What low paying job did you have before poker?(or still have)

[Arnfinn Madsen]

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Not to be arrogant, but I earned $3k a week before quiting to play poker full time and I have no chance of making the same playing poker. Money is not everything.

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Yeah, but you spend $6 of that on a gallon of gas, and live in 22 hours of darkness. It all evens out. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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Yes, absolutely. But now I'm moving to Poland, and there the money will last longer.

[astroglide]

busboy at caleco's sportsbar. fired for doing michael bolton impressions. there's a club in the basement and the music blares through it. i was holding butter packets up to my eyes when they were playing "when a man loves a woman" after hours. i screamed when he hit the high notes and squeezed the butter packets like my eyes were exploding, and when i pulled them away i saw a manager standing in front of me.

dishwasher at river star cafe restaurant. quit with no notice to work at quiktrip.

clerk at quiktrip. fired as described in another post.

rock and roll hardee's. fired for being a generally crappy employee, i hated the environment. note i was in the "work study" program in high school. i took 3 hours, french 4, psychology, and marketing. then i had to work. if you get quit or get fired from work, you fail the work study and don't get credits. you also can't go to work if you miss school and vice-versa. my teachers were somehow aware of my fairly abysmal home situation though and apparently took great pity on me.

jack in the box. i was a rock star at this place. i was going to quit in order to work at best buy, but they offered me a $2 raise. so i got like $7-$8/hr, which was what a shift leader would make. but i could run every side of the place and was an awesome employee. management changed 80 times and i eventually just didn't show up for work one day and technically got fired, although i consider it a quit.

best buy. started in pc sales, bluffed my way into pc tech. i knew software, not hardware. as a fraternizing type thing when i was "checking out the area" with a manager before joining i was handed a pair of pliers and asked to pull a jumper on something. i had no idea what to do and didn't do anything, but claimed it was dark or something and got through it. i learned all the hardware stuff fast and ended up the lead tech within a few months after the existing one left. got fired for being totally uninterested in helping any other department (especially customer service) when i had run through my workload.

started doing consulting after that. big pay jump to like $15-$20/hr. did some interesting things but the work wasn't steady.

tech support at an isp. dialup at the time still, windows 95 was still relatively new. i ended up getting a proxy server installed in the tech room before i left because i was doing denial of service attacks on people over irc with the ultra broadband (DS3) connection. ended up helping a manager of an upcoming compusa over the phone and met with him for lunch, he offered me more money with commission so i quit.

compusa i was the lead tech. different from best buy because it was a lot bigger tech center, and the store was computer-focused. i got something like 10 per hour OR commission. i would get 25% of all labor. if it ended up being higher than 10/hr, i would earn all commission. i ended up doing that regularly and making a good salary. this is also where i met/befriended a blues hockey player and ended up knowing and doing side work for lots of hockey players as well as other misc rich people. quit to get my first 'real job' at a software development company as a network admin for 52k. this was around 1999, so i was 21 or 22 years old.

worked there for a year. ended up being the main network admin since my peer moved to a different department. company exploded dot com style and hired 47894367 people, then in equally dot com style it got taken over and had the staff reduced by 66%. i survived the chops and would have continued to survive but the environment was abysmal so i just quit. i also didn't pay for my stock options in time so i got no stock, but that turned out to not be a big deal financially.

did nothing for a while. bought/sold sun computer equipment on ebay, started playing and losing at paradisepoker. did a couple consulting jobs. one was as a tech writer for linux admin certfication programs (like the MCSE of linux). i wrote really well when i actually worked, but i would often "work from home" and "not actually do anything." another half quit/fire situation.

i piddled around and ran through my datek account and etc, just scraping by doing side work for rich people and that sort of thing. very much the low point of my life but i have very fond memories of the period. gf and i broke up, ended up getting evicted from my townhouse. moved in with 2+2's own senor choppy and mooched off of him for an entire year. played poker seriously during this period, actually developed poker skills. paid senor choppy off mostly by way of a lot of $50 -> $1000 50 cent 1 dollar to 20 40 runups.

life kind of took off for me from there. had 4 "major clients" and was making a fair living with a side business. i could have gone with that and built it into something but the job offer i got was too good. scored current gf of 4 years, got my current great job which i've held in good standing since then, started doing very well at poker, etc.

i've got tons of misc stories from consulting jobs so you could say i've worked at more places than that, and it's possible i've entirely forgotten several employers.

[MelchyBeau]

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4) Programmer at ILC. 2nd worst job, only because I hated sitting in front of a computer pounding out code for 8 hours a day. The nice part was $14/hr with unlimited overtime, so I'd put in 50+ hour weeks, since all I was doing that semester was working. Oh well, I don't remember what drivers I wrote or editted, but I know I did a lot of them, so if you work for some telecom service, and contract out with ILC to do your M/C, I might've made your system work. The job bought me my car, but was bad enough to make me switch majors, and not come back for the 4 more semesters I was supposed to work.


