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Really, I’ve never had a *bad* job. There have been bad parts to all of my jobs, but I think I’ll focus on my history of menial work instead of the time I worked for gambling, alcoholic, habitual absentees.

In my youth I was designated child responsible for the chopping and carrying of wood. This was an important role because our house had wood-fire-powered everything. I’m sure that if they were still sold in commercial quantities we would have owned a wood-powered car. We had slow combustion heaters and a slow combustion stove that acted in the role of oven, stove and cameoed as our sole source of hot water. There’s nothing that motivates you to get out of the house more than a 35 degree (celcius) day when the stove has to be stoked up for a couple of hours so that we could have hot showers that night.

However, It was the cold days that hurt most. Snow, frost, sleet, rain – when we ran out of wood it was my duty to chop, carry and stack.

Within six months of leaving home for university mum and dad ripped out all of the wood-powered stuff and bought gas-powered replacements. Whenever this comes up in conversation I smile pleasantly and move on.

I was also security guy at a local Fosseys store during high school. That was good for the kind of money I needed to fund my motor scooter and C64 game habits, but a little mind numbing. My usual duties were to tidy stuff up, count things as they were delivered and compare the numbers to mysterious printed reports, give customers directions to stuff and look busy. After failing to look busy enough a couple of times I was given a badge that said “Security” and stood out the front of the store to smile pleasantly and look inside bags. No touching of people or bags was permitted. Security work was a delicate matter.

At the other end of the scale is the *best menial job I evah had*. During university I got a job at a large Sydney law firm as a … wait for it … fax operator. That’s right.

My job was to:

1. Work out who incoming faxes were for. Clip all of the pages together. Phone the intended recipient’s assistant and ask them if they wanted someone (else) to deliver it, or if I should just place it into their pigeon hole for later delivery by the mail room
2. Receive sheafs of documents from the firm’s solicitors with notes on who to send them to. Either dial the fax numbers on the note, or look them up in the pile of international fax directories provided
3. Examine the 15th storey, 200 degree unobstructed view of Sydney harbour
4. Replace toner and call the manufacturer if any of the six fax machines broke

Sure that sounds hard, but the machinery provided to me was more than capable. These were top of the line for 1987-1988. The Rolls Royce, the Alan Bond, the Christopher Skase of fax technology. My babies had touchtone dial, comprehensive error reporting and job logging, big trays, 9600 baud, huge toner reserves and racing stripes. Sure the photocopier guy next door had bigger gear than me, but I was wired to a world of communication he couldn’t hope to understand. He had all that Gutenberg could offer while I had the lovechild of Gutenberg, Marconi and Samuel Morse at my beck and call.

The most challenging part of the job was figuring out when you had been given a telephone instead of a fax number and interpreting international ring tones (what were the French thinking?). Perhaps that’s where my interest in telecommunications comes from?

My employers didn’t care much whether I looked busy or not, so long as I smiled pleasantly and faxes were fax-operated upon competently. This was fortunate because I started a few days before Christmas, and a few days after Christmas the courts shut down and 99% of the solicitors in the office were suddenly on vacation. This left me with just about nothing to do. Often I was so busy I was only able to read one novel a day.

Eventually the pace picked up again. Sadly I had to hand my stable of 6 fax machines over to an apprentice and return to university.