The Best Job I Ever Had

Upon reflection, I have to admit that, strictly speaking, I’ve never had a job I truly loved. That is, I have never been paid, so far, to do any of the things I love. All of my jobs have been to pay the bills. But of the dozen or so I’ve had over the past twenty-plus years, there were a couple I enjoyed beyond simple toleration. Utilizing unrelenting triage, here’s the “best” job I ever had:

During my freshman year at Rutgers I worked Saturdays and Sundays, fifteen hours a weekend, in the Library of Science and Medicine. They paid me $3 an hour. I don’t know how they legally did that, but I guess the steady student supply of slave labor was something too tempting for the university to resist. Regardless, the work was mostly low-stress and I had lots of free time to wander the shelves, read, explore, investigate. What’s not to like about that?

Every hour I’d circulate to a different duty. The one I hated most was at the checkout desk, particularly on Sunday when a major test would be held Monday morning. Professors would leave study guides (usually consisting of likely test questions) and we’d hand out the few copies on a first-come-first-serve basis. Students could be rude and impatient, but in retrospect I chalk that up to stress. There were a couple of cool people I worked with, a girl named Wanda, a girl named Faith, a guy whose name I forget but can still picture his face. But there was an Middle Eastern guy, I forget his name, too, who was ferociously afflicted with dragon breath. The head librarian never failed to schedule my desk duty with him, and when he would answer one of my many questions, my eyes would water and I’d be gasping for fresh oxygen.

I absolutely enjoyed getting at the library first thing in the morning, when 99.9 percent of the campus was sleeping off hangovers (and I had my fair share there, too). I put away journals, arranged the furniture, shelved returned items, etc. They had me spend an hour a day “shelf reading” where I just went book by book to make sure they were ordered correctly on the shelves. I would disappear into a corner, and any book that got my fancy I would spend some time delving into. I learned a lot that year, though I’m hesitant to reveal everything I read. But I was into physics back then, as well as medicine (I had toyed with studying anesthesiology), as well as … let’s just say weirder stuff I’m a little embarrassed about today.

So, the $45 I earned weekly bought my beer and off-campus food. I had something to do since my roommates generally went home for the weekends. My intellectual curiosity was satiated. Today, my goal is to earn a living writing and have loads of free time to continue my research into, well, whatever books pop into my life at that given time.

Now to me, that’s the best job to have!