When I was in high school, I got a job with a landscaping company in Goleta. It was less a company, really, than a man in shorts and no shirt who wanted me to work in his backyard. Every week, he would tell me to replace the sprinkler heads on his lawn, and I would replace them, and then he would tell me to mow the lawn, and I would mow the lawn, but I would run over the sprinkler heads, and then he would get real red-faced and yell at me, and make me replace the sprinkler heads. Then I’d do the same thing the next week. It was a pretty cool job, I guess • I worked for the campus police in college. I was a dispatcher. “Base to Safety Shuttle. Come in Safety Shuttle” • After college, I moved back to Santa Barbara and got a job at the Earthling Bookshop. It was a good year, except I learned later that one of the girls working there who I had a crush on actually had a crush on me but I didn’t know it at the time and if I had known it at the time maybe we would’ve hooked up? Still kinda bums me out. Not like a lot, but pretty much a lot. Like if you mention Earthling, that’s the first thing I think about • In graduate school, I was hired as a research assistant by a distinguished American historian. Mainly, I picked up cat shit around his house • The best job I ever had was working for an environmental law firm that hired me to write a history of development in the San Francisco Bay. I loved that job • The worst job I ever had was a temp assignment I had out of high school working for a company that advertised in the back of newspapers telling poor people they could buy repossessed cars for $99. Which they couldn’t. I walked off the job during lunch and still feel sick I stayed that long. I found out a few years later my dad took the same temp job at around the same time – he might have even replaced me. He said he thought it was a great gig • I worked as an attorney at O’Melveny & Myers LLP for over 10 years • I never thought seriously about playing in the NBA.
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