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My college limited us to 20 hours a week. They also limited us in pay. I was writing Firmware and software for 5.75 an hour.

Then I'd go tutor physics and math for 20 an hour. The reason I worked programming was because all physics majors had to write up a research paper on something we actually did. Mine was on the construction and testing of detection apparatus and electronics for a particle accelerator.

Melch

[Shajen]

You're the first person I've ever heard of who advanced to a good job via a compusa type place.

The only people I've ever known to work at Compusa were guys who lost their cushy jobs when the bubble burst.

Weird man. Good for you.

[astroglide]

i advanced by lying mostly. i wasn't qualified to tech at best buy but i figured it out. i wasn't qualified to consult for sure. for example, my first job involved rexx scripts and os/2 at bank of america (nations bank at the time). had no programming experience, even scripting, other than batch files and bbs administration from my house. wasn't really qualified to be a network admin at my first major job either. i always figured i'd get it or i'd get fired. i've been fired a lot but it was over laziness/disinterest.

my current one is the only one where i was pretty ready for what i was doing, but the actual process of growing the company and infrastructure with no help was pretty new. the environment is pretty hardcore too. around 30 employees, but literally hundreds of computers. huge mix of unix (openbsd, freebsd, linux) and windows servers and lots of clusters. i'm in the process of documenting it all now incase i get hit by a bus, and also so i can train an IT consultancy to have some chance of covering the place when i go on vacation. it's crazy how simple things seem to you when it's built on blocks, when you look at it from a top level it's really not something somebody can sit down and grasp like a regular office network.

[blatz]

Delivered sushi on my bike in the French Quarter, New Orleans. $15-$20 an hour with tips.

Kept the job for years; drank Sake with the waitresses all shift, we had Vicodin Fridays, biked around some of the finest architecture in the country every day, and most importantly strippers would hand me five dollar tips...that never got old.

New owners came in, they acted like I didn't really run the place and I was gone.

[Shajen]

This was well before (forbidden OOT word), but I think it qualifies as one of the worst.

I worked for the State of NM Parks and Recreations. It was a cool job, usually, just collecting money from people who wanted to be on the lake for the day or whatever.

Every tuesday (and occassionally thursday) though absolutely sucked.

Portajohn cleaning day. We had a huge old piece of junk "suck truck" we used to clean the portajohns. The smell. Aw man. I didn't know going in I'd be doing that, or I would have sought employment elsewhere. But for a 16 year old kid in 1990, $8 an hour was pretty good. An arguement could be made that $8/hr isn't enough pay for that job, but it taught me an important life lesson:

Cleaning portajohns is a horrible way to make money.

We also had an outbreak of the "mad shitter". UGH.

[SmileyEH]

I had a paper route from age 9 to 13 after school everyday. In highschool I worked in a KFC/Pizza Hut Express about 25 hours a week during school and 45-50 in the summer. During my freshman year of college I had a lot of jobs, but totaled at most 20 hours a week. I tutored, lab TA'd, worked in the dining hall, catered at school functions, graded homework, and did student security every weekend. My parents told me I needed to start saving for university when I was 9, now I'm making $80/hr and taking a year off.

-SmileyEH

[lastsamurai]

let me see...

worked at a summer camp first summer out of high school.

Ralphs Groceries- has anybody ever played TURKEY BOWLING w/ BOUNTY rolls as bowling pins? Good Stuff.

Dominos Pizza...I love it when I went to certain homes and they told me to chug a beer

Accounting for a travel Agency-they have a yearly ski trip where the crazy VP would make all the non skiiers go down black diamond lanes...funniest Sheit you will ever see...

stock broker at a Long Island Boiler room...(just to get my series 7 and 63 license...left pretty quickly "trust me...your returns will look nothing less than staggering"

PGP banker at commerce, hustler, normandie...most of the so cal casinos...Learned how to do all my CHIP TRICKS...OH and also when to go pair pair instead of two pair behind.
Investment Advisor/tax preparer @ a SO CAL firm
Also helping a few start ups with their book keeping.
EDD

[DasLeben]

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I worked at Circuit City. It was my job to rip decent people off.

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I did this too. But instead of ripping them off for a $1k-$2k computer, I was ripping them off for much much more. I'd keep prices of cars elevated by lying, dodging questions, changing the subject, everything. I was asked to see the sales manager at the "desk" several times for allowing the customer to leave with a fairly priced car.

I quit very soon after.