Full-time Jack Of All Trades

My first job was when I was twelve. I deseeded chili peppers, unloaded sterilized soil from a huge oven, and picked peppers and avocados. I worked under my father's supervision, and after one day of this I began to see why he always came home tired. Whoever knew that simply breathing in the air around cut-up peppers would make your eyes tear up and your nose run? That soil could weigh so much or your neck and shoulders would ache after only twenty minutes of picking avocados? There is a challenge in picking avocados. The trees grow to a great height, so you have to wear a pith helmet to protect your head against falling fruit. You also wear a great bag around your waist and carry a telescoping aluminum picking pole with a sharp blade at the tip. When the bag is full, it pulls on your shoulders and they start to ache. Your neck hurts from being bent back, and you have to squint to prevent debris from falling into your eyes. And yet picking avocados is far easier than picking peppers, which grow on small plants low to the ground; you aren't constantly stooping, squatting, then standing up again, but more importantly, you can work in shade. I have seen migrant workers bent over in fields, moving from pepper plant to pepper plant picking fruit under the full blast of the sun. My mind boggles when I consider that there are people who do this for hours a day, week after week, to feed their families. This is hellish work.

My second job was babysitting. I worked in a small day-care nursery that catered to working mothers and students at our local university. I worked twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday, walking two miles from high school to my job. There were eight kids, from ages two through five, and I loved this job. I played with the kids, I sang songs with them, wiped their noses and made them snacks and told them stories. I also learned how to get bubble gum out of hair, a skill I have since put to good use. (Peanut butter rubbed in, in case you're wondering.)

My third and fourth jobs were as a file clerk and clerk typist for insurance companies in Miami, Florida. Filing is deadly boring and I lasted only a short time; they didn't like my attitude. By the time I got hired for my fifth job, I had learned to be more punctual and not to ask questions that people could not answer. I worked as a clerk typist at a large land development company, also in Miami. Ninety nine percent of the management were gay or bisexual, and the other workers were a lot of fun. This is the first job I proudly listed on my resume.

I have almost lost track of the jobs I did after this one. I worked as a dictaphone transcriber, a receptionist, a medical transcriber, a waitress, a cleaner, a babysitter, a unit clerk in a hospital. I painted signs and tutored children in reading and cleaned people's houses and typed out letters, dissertations and surgical operations. I filled orders, bused tables, washed dishes and waited on people, and somehow, I managed to put myself through college and graduate school, but it took ages. Time was money for me, and the work I did to pay my way through taught me a lot. Mainly it taught me that learning to do any job well was a challenge. And it taught me that I didn't want to end up filing or typing for a living.

Since graduating from university, I have worked as a medical secretary, waitress and portrait artist (San Francisco and New York City), potter and dish-washer (Amsterdam and s'Hertogenbosch), translator (Japanese to English), teacher of English and Japanese (California, Japan, The Netherlands, and Wales), and waitress, legal secretary and inn-keeper (Scotland). And of course, I've been a mother too. Am I a jack of all trades? Absolutely. And I've had a blast. Believe me, there are worse things to do with your life. I don't necessarily recommend this way of life, but I'm certainly not knocking it either.

My main line of work has been as a teacher in Japan, where I worked for seventeen years. Then I started doing rewriting, proofreading and translations of short articles and educational materials, all of which I loved. My husband and I got caught up in the yen trap: we earned good salaries, but we were stuck in Japan. Now being stuck in the Japan is not a bad thing per se, but we began to feel that our options were somewhat limited. We also began to worry that our kids, who were as fluent in Japanese as English, were missing out when it came to reading and writing their parents' language. So we moved to the U.K. and started a business.

The business prospered and our kids did well in school; we were miserable. So we sold up, and my husband retrained for a job that no one would hire him to do. Everyone told him he was over-qualified and advised him to dumb down his C.V. My husband is no slouch: in addition to teaching and writing, he has driven a tractor and picked grapes and hauled strawberries to the market. And though he has not been able to work in his chosen field -- English teaching qualifications are not recognized in Scotland -- he has managed to feed his family. My past work experience came in handy too: since settling here I have waited on tables and cleaned rooms and babysat for children. I have typed and filed too, but we live in a stunningly beautiful area and a lot of people have come here for quality of life reasons. Whenever a halfway decent secretarial job comes up, it is immediately snapped up by someone more secretarially qualified -- and more British. I have looked long and hard for a full-time job doing anything more challenging than waiting on tables or wrapping cheese, but I have not found one.

Then something utterly amazing happened: I sent some stories off to a writing competition and won first prize. Shortly after this, I entered a short story competition and won another prize. Someone paid me for another story, then a poem, then an essay. Admittedly, they all paid peanuts, but even a pittance that you earn through writing is huge. One thing led to another, and through writing -- and competing -- I met another writer, Kim Ayres, who encouraged me to start a blog. Until meeting Kim, I didn't even know what a blog was.

Even before that first wholly unexpected win, I was hooked on writing, but after this I began writing non-stop. If I'm ever properly published, I look forward to telling the world I became a writer because I could not make it as a legal secretary.

Now something else amazing has happened: our eldest daughter has passed her higher finals with flying colors and she has been accepted at the university of her choice. Upon learning this, my husband applied to over a dozen overseas teaching posts. Just last week, he and I were tentatively offered teaching posts in a land far away which I will not divulge as I do not want to tempt fate. So now we're packing up and moving away, and he'll take the high road and I'll take the low road, but we're all leaving Scotland together -- even our eldest, who claims this will be a kind of gap year for her. And although I am still bristling with stories, this is why I may not be able to post for some time.

It will be strange to be teaching full-time again, and there will be a lot of challenges getting used to living in yet another country. But I look forward to it too; waiting on tables and typing up depositions is only exciting for the first couple of weeks.

And whatever happens, I'll still be your Resident Alien.