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I think it’s great we’re all here for the greater good of mograph. (looks over at Savage and he’s shaking his head no with his eyes closed...)
But before we were styling and keying frames what other weird and odd jobs did you guys have?
Mine include landscaping (my first job before of legal age to actually work) slanging music and movies at Best Buy (first official job at 16), delivering sandwiches to professional athletes while dodging tornadoes, and spending a year making money playing poker and video games.
Would love to hear more from everyone...
The weirdest non-design related job I ever had was to clasify some nuts and bolts that somehow had gotten mixed up. I spent two days just putting the right pieces in the right boxes, made you lose your sanity pretty fast but was surprisingly well paid. My first design job was pretty weird too, just so you get some idea of the level of weirdness, I once worked there with an ostrich walking around the office... and that's not the strangest thing that happened there by far.
The very first job I had was as a videographer / cameraman for weddings and such, in the mid-90s (so, VHS cams and the like). It was like this: every weekend, the guy I worked for went after the high roller clients (posh weddings, bar mitzvahs etc) and I covered the beer money crowd, so to speak. Oddly enough, it didn't make me crazy to follow through with video as a career, although I did learn a lot about using a camera and specially what not to do with it. :)
Cool thread! So like someone above, I was a film extra for a while! My top moments being in a scene on my own with Russell Crowe and shaking hands with Ridley Scott! Shame I ended up on the cutting
Room floor haha! After that, I worked with people with challenging behaviour (so basically getting beaten up daily for six years), I've spent last 8 years working as a 3D artist in the pharmaceutical sector! ::)
I once had to make a comic strip for a couple's wedding in Macau. They had a faux newspaper printed for every day of their wedding celebrations (3-4 days) and my comic strip was in the centre fold.
The kicker: the comic strip was a four-part love story about how the bride and groom came together complete with their likenesses!
After college (BA Painting) I worked for a big London art gallery, hanging shows and packing artworks. We used to slice up big 8' x 4' sheets of corrugated card as part of the wrapping of small, framed prints. One day I went to the basement, propped my sheet of card up, probably went to grab some bubble wrap, came back and started slicing my card right down the middle. I felt some more resistance than usual… took the card away and found I had just slashed a £25K canvas. Whoops.
I did motion graphics for the short-lived This Week In podcast network (where we launched Talking Dead before Chris Hardwick and friends "appropriated" the concept for wealth and untold riches).
Eventually I produced a couple shows — not really an audio guy but I know some that I could ask around for a Q or two.
And yeah, I was playing James Bond for Nabisco while I was In Like Flynt with Keebler. It was fun until I got caught, but that's how the cookie crumbles.
Started working as a cashier at Staples (office supplies). They promoted me to Customer Service soon after. They had just launched "EasyTech" (their competitor to BestBuy's Geek Squad). When that launched, they were repairing computers at the customer service counter. The store was in a small town so I had a lot of down time and ended up watching the techs go to work on these massive desktop machines.
After watching them work for a few weeks, I felt confident enough to go home and rip apart the family computer and attempt to put it back together. I was 15. This is how I got into computers. Fast forward eight years, and I get a call from Rob to help him and Dan set up a community for animators.
Besides that, I've worked as a bartender, waiter, and chef for a few different restaurants. Delivered hummus and pita for 6 months. I was a manager for a Barnes & Noble when I was in college too.
Good times.
Hey Jerry. Right on! I knew you dabbled in poker when you had the Rounders nod. I saw Rounders in the theater in 1998 as my friends and I were starting to play a regular game in college. The movie really fired us up and we started hosting a home game tournament circuit. I never did live in NY in those years. I was in LA.
By 2000 we have a rotating list of 100 players and had games up to 40 (4 tables) going at my buddy’s house. In 2002 we started up a point system and had a tournament of champions where the top 10 at the end of the year played for an accumulated prize pot and trophy. We also started a Super Bowl of Poker that was a big 100 person $100 buy in $50 rebuy tournament. I won the first 2 years and people started thinking I was cheating. In 2002 I also started playing on Poker Stars. By 2003 I had built up a bank roll of over $30K. I lost it all later that year. Ironically, it was 3 stacks of high society, just like Mike McD—who also lost it all. He lost it all in one night. I lost it over 2 weeks.
Fun fact during this time, I played in a backroom game with Sam Farha and other Houston high rollers who finished second to Moneymaker a year later in the WSOP. That game was brutal but taught me how to play cash tables as I was mostly a tournament player up to that point. Unfortunately I was a little out of my depth on the cash tables and that’s how I lost it all.
First HS job was lifeguarding - I was on swim team, we all did it - the most fun shit job I had. I also worked in the dark arts of: pizza, sandwiches/coffee, telemarketing (college donations and later vitamins - basically it was being paid to get rejected repeatedly), being a teaching assistant (this was the best college job racket), other super random on-campus crap. I once lasted almost two weeks at a grocery store before quitting from insanity.
I also played poker... ALOT, no wonder you were feeling my Rounders movie pick. Didn't make enough to consider it a living based on my current financial needs, but enough to ball out as a teenager/college kid. When I first moved to NY I designed tattoos and was the only guy on the W4th St block that did Henna freehand. Those were some fun times actually.
Brian were you in NY around 2004-2006-ish and happen to play in Version 2's (no longer in business) big tourneys? During the Chris Moneymaker era when everyone thought they were good at poker haha.
Also totally random, I wonder if anyone in here was at Jose Fuentes and Morgan James's game when Eric brought me in to play that one winner take all tourney?
My favorite job before designing was background acting. I got to be in The Sopranos, Law & Order, The Wrestler, Gossip Girl lol, Fringe, played a Zombie on a pilot that never got picked up. I loved it, so much fun to nerd out on set and watch the crew. The Wrestler was amazing, they filmed during an actual local wrestling show in Rahway. The crowd was insanely rowdy, the wrestlers would get on mic and trash talk the movie being filmed haha almost got a little scared.Being on set never got old for me, always loved it!
Started off as a paperboy when I was 13, busboy beer-stocker in a deli at 16, ice cream scooper at Baskin Robbins at 19, AmeriCorps tutor for high school kids and adults at 22 post film-studies degree. Ended up as a paid intern at a video production company in Pittsburgh before the first dot com crash. Looks like I had a nice 3 year cycle for a while :) Didn't get my first real industry job until I was 28, though I did do a bit of Flash work at a University setting in my mid 20s.
The high-school tutor gig as an AmeriCorps member was probably the most fun, but lowest paying gig. Lots of shake and bake chicken and cheap pasta.
RadioShack!
I got fired from Best Buy for saying “shit” in the warehouse at the volume the GM heard it on the floor. They called me in an hour after and told me. Upon hearing the news I took my shirt off and threw it at the GMs face and stormed out of the office shirtless, grabbed a twinkie and a Mountain Dew from the checkout line, got in my Ford Tempo and peeled out.