Jobs I’ve Had: High School Part 2
Shady Pseudo-Telemarketing
A guy in our neighborhood got on the internet riches bandwagon the summer after my senior year, so he posted a flyer asking for part-time help. It was listed as something like “database maintenance and data entry”, which should have sent up some red flags from the get-go since these are highly disparate skillsets. Yup, it was basically telemarketing. He had bought a list of businesses across the country and I sat at an ancient credenza in his basement and called these businesses to “verify their contact info”. He was under the impression that if I fed a line a receptionist at XYZ Industries about how I “needed to ship them something” and asked them to “verify their address” for me, we would be in the clear to send them mail and it would not be considered unsolicited. It was really easy work because most businesses have no problem confirming their address and the call never took more than 60 seconds. When he explained to me that he’d pay $0.50 per phone number, $0.50 per address, and $0.50 per email address confirmed, I had cartoon dollar signs in my eyes and wasted no time in adjusting the headset attached to his second phone line and jumping right into Filemaker Pro without even questioning what the data were for.
It turned out that the ultimate purpose of my collecting/verifying this information was to try to sell these businesses a listing on a web site that was “about to become the premier shopping destination on the ‘net!” This was one of those buy-domain-name-first-ask-questions-later business ideas where the business owner thought that a great domain name was all you really needed to make it big. His killer domain name? Bestshopping.com.
You probably don’t have to be told that the business never took off, but how was the work? Relatively lucrative. I didn’t mind cold-calling since there wasn’t really any sales pitch involved. Of course, the pay wasn’t as great as the mental math I did on the first day (60*$1.50 = $90/hour potential). As it turned out, most businesses didn’t have an email address at the time, or wouldn’t give it out over the phone to a shady character like myself. In addition, between being put on hold, navigating phone trees, and all of the numbers that were no longer in service, I think I was able to manage closer to $10 an hour. This was still relatively excellent pay for a high school kid sitting in a rickety office chair in an air-conditioned basement, and I milked the job for as long as I could that summer. I think I ended up exhausting his initial list and his business never went any further beyond that initial phase.
Video Production Monkey
I did a few months of work on and off for a local video production company owned by a marching band parent at my high school. Since I already had loads of experience making video projects for school with editing tools on my friend’s Mac, I was proficient enough on day one to use the fancy non-linear video editing tools that the owner had set up for various jobs. I mostly loaded video from tape (DV, DVCAM, MiniDV, and Betacam) to HDD and did some basic editing/cleaning up. I also ended up using the source material to produce some DVDs for sale from start to finish, and one time, I directed and edited the Spanish language portion of a training/sales video for a construction equipment manufacturer. The hardware and software was easy to use and really pretty intuitive for me, and I think I produced some pretty good work.
Fascinating, I know. I loved this work, and Video Production actually became my dream career for a time, which was my initial impetus for getting a degree in journalism. A few summers later, I did a short internship on location with a company that produced extreme sports videos, too.
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