Thirteen jobs

I think Dean did this one a while ago. But that’s okay, my jobs are different than Dean’s.

1. TV extra. I made a little over two hundred dollars for a one-day shoot on Green Acres. Not only was this good money back in ’68 or ’69 or whatever, but it was my money. I had torn out the ad for Children’s Screen Actor’s Guild from our TV guide, filled it out, and sent it in. This one was my idea start to finish. (Inspired, no doubt, by my grandfather, who kept banking on a Hollywood career that never materialized.)

Annoying thing: recently, I checked to see if I could buy “my” season on DVD. It’s one of the later episodes, though, and that season is not yet available.

In the photo below, I’m the one giving Eva Gabor the lap dance.

Damned cropping . . .

2. Collator maximus.

From first grade to sixth grade, it was one long slog on the unemployment lines. Then, in the summer before seventh grade, my dad offered me work. He taught high school at the time, and he had this enormous collating job to do. NO, photocopiers didn’t collate automatically back then. Those were mimeo days, if I’m not mistaken. Carbons. Whatever they’re called.

For five days of mindless collating-and-stapling, my dad paid me $100, with which I opened my first bank account. Hey, wait: what happened to the money I made on Green Acres? Hmph. Add my name to the list of child actors whose parents took advantage of their kid’s enormous wealth.

3. Dishwasher and toilet scrubber.

A kid has to do something to earn his allowance — which, in my case, amounted to $5 per week. I spent the money on singles (45 RPM records, to the children in my audience *cough* SHAINA *cough*) and snacks, but mostly I put it into the bank.

4. Dishwasher for Sizzler.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. What more can I say about Sizzler, aside from the fact it introduced me to meat not cooked to leathery badness? Oh, here’s a quick story:

The chefs and other dishwashers all liked me because I spoke Spanish and was friendly to them, unlike the uppity Arcadia kids who treated them like scum. After every payday, they offered to take me with them on their trips to Tijuana — which were for the explicit purposes of getting drunk and getting laid by prostitutes.

No, I never went. Would have made for a better story (especially the part about the STDs, eh?) but I had a girlfriend and was Puritanically scandalized by the thought of soliciting sex for money.

5. Math tutor.

Let’s skip over the stomping-on-trash story and the shoe store bit . . . before leaving high school, I’ll mention one thing from my math-tutoring job in South Pasadena.

One of my students was a drop-dead gorgeous Hispanic girl who was as slow as she was beautiful. She had a younger sister (maybe a year younger than me) who was sharp, had no need of tutoring, but insisted on asking me for an hour of my time. The younger sister perhaps wasn’t as cute as the older, but clearly she only wanted my attention, not my teaching skills.

She didn’t have the money to pay me and I didn’t make an issue of it. Back then, the boost to my ego was payment in full. And, no, I never told my girlfriend about it.

6. Cloner.

Flash forward to my last few months at Berkeley. I had been volunteering in the Kim lab for the last nine months, and for my last summer before med school, Sung-Hou (the boss man) had some extra money for a lab assistant. He and his wife Rosie liked me, I liked them, so I think this was more of a going-away present than an actual job. God knows I didn’t do much to earn my keep. (Although, come to think of it, plasmid preps were a pain in the ass in those days. Dealing with mass quantities of E. coli is a smelly business.)

I made several hundred dollars at that job, though. Combined with what I had saved from my six month internship at Stouffer Chemical, I had the money to buy Karen a halfway respectable wedding ring.

That haze in the tube? That’s DNA!

7. Grad student.

Karen and I lived on student loan money in those days, but as a Cancer Biology grad student, I earned a small stipend as well. The tuition credit was the big deal, of course, but we still needed money to pay for rent and food.

Did I earn that money? Not really. Oh, I put in the time in lab, of course (when I wasn’t playing Rogue on the dumb terminal!) but I wasn’t a productive grad student. My ambitions for being a mega-bucks Primary Investigator with a crew of post-docs and grad students, and several R01 grants and NSF grants and all the rest, had run headlong into the reality of trudging through several years of grad school and post-doctoral fellowship without so much as a technician to help me. I wanted to be the boss right away, thought I had the right to skip to the head of the class, but no one else saw things my way.

