New Jobs!

For the first time in over a year, I'm proud to report that I'm now gainfully employed. I've got not one, but TWO jobs - both about five minutes walk from my parents' house.

Hopefully, Fiona and I will be able to make enough money over the next two months to pay for our time working in Africa.

I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to get a software development job, but realistically speaking it's just not possible to do much of anything in two months. Granted, I would have made more money, but after the past couple of months I'm really looking for something as low stress and as fun as possible. Besides, the way we have it figured as long as we make around $5,000 over the next couple of months we'll be good to go, and that shouldn't be any problem at all between Fiona and I.

So, without further ado, here are the two gigs I've landed (names changed for obvious reasons):

1. The Cheese Shop

   The Cheese Shop is a small gourmet shop that specializes in exotic cheeses. What, you may ask, do I know about cheese? Absolutely nothing. That's why I'm working there. Hopefully over the next few weeks I will become an accomplished fromager (sp?) and will be able to impress/bore my liberal, blue-state friends with my knowledge of the finest moldy food products.

   It's a crazy clientele that frequents these gourmet joints. On my first day (yesterday) a woman came in and bought over $30 of fancy goat cheese. She was going to use it to make macaroni and cheese for her kids. As far as I'm concerned, that's a clear sign that you've got far too much money.

2. Electronics Hut

   I haven't actually started yet, but yesterday I swung by the "Career Fair" to see what was up. It was actually quite remarkable. I expected to be sitting in a room with four or five pimply high school nerds, but that was not the case at all. There were at least 15 people there, and the majority of them were older than myself. A couple of them were gray-haired guys who looked to be in their 50s (at least). And we were all applying for floor jobs. Doesn't say a lot about Bush's so-called "economic recovery".

   It'll be interesting to see how it goes at The Hut. It's a commission-based job, and I've never been a salesman so I think it should be fun. Obviously, I know loads about all the crap they sell so I'm not to worried about it. If there's one thing I can do all day long it's talk about gadgets.

Just yesterday at The Cheese Shop I tried three different kinds of expensive, weird cheeses. I can't remember what the first was, but one was a goat cheese rolled in cumin, coriander and French Truffles. It was tasty, but it smelled like farts. The third was a cheese from Colchester, CT called "Hooligan" that's made from the milk of 36 cows:

Quite the bully, indeed. I don't know if I'd use quite the same words to describe it, but it was definitely pretty good. It'll be interesting to see if my palate gets used to appreciating this stuff.

So there you have it. I think it'll be fun to have a couple of low-key jobs that I can have a laugh at. The best part is that I'll be able to go hang out at these places, and then come home and spend some good family time over the holidays without being stressed out (at all) about work.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 18, 2005 at 08:57 PM in Me | Permalink