Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Most Fun I Ever Had While Working

*Day 8* I'm blogging everyday till VidCon! What is VidCon? Check it out at www.VidCon2010.com

The best job I ever had only lasted one week and I have no idea how I could ever get hired into such a position ever again.

During the summer of 2006 I was working three different jobs (I never had a day off basically). One of the companies I worked for was called Camp Las Vegas. Their flashy pitch was that they offered kid-friendly 4-hour tours on the Las Vegas strip for children. Basically, it was a 4-hour baby-sitting service for tourists. There was a morning shift and an evening shift. Only, we never had a lot of customers.

I don't even want to tell you about my job with Camp Las Vegas, but it was because I worked for them that I got to work the most fun job I've ever had. While I was employed by Camp Las Vegas, a convention planning company contacted my boss and said that they needed some extra chaperones for their childrens entertainment. Basically, a convention was in town that encouraged guests to bring their whole family and promised that entertainment and supervision would be provided for children ages 7-17 for 14 hours of the day. Since we didn't have much going on at Camp Las Vegas, four of us were sent to work as chaperones for this one week.

On the first day, the children were diveded into age groups and split between 6 chaperones. I got the group of 17 year olds. I was actually very happy with this because I was only 21 at the time. I think the kids in my group were happy to have a chaperone that was so close to them in age. We sort of became 'friends'.

Anyway, we spent the whole week taking those kids to every kid-friendly attraction that exists in the Las Vegas area, and also every fun restaurant. We had two or three meals a day with them and we were truely with them for 12-14 hours every day. We went to gameworks, the mini gran prix (think race cars), the Hoover Dam, Shark Reef (that's an aquarium), Madame Tussauds wax museum, The Adventure Dome (Las Vegas's only theme park) and we ate at the most fun restaurants like Planet Hollywood and The Rainforest Cafe. We even had a pool party with them one day. Late at night we had a ballroom at the hotel where we would watch movies and play games. Some of us would all sit in a corner and paly Mario Kart on our Nintendo DS's and DS Lite's.

This job was incredibly fun because I didn't have to just supervise these kids while they got to have all the fun. I got to have fun right along with them. I played games with them at Gameworks. Ate lunch with them at Planet Hollywood. Got frightened in the wax museum by figures that turned out to be real. Rode alongside them on the roller coaster at The Adventure Dome, and raced against them on the track at the Las Vegas Mini Gran Prix. Not to mention, I was getting paid to do all this too.

Working as a chaperone for a convention was the best job I ever had. If I only knew where to start to be able to work this kind of job more often, I'd sign up again and again.

What was the best job you ever had? Or, what fun job do you know of that you would like to have?

5 comments:

  1. My current job I work as a Mad Scientist and teach children science. I love when the kids say they want to be scientist. It's so fun, it's not even like work.

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  2. Wow that sounds like so much fun! I want to do that! I have only ever been a waitress and a comms officer (and a pathology lab assistant which only lasted a week because it was so boring so I don't count it).

    I would love to be something like an children's illustrator. I don't think I would be good at it but I'd love to read kids books all the time and then bring them to life through art!

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  3. I have always wanted to be an actual published author, I think that is one of the most fun jobs to have if you can get paid for it.

    The best job I have ever had was as a summer camp counsler, I spent two summers working at a christian summer camp in the San Bernadino mountains and I had a blast all summer long.

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  4. This is pretty long, I know. I'm sorry. I just love talking about these two jobs!

    Best job ever: Working for a small company that did contract work for printers. The printer would make pamphlets or flyers or whatever for their client and then ship them in plain, flat form (straight from the press) to where I worked to be folded, stapled, labeled, whatever, to make them ready for actual use. It was crazy easy because after you do the first half dozen or so it becomes mechanical and you don't really even have to think about what you're doing.

    So because the work didn't require much attention they rented tons of movies bought huge piles of food and drinks and put it in the middle of the big table where we worked, and we would sit and fold or whatever while we talked, laughed, watched movies, snacked, whatever we wanted. Also, we worked whatever hours we wanted and we were just paid for the work we did, and I never sleep anyway, and it was like two blocks from my house, so I literally worked 18 hour days, went home and slept for four hours or so, got up and showered and went right back to it. I raked in tons of money for basically sitting around watching movies. It was AWESOME!

    2nd best job: Two middle school boys in my very tiny town called in a (completely false) bomb threat to their school and state law requires certain consequences for bomb threats no matter what. One of the consequences is that they have to be removed from the general school population and placed in an alternative educational setting. State law also requires that the person(s) who watch over them there is a certified teacher so they can get professional help with their work.

    I wasn't teaching at that time but I was certified and all the other certified people in town were, you know... teaching... so they hired me to do it. I didn't actually have to do anything other than watch over them and help them when they needed it. Their regular teachers were required to make their assignments, bring it to them, grade it, etc. And they were both super good boys who had just made a stupid mistake, so there was no discipline issue at all.

    So I essentially sat at a desk all day and read and sipped a cold drink while they did their school work. They even brought meals in for us! I was making money for sitting in a chair reading all day. SO cool. I'd do it again in an instant.

    I just realized that both of these examples show how lazy I actually am, but that's cool by me. They were still great jobs! :D

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  5. those sound like awesome jobs Edi, I did something like the first one you mentioned once, but it wasn't an actual job, I did it for my high school. A bunch of us student council members went in during the summer to prepare all the envelopes of paper work that get sent to the students for parents to sign before the school year starts. It took us a few days and they paid us in pizza and soda. It was fun. :-)

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