As a published writer, I have gotten some strange questions. I get the usual “How do you come up with your ideas” and “You look normal, how can you write that stuff?”
But there is a question that I get even more frequently. “What did you do before you became a writer?”
The truth is, I have had a lot of jobs. For a while in my mid-twenties, I was a bit of a spark plug. I remember my first job when I was eleven, I worked on an exotic bird ranch for an hour or two after school. I got a couple bucks a day, but mostly I wanted to look at the birds. My first official job was at McDonald’s. I worked the counter and I was horrible at it. I still feel sorry for all the people who came to my register.
After the fast food industry asked me to leave, I began a journey of trying a large number of different jobs, none of which were for me. One job was cleaning out horse stalls in the Oklahoma summer heat, and I only made it until I had a check in my hands and I was out of there. Another was finding rare mushrooms on a southern Oregon mountainside.
In my late twenties, I decided that office work would be better suited for me. I worked for Dell Computers for about a year, and then I went to work at an answering service for about six years, until the great recession of 2008. This is when I began writing at night. During the gold boom of 2010, I was managing a Cash For Gold company.
These days, I am working at a wood flooring company. It’s hard work, and it pays the bills, and it let’s me write at night. So here is my question, what is the weirdest job you ever had? I look forward to hearing the results.
-R.L. King