Anyway, this is all just an excuse to show this great photo of me & Karen from those days. I’ll show this one any chance I get. Ain’t she a doll?

8. Internship.

No student loans! Real paychecks! Too bad we were paid below minimum wage, but the minimum wage law doesn’t apply to doctors-in-training. Never has, likely never will. From what I’ve heard, the laws regulating maximum hours for interns and residents-in-training are largely ignored.

First month, Urology, went fine. My R2 was a cool guy (even if he did make ill-timed jokes to his priapic patients) and the other residents were — well, urologists. Laid back, kind of funky. Playing with urine and penises all day makes a guy kind of funky, I guess.

Second month, Cardiothoracic, had me in tears by day two. I didn’t think I would survive, but I did.

Interns had two separate four-week vacation blocks that year. These blissful interludes were perturbed by the knowledge I would be back in hell soon enough.

I still have nightmares that I’m back in Internship, Day 1, with twelve months of misery before me.

9. My remedial year.

After internship, residency could not be anything but a relief. But the mind readjusts and one’s set-point for “hell” shifts to the ambient temperature. By the time I hit my Chief year, the thought of taking in-house call was an agony.

After residency, I remained at USC as faculty for one year. My junior residents liked to tease me by calling this my remedial year. In subsequent years, several other graduating Chiefs did the same, and for a while, they called it the Hoffman Remedial Chair.

See? I’m notorious for something.

One of my jobs that year was medical student education. I was much hated for my grueling multiple choice tests. One of my other jobs, self-assumed, was cheerleader. We had low morale that year — odd thing, but I don’t remember why — and I took it upon myself to hold twice monthly educational meetings with the juniors in which we did, among other things, some pretty wild trivia quizzes, with prizes. I wonder if they remember all the gyrations I went through in the hopes of cheering them up?

10. University of Texas, San Antonio.

I was an assistant prof at UT from ’96 to ’98. When I interviewed, the residents clinched the job for me. Isn’t that neat? I heard later on that the faculty were lukewarm (they “had reservations about me”), but the residents thought I was great. And, really, I was (for them). What I mean is, I was more of a residents’ professor than a professor’s professor. I loved teaching in the OR, I was always available to them for advice on the patients, but I hated my research and my lab productivity sucked.

The deal-killer, of course, was the Texas weather. Karen and Jake were both miserable. I was miserable, too, despite the fact I enjoyed being an assistant prof, but I can suck up bad weather better than my wife or son. Leaving UT was one of the more painful decisions I’ve had to make, but it wasn’t a difficult decision.

11. Private Practice.

That’s October 1998 to the present, nearly ten years. In med school, I had never imagined I’d be a private practice doc — not once.

I had a rough time adjusting, and I suspect I took out most of my frustration on my family. Isn’t that the bitch of human nature? I’d done the right thing by them, and now I would make them pay for it. Sorry.

I’m not as grumpy anymore.

12. Agony aunt for iVillage.

Late 1999, iVillage offered me a job as a regular health columnist on their website. They had seen my Q&A pages at doctorhoffman.com and wanted some o’ that action.

Some of these articles are still online (like this one). I’ve reprinted more at doctorhoffman.com. For one year, they paid me a nice chunk of money to write a weekly 2000-word column. It wasn’t enough money to allow me to quit my day job, but way more than enough that I can call myself a professional writer.

Why only one year? Budget cuts, I guess. I’d still be doing it today if they would let me.

13. Vice Chief of Staff, Chief of Staff.

Well, it was a nice CV-builder, but I didn’t enjoy either job. Of the two, I preferred Vice. For one year, I had the final say in all of our hospital’s bookmaking and prostitution operations. The task suited me well.

You know the drill, folks. Love for lurve.

thursday thirteen

microsoar eulogizes a professional hoaxer

thrill to the spectacle of Meritt breaking her Thirteen cherry!

Tam’s fingers are crossed. So are mine.

Dan hosts a lesson on photo filters

and since sxKitten has retired her blog, here’s Dean’s Friday Flickr Babe

D.