“I really don’t care what I do!” I say with the kind of disdain that only a 22-year-old stuffed from too many unlimited salad and breadsticks from the Olive Garden that her parents just bought her, can say. “It’s just a job to pay the bills till I can support myself doing what I love!”

I’m home for winter break, and my parents just asked me if I’d given any thought to what kind of job I’d like to get when I graduate in a few months. My BFA in drama taught me many things: comedia dell’arte circus skills, basic fencing, and how to naturally speak in iambic pentameter. Unfortunately none of these are actual job skills people look for. Besides, as you and your friends say with all the weariness of a person who’s never seen the inside of a free clinic, “I just could never work behind a desk all the day!”

The irony is that unless you’re a bike messenger, waitress, or babysitter, you will definitely end up behind a desk all day, and doing grunt work for people who do things like tuck their button down shirts into jeans and says things like “oh bummer” as they check their Blackberry when being told someone’s grandmother just died.

I’ve always felt grateful for having a job and being able to support myself, but I’ve realized along the way that these just for now jobs tend to affect you more than you realize they will. In honor of all the people graduating now who didn’t choose the most linear paths to career success, but who still believe in themselves, here are some of my crappiest day jobs. 

For most of the 28 years of my life, I’ve pretty much taken up any offer to make money that came my way. Here are 40 jobs that I remember. 1.  Child model, 1988 Payment: Unknown Highlights: I only have hazy memories of this, but it somehow involved tacky clothes from some store in my hometown mall, which until 2002 was only called “The Mall.” I could not make it as a model now, except maybe in, like, weird bear stuff

2. Local Television Commercial Actor, 1988 to 1992 Payment: $50 for one commercial, all others free. Highlights: Started out with Clean City Committee, costarring with a brown kangaroo mascot and other small children in anti-littering commercials. Later drafted to a Crime Stoppers commercial where we were handed crowbars and asked to beat up a car in a junkyard. Once paid $50 for a local pharmacy commercial which involved asking for scientific names of drugs to kindly old man pharmacist. Mom forced me to put it all in savings. I blew right through those savings my freshman year of college.

3. Self-babysitter, 1993 to 1997 Payment: $5/night Highlights: My parents paid me stay home alone and babysit myself while they finished their college degrees with night classes. This was largely a ploy to 1.) make me less terrified of staying home alone by incentivizing it and 2.) make it easier for them so they didn’t have pick me up at one of my aunts’ houses. Involved watching lots of Unsolved Mysteries and scaring myself shitless.

4. Bar Stocker, 1995 to 2002, 2004 Payment: $20/day Highlights: At an age that probably wasn’t entirely appropriate, on select Sundays, ensured  that the coolers at my grandfather’s bar were stocked with beer and, sometimes during the summer, cleaned off the beer garden with a power washer. To an 11-year-old kid, $20 was a LOT of money. I have rarely felt the same sort of job fulfillment since.