Open Mic Wednesday 8/31/11
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
It’s Open Mic Wednesday. What’s on your mind?
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Books by Kaye Dacus
Novel in Progress
Follow the Heart*
Book 1 of The Great Exhibition Series
Due May 1, 2012
first draft completion goal date: 01/31/12
*working title
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Middle Tennessee Christian Writers
Just in case you missed the announcement last week, tomorrow I start a new job. It’s part-time, still allowing me my afternoons off for writing and editing, and it’s office assistant work, which means it shouldn’t be as draining as full-time editing has been in the past. So that leads me to the only discussion starter I’m going to post today (y’all are more than welcome to post some ice-breaker questions yourselves, though, to get some discussion going):
What was your first “real” job (i.e., you had to pay income tax)?
My first job I paid income tax on was working as a cleaner at the department of Ag.
My first on-the-IRS-grid job was as a salad-bar girl/behind-the-line-order-taker girl at Golden Corral in Las Cruces, New Mexico, my senior year of high school. (That was back when it was actually a casual-dining steakhouse, not a graze-all-day buffet.) I made minimum wage to start ($3.35/hour) and got several incremental raises over the eight or so months I worked there (I think I was at $3.75 when I left). So when I got a job as a student-worker in Baton Rouge at $4/hour (limited to twenty hours per week), I thought I was rich—not realizing that I’d been working far more than twenty hours a week at the restaurant.
I worked part-time doing filing at an insurance agency. It wasn’t bad, my boss was really flexible, and I liked my co-workers. I made min. wage, which I believe was a little over $5 back then.
Once I was in college, after I did the requisite daycare thing (after doing the requisite restaurant thing), I did the part-time office work, too. When I worked in the HR department at Louisiana School for the Deaf, that’s when I learned I hated filing, because that was pretty much all I ever did!
Mr. Gatti’s Pizza was my first job. I made minimum wage and bused tables, ran the cash register, and made tons of pizzas. Good stuff….and I STILL love pizza!
Sherrinda, there’s a Mr. Gatti’s Pizza (now Gatti’s Pizza) in the town near where I live. Is it a chain? I thought our town was the only one that had one?
Mr. Gatti’s is a chain—we had one in Las Cruces, NM, and in Baton Rouge, LA, when I lived there. In fact, Mr. Gatti’s is where we always went after the LSU football games for the pizza buffet. It was good, cheap, and killed enough time that the other 90,000 people who’d been on campus for the game were pretty much gone. They had the BEST apple dessert pizza!
There’s a Mr. Gatti’s in my hometown, and one here in Lexington. They still have the apple dessert pizza. My stepdad likes them, but I don’t.
Ugh — chamber maid at the Holiday Inn. I still shudder thinking about it. I worked there to earn money to go to college. Good luck with your new job, Kaye!
My least favorite job ever was in the laundry room at The Faculty Club—a boutique hotel and restaurant on campus at LSU. It might not have been quite so bad if it hadn’t been in the summer and early fall . . . in Louisiana . . . in a room with a steam press, huge dryer, two open-top washers, and NO AIR CONDITIONING. Talk about hot and humid!
McDonalds. Yuck. My next couple summer jobs were much better – wiring and testing light fixtures at a nearby factory (second shift). I worked on an assembly line and it really opened my eyes to what a lot of people do for a living. That first factory job was when I discovered audiobooks
. Every so often I get a little nostalgic for the complete lack of responsibility, bells ringing to tell you when to go on break or to lunch, etc… but I know I’d go insane if I had to do a job like that for more than 3 months.
There is something to be said for those short-term, repetitive jobs. But you’re right—I’m also the kind of person who wouldn’t be able to do something like that long-term.
Kaye, I just finished Ransome’s Quest last night. What a great book!
I liked the epilogue and noticed that those two characters you mentioned at the end are the ones that you were going to write about in the 1840′s series about the Ransome descendants. I recognized the guy’s name.
I left the book feeling happy, but want a book about Serena and her man. If you have to do a stand-alone please do. I want to read their story. Those two captivated me completely.
I would love to write a book about Serena and her man . . . and her big brother. Yes, I wrote the epilogue after I found out I wouldn’t be writing the sequel series (at least not at this time). But who knows. In another couple of years, I might have time/be allowed to (due to copyright issues) put out some e-books focusing on some of those secondary characters from the Ransome series . . . after all, we need to know what happened to James R., too!
By the way . . . if you’d like to discuss Ransome’s Quest with other readers, spoilers and all, there’s a forum over on Facebook for that:
https://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=30626117435&topic=16283
Audry has already posted, trying to get a discussion going!
Congratulations on the job, Kaye! I pray that it will work out great and give you even MORE fodder for great stories!
First “real” job – I worked at a bank in 1983, in the bookkeeping department, 30 hours a week. Actually, my main responsibility was filming bank documents to go on microfiche, then in the afternoons I literally filed business checks. This was before computers and machines did all this for us! It wasn’t bad, and I made a tad over minimum wage – 3.85, maybe? My jobs after that included babysitting, and my campus job, which, literally, was my favorite job ever, scheduling events and rooms in the campus student union building. And guess what? The job I did in the late 80′s, my daughter is doing, on the same campus, now!
Great news on the job. I hope it goes well and proves to be a blessing. It should relieve some of the stress and hopefully give you a new well for creativity!! I just ended my part-time job at the end of June, for health reasons primarily.
My first tax paying job? Oooh, you TAX my memory – that would be almost 30 years ago. I worked as a junior executive secretary for an insurance company in Boston. Had to take the train to work every day. Glad those days are over.
Okay . . . I’ve picked out what I’m going to wear tomorrow–down to shoes and accessories. The coffee pot is set to start an hour before I need to leave the house. Breakfast is pre-prepared (so all I have to do is nuke it for 30 seconds before I leave the house). Now all I have left to do is change purses (can’t carry a hot-pink purse when wearing a red top!), pull a blank spiral notebook from the closet in the office to take with me (I know I’ve got a lot to learn my first couple of weeks on the job, and, let’s face it, I’m at an age where if I don’t write things down, I’m likely to forget them), and then try to read for a little while to hopefully clear my mind so I can sleep the night before my first day back at work in exactly three years and one month. Not that I haven’t kept awfully busy in those three years, but it’s a different kind of busy working for oneself at home and working in an office with other people.