Years before I became the high-powered divorce lawyer (ha!) that I am now, I put up with a bunch of silly summer jobs as a teenager. These are long gone from my resume, so I’ll recap them here for everyone’s quiet amusement.
Busboy – Ambassador’s Residence, US Embassy Paris – Summer 1985. My first job – EVER. I was 16 years old. Just one day of picking up plates and dishes and taking them into the kitchen. It was hot out and we had to go outside. The food was fancy dishes and there were lots of important people, but I only recognized the Ambassador himself. At the end of the day they gave us our paychecks.
Foreign Commercial Service – US Embassy – Summer 1985. The very next day, I started this job. The FCS helps US firms find French distributors and wholesalers for their products in France. The actual work hardly kept the permanent staff busy – so they were bored and it was very low-key. On the very first day I ran out of work within one hour – and told my father I’d be going home. His response: "no way. You stay until 6 p.m." "But there’s no work here! There is nothing to do!" "I don’t care. FIND something to do. Ask them to give you work. But you are not leaving there until 6 p.m." Somehow I managed to keep busy. Looking for work was more work than actually working. The hours dragged by. If they gave me a task stuffing envelopes I was ecstatic. However, it did impress them that I was eager to work and looking for something – to keep busy and make the time go faster. The boss, Mr. Flannery, signed letters of recommendation. The job was certainly a learning experience.
Office of American Services – US Embassy – Winter 1985. I took this job for two weeks to earn money to buy a guitar. This office mainly makes tourist passports for US citizens in Paris who have lost theirs. I even helped make them – typing in the name with the special font ball on the typewriter, gluing the picture to the passport, and then stamping it. Given that passports are valid for 10 years, none of the passports I made are still valid. Moreover the new ones are scannable. Anyhow. I also put old ones in the shredder, and few things are as cool as shredding. My "boss" was Bernard, a shy French guy who loved rock music. He turned me on to Hawkwind and Motorhead. And the beauty of it was, after I made the money I did go out and buy a guitar – a cherry sunburst copy of a Fender Stratocaster.
Visa Section – US Embassy – Summer 1987. This was the complete opposite of the FCS. The Visa Section is swamped with French tourists during the summer; the line goes around the block. This was one job where we were all overworked and busy from 9 to 6, even the full-time permanent staff. From 9 to 3, I stayed outside in a little booth handing back passports with tourist visas to the various French people who had applied for them. The typical turnaround was 24 hours. If the application was rejected, it was usually because someone didn’t answer all the questions – like "are you a communist?", "are you a terrorist?", "are you a criminal?", "are you a drug addict?", "did you collaborate with the Nazis during WWII?" (which kept Kurt Waldheim out of the US). The reason these questions weren’t answered was because the applicant was a 5 year old child being sponsored by their parents. Oddly, being a communist wouldn’t disqualify you if you were honest and admitted it. It was LYING on the application that nailed you. [FYI – if you ever lie on a visa application and you are caught, the INS will ban you for LIFE. Tony Montana from "Scarface:" "Donnnn FOK with me!!"]
From 3 to 6, I came inside to the air conditioned office and entered applications into the system, and they would eventually be reviewed against a State Dept database back in Washington. This is the database that could tell the Consular Officers if a particular applicant wasn’t being completely truthful. Sure enough, many applicants would be denied, yet come back day after day to apply again and again. The officers would tell them, "we rejected it yesterday, we rejected it today, and we will reject it tomorrow if you come again. Get a clue and leave." If they gave any problems, the Marine guards were usually menacing and intimidating enough to do the rest.
Anyhow, this was the first job where they depended on me and found that they could. The hours went by quickly and before I knew it the summer was over.
Paris Air Show – June 1989. Two years later, my summer began with this. 12 days straight – no weekends off. Up to catch a bus at 7 a.m. at Place de la Concorde, out to Le Bourget Airport (the rinky-dink obsolete airport that Lindburgh flew into in 1927) for the Air Show. We worked at the US Pavilion, either working the front desk, in an airconditioned booth entering data into a database, or at the back entrance telling people either "goodbye! Hope you enjoyed it!" or "no, this is just an exit, come in through the main entrance." They had 30 kids there working, doing work for about 10, so we were encouraged to take breaks and walk around the air show and see whatever we liked. Talk about no pressure. The SR-71 had just been retired, so that was the highlight of the show. The pilots came through our pavilion and handed out lots of cool badges. And of course, no show would be complete without a Russian fighter jet crashing – and the pilot (luckily enough) managed to eject and survive (no one else was injured aside from Russian pride). The only downside to this job was that it was nonstop for those days and we wouldn’t get back home until 8 or so – only to have to get up at 6 a.m. the next morning. Well, it was only for 12 days. Incidentally, my brother met the girl, Danielle, who was to become his wife, at this show.
Regional Administrative Management Center – US Embassy – Summer 1989. A day after the Air Show, I started working here. Back to regular hours! This was somewhere between the FCS and Visa Section in terms of how busy and hectic it was. The staff took it easy and we had work to do, but there was no intense pressure. This place handles the finances for all the US Embassies in Africa and Europe. My section handled Africa. At this point I can’t remember what I did, only that it was boring but kept me busy. My buddy Phil came to visit us in Paris on the way back from India, so in August I shortened my hours somewhat.
The highlight of this job was Heather, a blonde girl a few years younger than me who was stationed in a slightly different section. We had breaks together and lunch together practically every day. Of course, we got to know each other fairly well. She was kind of petulant and had an abrasive personality. I suppose there were sparks, in the "two people rub each other the wrong way so SOMETHING must be going on" way. We went into town a few times with my buddy Phil, my brother Matt, another girl Dianne, and Heather’s boyfriend Eric who was visiting. But nothing came of it. Her younger sister Courtney eventually ended up going to high school (ASP) with my sister Sarah. Heather herself ended up at Virginia Tech. I met up with her briefly in July 1990 when I returned to Paris one last time, but I lost track of her when I went to law school. (Heather, if you’re reading this, I got over you sometime in October 1990!).
That’s it for my pre-legal career. If anyone wants my resume, just let me know.
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