I liked volunteering at an archives, because I was a history major and it was so interesting, having access to all that history. As a volunteer, you are thanked daily for your service. I don’t consider volunteering a job, though, because the parameters are different than when you work. For example, a volunteer wouldn’t typically be chastised for being late or doing something wrong, because if they piss you off, you just won’t return, whereas with a job, you have to take a certain amount of shit in exchange for pay.
When I first started working, I did a lot of temp jobs for a temp agency. I liked it because I didn’t get involved in office politics. I just did the job.
My first real job was for the Reader’s Digest, in the mail room. The work wasn’t particularly fun, but I had a lot of fun with my friends, joking around, and the Reader’s Digest in those days had a company store that had good prices, they had a great cafeteria that had great prices, and they had a bus that picked people up along a route (many bus routes) and drove us home for $3 a week. This was around 1983–5. When I went for the job interview, they had a Lincoln Town Car pick me up at the train station. I started in the mail room and then they needed typists to type checks, so I did that for a while and then I worked in the business correspondence department, typing business letters that were transcribed by people who put them on tape, and then we used transcribing equipment to listen to the tapes and type it out. That job is what got my typing speed up to a phenomental rate, and it’s still phenomenal to this day. I guess I’d say that was my best job.