Unexpectedly Practical Lessons from Past Jobs

Earlier this week, while in the middle of repainting a friend’s bathroom, I did a phone interview about my mini-internship at Sassy way back in 1992.

Painting walls and talking about my first boots-on-the-ground experience in an editorial environment — this incongruous combination of tasks somehow felt very congruous, in fact, as a snapshot of how my life has unfolded and evolved.

I’ve lived many, many work lives and learned many, many things from my time at various gigs over the decades.

Apart from interpersonal relations (including dealing with all manner of toxic coworker behavior and in one case, true mental illness) and various organizational/time management skills, I’ve picked up some unexpectedly useful life tidbits on this very winding path.

More recently, My Quiet Job taught me how to disengage with my food media career identity. But there are tangible skills I’ve acquired over the years that weren’t necessarily part of any job description.

Here are three practical lessons I’ve learned from a few past jobs.

Art gallery (1999-2000): Wall painting

My main job as a student employee at my college’s art gallery was to sit alone at a desk for 3-hour shifts and monitor visitors to the space. Pretty exciting stuff. (There was a computer at the desk; I guess I did various admin tasks too? One summer I transcribed interviews for a catalogue and retyped catalogue cards using a real typewriter.)

But the real fun happened between shows. After one exhibition went down and before the next went up, all of us student staffers got to prep and paint the walls together. Hey, why call in the college maintenance team when you’ve got cheap(er) labor?

So all of us art nerds had the chance to hang out in community instead of being stratified on our solo shifts while we spackled and sanded holes and gave the walls a fresh coat of white — or once or twice, a striking contrast color of green or charcoal or something.

Painting walls as a middle-aged adult isn’t quite as fun because I don’t have a team of silly geese all around me to chat with, but it’s a freaking valuable skill to have on hand. Oh, the money I have saved for things I don’t feel confident doing — like replacing a toilet or fixing a boiler!

Butcher shop (2009-2010): Sensible footwear

My last (?) full-time job in 2009 was at a fashion PR agency. And though I commuted from NJ to the city in Danskos and Birkenstocks — thus sparing myself from the hairline fractures all my coworkers got from wearing ballet flats — I dutifully slid into one of my many pairs of black pumps for all of our official events. Stella McCartney and Marni, Sergio Rossi and Prada, I was tortured by the best for many hours.

So when my lifestyle division was mercifully axed and we were laid off in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, I made a hard right, career-wise, and took a weekend job as counter help at a Manhattan butcher shop.

The entire place was cold and the floors were always covered with a slight film of greasiness, so none of my fancy-pants pants OR shoes were appropriate for this new gig. I turned to the sturdiest and most sensible footwear I had in my closet — my shearling-lined L.L. Bean boots — to protect me from frozen toes and feetsicles during my shifts.

My luxury-brand heels have all been sold on The RealReal (and I am very grateful that they all went to loving homes), but my dependable, sensible boots and sneakers remain closet mainstays. Also, did you know that L.L. Bean will resole your boots when the heels and treads wear down to nubbins? And Birkenstocks can be recorked and resoled too? I love companies that try to make their products a true lifetime purchase.

Women’s lifestyle magazine (2002-2004): Cooking skills

I didn’t work in the food department at the magazine — surprise! I was an associate editor, nominally the assistant entertainment editor because of my natural inclination for pop culture. And although I believed I was following my chosen career path by finding work as a writer and editor, the work itself turned out to be pretty mind-numbing.

So I did what any voracious content consumer would do whilst bored at a desk job in the early 2000s — I read blogs.

I was already a fairly ambitious amateur cook with a growing cookbook library at home, subscriptions to Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Saveur, and a penchant for attempting restaurant-level recipes as a hobby.

Cooking was how I de-stressed. It was an arena where I felt curious and confident at the same time, where I didn’t worry about taking on a complicated project or twist myself into knots thinking I might fail and others might judge me.

So at the office, I sought out food-focused blogs — ones that don’t exist anymore, like Augieland, and others that still do. I read Julie Powell’s blog in real time and took the magazine’s copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking home with a to-cook list for myself. (And maybe possibly never returned the copy? I admit nothing.)

I left that job and the magazine world for my first PR agency stint, and I continued cooking and sharing recipes with my coworkers there. Those people became some of my dearest and greatest friends in that era of life, and encouraged my recipe developing and writing with sincere enthusiasm.

And five years later, Good Food Stories was born. And still exists! I remain incredibly proud of that cornerstone of my life.

Coda to this: Although I’ve tapped out of full-time food work, I’ve rekindled my love for cooking over the past year.

I’ve become conscious of how much more I enjoy the act of making meals when I’m not on the constant treadmill of pressure to come up with something NEW — and when I don’t have to cook and eat chicken! Or convince Dan to eat whatever I was forced to make or test, or try to pawn leftovers off on friends and neighbors.

It’s been so refreshing to fill our meal plan with the food we want to eat and, yeah, I see why this was fun in the first place.

Just don’t ask me to write about it again. Not yet.