We Work Hard for the Money

Today: Part II of our chronicle of unenjoyable jobs and workplace shame, courtesy of my wonderful readers.

Cricket, Anyone?

After Sharon Durham interned as a public affairs specialist at the National Zoo, she volunteered to help take care of the small mammals. This is when she became a cricket chiller.

"Upon arrival at 5:30 in the morning, my first task was to chill crickets," Sharon said. She placed a bucketful of live crickets into a refrigerator.

Why? Well, the shrews, porcupines and rodents that feasted on the crickets lived in cages with mesh walls wide enough for the crickets to escape. The crickets needed to be made sluggish.

You're thinking the crickets needed to be made sluggish so the small mammals could more easily catch them. Not quite. They needed to be made sluggish so that the large mammal could pull their heads off.

"Yes, I had the wonderful task of pulling off the heads of over 400 crickets each day," she said.

This really ensured that the crickets wouldn't get away.

"The only complication was that I am terribly afraid of crickets," Sharon said. "I lasted about three months before I couldn't behead another chirpy. I guess it was the nightmare of the giant cricket head chasing me down the street that did the trick."

Cash Cowed

About 15 years ago, my colleague Mike Greenberg was working for a small publishing company that had a booth at a trade show. To lure passersby, it set up one of those money booths.

"You know," Mike explained, "where people step inside and a big fan blows dollar bills through the air and people flail about trying to grab as many as they can in the allotted time."

The morning of the trade show, they discovered that the money booth wasn't working. The fan wouldn't blow the bills high enough. Disaster loomed.

Mike's boss quickly deduced that though the booth was designed for one person, two people would fit. He also decided that one of them should be Mike, whom he commanded to kneel in the booth with the contestant and fling handfuls of currency into the air.

"Now take a second, John, and picture this image: A young man, four years out of college, possessed of some self-esteem, forced to kneel in a booth, eyes level with the various crotches and [bottoms] of strangers, and toss bills into the air for their enjoyment."

Not a pretty picture. Yet I am glad to have formed it in my mind.

Dog Daze

Wanting to make a good impression, a young Jessica Bartlow said yes when she was asked if she would dog-sit when the president of the nonprofit organization for which she was interning went on a three-week trip.

"Nikki was a beagle with some major issues," Jessica recalled. The dog suffered from separation anxiety and would cry and whine for hours when left alone. She had little control of her bodily functions, and one of her favorite chew toys was the kitchen door.

But all of this paled in comparison with her asthma. "Ever hear a dog have an asthma attack?" Jessica asked. "Sounds like a vacuum cleaner on reverse."

It was precisely this sound that Jessica heard at 2:30 one morning. "I was convinced that she was going to die, I'd be fired and known forever for killing the boss's dog."

In a panic, Jessica called an animal hospital and was told to take Nikki into the bathroom and start a hot shower, the steam of which would hopefully open her swollen passages.

"I dragged Nikki by the collar into the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the sink and the shower to full blast and sat on the floor with her. The entire time Nikki was looking at me like, 'You never scored above 650 on your SATs, did ya?' "

Road Worrier

Nearly 45 years ago, Peter Schneider of Vienna was hired onto the city desk of the Baltimore News-Post. The first order of business when he came in each day was to turn the stack of press releases they'd received into brief filler items for the paper.

"One morning my city editor, a newspaper legend named Eddie Ballard, handed me a release from City Hall saying that a side street adjacent to our building was to be closed to parking one day for some repair work."

This side street, down near the harbor, was a favorite parking area for the men who laid out the paper and ran the presses.

"For a reason that I cannot to this day explain or understand, I got the date of the street closing wrong," Peter said.

That meant that when the road crew turned up, the street was lined with cars. The road work was canceled, but every last vehicle received a ticket. "Luckily, no cars were towed, or I probably wouldn't be here today."

The next day, the phones rang off the hook. Eddie took every one himself. "At the end of every call, he said, 'He's just a young guy. He'll learn.' "

Peter says that he learned more that day than he did in four years of journalism school.

"Did I ever make another mistake? Of course I did. And do. I'm human. But I never made that mistake again."

We can all learn from our mistakes. And we can learn from my online chat today at 1 p.m.

Go to www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.