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   Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 20-Apr-2026 02:43:05 JST Adrianna Tan

   in reply to

   • Milcom Miasma

   @mmiasma I worked as a cashier at a cable car company selling tickets to tourists. I mostly wanted to take cable cars for free (there were glass bottomed ones).

   One time, a tourist paid for their ticket with all coins, which took a long time to count; later, I got laid off because of SARS (which preceded Covid by decades), which made me feel strongly that I don’t want that type of job (tourism / anything that relies on seasonality)

   • Embed this notice
     Milcom Miasma (mmiasma@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Monday, 20-Apr-2026 02:43:06 JST Milcom Miasma

     What's the strangest job you've ever had and did it change how you saw yourself?

     I wasn't officially on the books but when I was in high school, I would routinely go with my next-door neighbor to his job at a mausoleum and crematorium.

     Apparently I was Goth before Goth was a thing.

     It's not only fair but accurate to say seventeen year-old me didn't understand death or what it does to the survivors.

     It also gave me an abiding hatred of organ music.

     #JobDescription
     #ModernLiving

     Steve's Place repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Abram Kedge🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇦 (abramkedge@beige.party)'s status on Monday, 20-Apr-2026 15:43:12 JST Abram Kedge🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇦

     in reply to

     • Milcom Miasma

     @mmiasma I've done a bunch of different jobs. Making precision approach path runway lights that guide aircraft in to land at the correct angle was unusual, I even made a set that were installed at the Moron airbase in Spain for use if the Space Shuttle ever failed to achieve orbit.

     But the strangest of all had to be when I was hired as ARM's first software engineer in their newly formed Consulting business unit.

     What a welcome... a dozen people came up to me in the first couple of days to tell me that ARM should not be doing consulting, and my job should not exist.

     I actually called my second choice from the job offers I had declined and arranged a meeting, only to cancel the next day, apologizing and saying I felt I should tough it out, show ARM what I can do. ARM acquired that company years later, merged with my department. I worked with the company's management team to ensure onboarding for everyone was as painless as possible.

     Anyway, I was there five years, worked on cool stuff like prototypes for Gameboy Advance, invented a nested interrupt technique that made it into the official ARM training material, but also learned that there's always some bad shit in every job that you just have to live through until it goes away.