a nice city memory!
KATE GALLISON: In high school I was baby-sitting for two kids when Grandma emerged from her bedroom and demanded that I lace up her corset.
JAMES SCOTT BELL: Being in charge of the fake food as a stagehand in a New York theater production of a Shaw play. It was my first paying theatrical gig since arriving in the city to become an actor. Even though I was backstage, I felt like had my foot in the door. The play had a big dinner scene, and after the curtain came down it was my job to rearrange all the fake food for the next night's performance. I felt a little like that guy who cleans up after the elephants at the circus. When asked why he didn't quit, he said, "What? And give up show business?"
J.T. ELLISON: My most unusual job was as a vet tech. You don't want to know what goes on behind the scenes at the vet! I lasted three days!
SHEILA YORK: When I was a sophomore in high school I was hired, along with some other girls, to pretend to be mannequins in a store window. We modelled fall fashions in August in Tennessee in a west-facing window without moving, with only one fan blowing on us from the narrow door into the store. (It could explain why I am to this day very unenthusiastic about shopping!)
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN: My first job ever! Selling sponges door to door. We were supposed to say that a portion of the proceeds went to help mentally handicapped children. The guy with the speech impediment was the top seller! I quit after two days!
KAYE BARLEY: After a divorce in my 20's, I was working as a secretary in Downtown Atlanta and not making much money. I decided I needed a part time job. A brand new Hilton Hotel had recently opened ? quite the place! Nikolai's Roof, The Casablanca Lounge, designer shops ? all quite upscale! With an international flair. I marched in, filled out a job application and was hired to work as a hostess in the Cafe de la Paix. My uniform looked like something out of the original Heidi movie ? plaid pinafore, ruffled petticoat under a very short skirt. (and this was a French restaurant ? what was with the plaid? Horrible!) One evening, when the gal who was supposed to take care of the "take out" window didn't show, I was put in her place. I want to tell you ? the things some guys traveling on business have the nerve to say to a young twenty-something-year-old waitress are beyond the pale! I'm going to blame it on the drinks in the Casablanca Lounge! I didn't last through the evening! I have no idea who continued selling pastries through that take out window that evening, but it wasn't me! Not only was it very weird, it was very short!
CAMILLE MINICHINO: One of my first (signings) was at a local market. The manager, whom I knew, had always wanted to open a bookstore! Stuck with a deli/market, she was determined to at least host a book party, and it was very successful. She had coffee from a small shop next door, made cookies, stencilled guns on a bedsheet the color of my book cover and used it to cover the meat cases!
ANNETTE MEYERS: In the late 50's I was teaching high school English in New Jersey and living in the city. I had a boyfriend who worked for a car rental agency, ferrying cars out to La Guardia for the rental booth there and picking up others and driving them back into the city. Sometimes they were short of help, and they'd call on me and I filled in. I didn't know Queens and I was used to driving a VW. I just followed one of the workers out to the airport the first time in a big car, and then went back and forth all that summer. I stopped seeing the guy by the end of the summer!!
SUNNY FRAZIER: As a confidential secretary with an undercover narcotics unit. They stuck me out in a double-wide trailer in a nectarine orchard with 10 alpha males! No real supervision as we were so far away from headquarters. Every day was full of hijinks and I had to sometimes treat the men like they were kindergarteners. They were proud of me and used to say, "Only one member on the team is a military vet and college graduate ? and that's our secretary!" I spent eleven years with them, the longest any woman has ever lasted! It gave me lots of great material for my Christy Bristol Astrology mystery novels. I don't ever have to come up with plots ? I lived them!
