drossbucket

[Written as part of Notebook Blog Month.]

There was a ‘first five jobs’ meme going around in March when I first started compiling this list of potential posts. This is my favourite entry:

I’m going to do this but with the first five jobs I did immediately after getting a PhD in physics, because the answer is funnier. I had a sort of unmotivated directionless phase after I finished, and did a bunch of weird temporary jobs in the absence of any better ideas. Exactly five in fact. I haven’t made anything up here, the jobs really were that odd. Here’s the list:

1. Walking round hospitals measuring things

I really wanted to do something mindless straight after I finished, and I’d done some temporary admin work before, so I signed up with a temp agency. They really excelled themselves and came up with something more mindless than I could ever have imagined.

The job was seriously weird. There were two hospitals being merged together on a new site, and the project management office needed to collect data on how much storage space the new hospital would need for medical supplies. I’m not sure what the best way of doing this would be, but maybe it would involve, I don’t know, some Fermi estimates based on their current storage requirements, plus some efficiencies for the single site. What they actually did was make a giant spreadsheet of every sort of item ordered by the hospital (bandages, prosthetics, tiny orthopaedic screws) and then employ EIGHT OF US to go round the hospitals with tape measures FOR WEEKS tracking down and measuring every individual item on the list, including the tiny orthopaedic screws. It was a kind of bizarre treasure hunt round the wards and cupboards and operating theatre storerooms, and I sometimes got to scrub up and go into the theatres themselves for the more obscure items. I genuinely enjoyed this job, because I like walking and exploring and being nosy, but also wtf??

I was so talented at this challenging job that I was kept with one other guy for an even tougher assignment – weighing things. We went round finding all the different types of surgical kits and putting them on scales for… reasons, I guess.

I have no idea if any of this data was ever useful for anything.

2. Following medical secretaries around

After this I had a few weeks off for some reason I forget, and then I phoned the temp agency again. They had more work at the same place! This time they were collecting data on the space they’d need for admin work, and my job was to follow people round and tick a box saying what they were doing every five minutes. Most people were understandably pretty unhappy about being seen like a state, and were grumpy at first, but when they realised I wasn’t too irritating they’d soon warm up, often to the point of offering me office cake.

I discovered Slate Star Codex some time in this job (this was early 2014) and obsessively read my way through the whole back catalogue on a tiny phone screen in between ticking boxes. That was my first step down the rabbit hole of becoming an extremely online person, so I guess it’s notable in retrospect.

3. Receptionist in a soup factory

I only did this one for two weeks, which is good because it was deadly boring. I was on the reception desk signing visitors in and out of a soup factory in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bristol. Not many people visit soup factories in industrial estates unless they’re bringing a lorry of soup ingredients, so this wasn’t very taxing. To pass the rest of the time I was given a big pile of soup batch reports (temperature, density, etc) to enter into some spreadsheet.

Not much else to say about this one. The soup smelled quite nice in the morning I guess.

4. Numeracy drop-in sessions for nurses

After this I stumbled into a job that actually used some of my mathematical knowledge. This wasn’t really due to any effort on my part – my landlord, a research chemist, knew some people at the maths department of a local university and passed my name on. It’s not a big research university with an army of PhD students to do all the bits of marking and tutoring that crop up, so I took some of these on.

This is the only one where I’ve tweaked the title for comic effect, because I did a lot of more normal stuff too, marking Fourier series engineering coursework and running computer labs. But the best thing they gave me was the numeracy drop-in sessions. There’d been a high profile case somewhere where a patient had been given X milligrams of something instead of X micrograms and died, and now nursing students had to pass a test to show understanding of unit conversions along with some other basic maths. It was a nice walk along the river to the nursing hospital, which was in a converted Victorian lunatic asylum, and I’d sit in their fancy barrel-vaulted canteen and help people out if a numeracy test was coming up, and get on with whatever I wanted if it wasn’t. Pretty enjoyable job.

5. Sorting the post in a law firm

This was about as exciting as it sounds. The post would come in early in the morning, and then we’d open it, sort it, scan it, email it out, and file the originals. Sometimes people would request the original documents, so in the afternoon we’d pick those out of the files. For some added excitement we’d do a trolley run to other offices to fetch the post.

The most fun I had on this job was when I got put on ‘destruction’ for a week. This is still a lot less fun than it sounds, and involved chucking old documents into bags for shredding after rescuing any stray passports and birth certificates. Still, it wasn’t supervised much, and a leisurely week of listening to music while throwing things in bags is quite relaxing.

After a couple of months of this I finally decided I’d had enough of this, and started looking for a more normal job. Since then I’ve been working as a programmer, like everybody else who left academia after a STEM PhD and didn’t have any other ideas. So that was that was the end of my prestigious career in weird temp work. Though I guess there’s still time to become a duck roper.