I have had...a few jobs in my life, specifically during my younger years. Approximately 28. I'm not even kidding. In the book, Burying the Past, coming to you hopefully Fall of '22 (3 chapters left!) ...the job chapter is easily the longest and possibly the funniest.
I thought I'd take 3 examples from the book to get my Blogger page some attention, tease another entry from the book AND get my writer's block outta commission so I can finish the book AND write about the past few months which have been CRAZY in my next blog. Here's the last preview of Burying the Past that is somehow almost complete.
* Quick note! If you are reading this and have any suggestions for the book I may have missed, feel free to send them my way! After I finish the final chapters, I'll hit the fun proof-reading stage!
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| Picture from best job ever @ the Char |
USD Foundation
I somehow worked here THREE separate times! This was fundraising for my school, but
here’s the catch, I never was a student during any of my stints there. Isn’t that crazy!? The first time I had finished my freshman
year and needed a job, I was taking the next fall off just to clear my
mind. That sounds like I did something
important, but I basically figured out I needed to go back to college at USD
and worked odd jobs…and drank, a lot.
The second time was the summer of 2005 where me, Dozen, Bear
and Muzzle worked there and somehow afforded an entire summer off of that
salary. I’m not entirely sure how we
survived working 4 hours a day at that time, but we did it and we drank…a
lot.
The third time I was taking online classes with another
university, but I needed money and here we were. I actually won homecoming king of the office
with a girl named Katrina winning queen who was really cool, we all had a crush
on her, but she had a fiancé who lived in New Orleans, so we all called her
Hurricane…yeah, I know this isn’t funny and it has aged horribly.
One regret from this job, I ended up calling a woman who told
me her son worked for SNL and that I should contact him to try for an
internship. Clearly writing for SNL or
the Simpson’s was a dream job of mine. I
wrote down his number and…. never called it.
I don’t know why to this day. I
ended up losing the number along the way, so if you know a USD graduate whose
son works for SNL, I’m still interested in the internship if I can bring my wife
and kids.
Year later, before I met my wife, I had a dream I was dating
Kristen Wiig and writing for SNL from meeting this guy. It was the best dream I had in my life at
that time, only to be woken up by Simo to go see our family. I have a weird belief that dreams could be an
alternate reality so maybe I called in some other life…
My time at the Foundation ended as I just stopped showing up,
thinking my job was saved, it was not.
Rating: 4/5 Job; 0/5 For never calling that number.
Basketball Referee
This is the weirdest entry on the list. The fall of 2001 I had taken a break from
school. I needed some money, so I
applied with the parks and rec department at USD to do odd jobs. One of which was a basketball referee. I love basketball, being a ref will be a
breeze, right!?
To add even more fun into this, my buddy Tick needed a job
too, so I recommended him, and we were assigned to ref the only game that him
or I will ever referee ever again. It
was two fraternities up against each other, I had no idea they took it
incredibly seriously. I was still in shy
mode at this time, so I remember calling maybe one foul. Tick didn’t call any. We got yelled at the entire game, it could
not have ended fast enough. We literally
had no clue what we were doing and I was surprised we even got these jobs.
This guy I went to high school with, since then he’s become
better, but I fucking hated him at that point, went off on me and Tick. The next day we were changed to strictly scoreboard
duty, the both of us. We could not even
do that correctly. Reffing was not in
the cards for us.
We were not asked to come back after scoreboard duty ever
again.
Rating: 2/5
Wedding DJ
Brief, but I did help Dark Honey get a job at this place and
at least he did great! I DJ’d two
weddings. The first wedding the people
didn’t even dance and it was super hick, so I had to listen to country music
for literally 3 hours and ruin my Saturday night by not getting tipped and not
going out with my friends.
The second wedding was ALSO super hick, but the music was pro
wrestling themed as he proposed at Wrestlemania, awesome right!? During the garter ceremony they actually
crotch chopped each other and screamed “Suck it!” which was made famous by pro
wrestling stable Degeneration-X. It’s
hard to describe, it’s best to go YouTube this.
But it was another failure of a wedding, no tips and it completely took
over a Saturday night. Besides the
crotch chops, I am thankful I got the idea for personal introductions for each
member of our wedding party from this reception.
One last wedding I DJ’d was for the sister of an actress. This wasn’t for that company I’d previously worked
for; Stone was asked to DJ the wedding, so he got me and Beast to help him out.
It was nice because another sister of
the actress was my former roommate, and I hadn’t seen her forever and we got to
talk briefly which was awesome! It was
nice to catch up to her, it wasn’t nice to look like a child because I had to
wear a polo shirt for Stone’s DJ’ing company.
The only catch was it was an XXL, I’m a medium, I looked like a child. Easily, the best part of the wedding was the
actress yelling at us to “FUCKING PLAY VANILLA ICE NOW!” and then she stormed
off with a very bewildered Beast going, “I guess we better play Ice, Ice Baby!?”. Then we got paid in nothing but Taco John’s
tacos for our work.
Rating: 3/5 Taco John’s
Rating: Always 5/5
Jeff Kleeman