DENNIS PALUMBO: Trying to break into show business as a writer, way back in my early 20's. While I was writing spec TV scripts, I earned extra money selling jokes to stand-up comics. I would hang around the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, pitching jokes to stand-ups after the acts were finished. Tough gig, let me tell you! One time I was trying to sell some one-liners to an older Vegas comic, and he asked me to meet him in his gym's steam room. So there I was, surrounded by old guys in towels, all sweating our brains out, and I'm trying to read jokes to him from a sheet of paper. Meanwhile, the steam is making the ink run on the paper? Next time, I'm on the road with Gabe Kaplan, at that time the star of Welcome Back, Kotter, and I'm writing jokes for his act. Our deal was, I got paid for every joke that got a laugh. So, we're in the New York City Playboy Club lounge, at 4 A.M. and he's just done a set, which included some of my new jokes. So we sit in the back, arguing about each joke in terms of whether it got a laugh or a chuckle. If it got a laugh, he paid me. If a chuckle, no. Our debate lasted half an hour, ending with us canvassing the few patrons sober enough to speak coherently, asking if they thought a particular joke was funny! Soon afterwards, I was employed as a writer, then screenwriter, and didn't have to peddle jokes to comics anymore. Now long retired from show biz, I'm a licensed psychotherapist, and mystery author! Still, I have fond memories of that early time!!!
DOUG LYLE: If ever I had any doubts about going to college, and I never did, those would have evaporated on a very hot July day in Huntsville, Alabama. I had a summer job at a lumber yard, a good way to make some money and get in shape for the next football season. Loading dry wall all day will do that.But on this day, a very strong black guy I worked with called Mr. Golden and I were dispatched in a flat bed truck to unload roofing tiles from a box car over at the rail yards. Forty pallets on those old asphalt tiles. No problem! We had a fork lift on the truck and it was a simple matter of lifting the pallets, removing them from the box car, and settling them in the long bed of the truck. Piece of cake! Not so fast? The box car had a sliding door that ran on metal rails at its top and bottom. The bottom rail prevented the fork lift from entering the car - it was slung too low. So we had to do it by hand. Each pallet had ten squares, each square three bundles, and each bundle weighed 67 pounds! So we had 1200 bundles to off load. Did I mention it was July? The outside temperature was 95, the humidity the same, and inside the box car it was 140 if it was anything! We took turns being in the car. Lifting a bundle and tossing it out the door, where the other guy would catch it and stack it on an empty pallet. Took us five hours! No food, no water, we were way out on the far reaches of the rail yard. Took two days to recover from this little adventure. Never again!!!!
LOIS WINSTON: My weirdest job wasn't at all weird back in the day, but by today's standards??? If I said I once had a job spec'ing type, I doubt many people now would know what I was talking about. Typesetters have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Everything from magazine ads to book text to the words on a bag of Cheetos is done in no time with a few computer keystrokes. However, back before computers, figuring out how big to make the font to fit within a text block was tedious work that involved (shudder) math. And being a totally right-brained person, math and I didn't exactly get along. Make an error, and it cost in both dollars and time, not a good thing when each job was on a tight budget and an even tighter deadline. Great for inducing panic attacks, though getting fired was a huge relief!
THELMA STRAW: Ever wonder what nuns wear under those voluminous robes? For sure, not Victoria's Secret! One fall, while enrolled in one of the colleges in Oxford, England, I ran out of money to pay my room and board at the hostel run by the Anglican nuns there. They graciously offered me a trade - doing their laundry for lodging. In an open shed in the middle of their huge cabbage garden, daily I stirred over an open fire a huge cauldron filled with a weird assortment of bloomers, female tops, long black cotton stockings and some sort of Elizabethan petticoats (from a Mother Goose fairy tale) in a steamy brew of the nuns' homemade soap. Not Ivory! I then hung them on a line over the rows of cabbages, often wondering if I got the garments really clean! The icing on the cake was that at mealtime the ladies served their boarders cabbage ? thrice per diem! Cabbage mush, cabbage cereal, cabbage bread, cabbage pudding! Nowadays I rarely meet a cabbage dish I'll eat!
P.S. Please share with us your own weird or odd experiences in our comment section!
Thelma Straw
Source: http://crimewriters.blogspot.com/2012/08/our-weirdest-jobs.html
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