The Ghosts of Jobs Past: Part 5

Obsolete skills

After I stalled as long as I could in Lansing, I finally ran out of money and had to move back home and find a job.  I had managed to get an associates degree in photography, and eventually ended up landing a job at a local commercial lab.  Its name was Kibby lab.  It was a small place that worked exclusively with commercial clients and ad agencies.  They did a lot of large format printing and finishing, but what they really did best was dye transfer printing.  Dye transfer was an extremely exacting and precise process that was popular because it tolerated a lot of manipulation and allowed for retouching.  For more information you can read about it here: Dye Transfer Process.  It could also, with the help of hand cut rubylith masks, be used to create elaborate composites. 

I worked here for almost two years, and while I was there, dye transfer was the only game in town for glossy commercial images.  During the run up to car catalog season, it was not unheard of to work 12 or 14 hours a day for 6 or 7 days a week.  It was tedious, time consuming, and exacting work, but of all the complaints I had about that job, the worst was the smell.  This process used gallon upon gallon of acetic acid (vinegar basically), so every night I’d come home smelling like a pickle.  You would forget how badly you reeked most of the time, but if you stopped anywhere between work and home, you were reminded of it. 

After photo school, working in a production environment really forced me to up my game and taught me a whole skill set I’d have never learned in any school.  Every morning we’d start the machines, clean them, run tests on the exposing lights and processors and then calibrate everything so we were producing our separation negatives as consistently as possible.  We had to clean small chromes meticulously and make sure every surface was dust and fingerprint free.  Everything needed to be in perfect registration.  Even a little deviation in one of these steps meant that someone was going to have to adjust their exposures and times, or someone else would have to touch up your dust spot, or someone would have to try to manipulate the way the mats went down to correct for your registration inconsistencies.  It was important to take the time to prepare well to save time further down the process. 

I also learned a wealth of information about color correction, building composite images, and the art of cutting out one image to drop into another.  What I didn’t realize was that I was participating in the end of an era.  Digital photography, personal computers, and photo editing software were all just around the corner.  I was down in the trenches and didn’t notice that the photographic world was changing.  What I did realize was that I really didn’t want to smell like a pickle for the rest of my life (or work crazy long hours either for that matter).  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I was pretty sure I would need a bachelor’s degree to do it. 

After I’d been working in the lab for about 2 ½ years, I quit and went back to school at Wayne State University.  Unfortunately, the real and practical world of commercial photography had no place in the art world.  Craftsmanship, technique, consistency, and quality were given a back seat to concepts and vision and far less tangible things.  When I asked an advisor about my employment options after graduation, he looked at me like I’d pooped on his desk and informed me that a degree was not for getting a job but to explore and fulfill my artistic impulse.  I knew that I really had no business in art school, but played the game as well as I could and earned my Bachelors of Fine Arts in Photography in about two years.  

During my first year, I ended up getting married to the guy I’d met way back before I went to school in Lansing, and at the time of my graduation I was five months pregnant with my first daughter.  All the skills I’d learned both in the lab and in college were about to take a back seat to a much more daunting task.  Luckily, they stuck around just waiting for the day that Photoshop and I were destined to meet…

The Butcher

The Ghosts of Jobs Past - Part 4

Part time college jobs

I am one of the few people I know who moved away to go to community college.  I wanted to study film production, and there were all the expensive schools on either coast, but being the thrifty girl that I am, when I realized that there was a community college in state (Lansing Community College in Lansing, Michigan) that offered an Associates Degree in Film Production, I decided that I would go there.  Credits were under $13 an hour at the time (not a typo), and rent was pretty cheap, so I saw a way to move out with the savings I had from my accounting job.

This was more than thirty years ago, so we were shooting 16mm stock, having it processed, and editing actual chunks of film.  It seemed impossibly high tech and exciting at the time, but I had not counted on how expensive even rinky-dink little films cost.  Even then I was spending about $100 a minute for a finished film, and that was using friends for actors and borrowing all the school’s camera and sound equipment.  As my seemingly vast savings dwindled quickly, I came to two conclusions.  The first was that if I wanted to make films for a living I would be spending as much of my time begging for money as I would filming, followed by the realization that I needed to get a job fast, or I’d be moving home soon.

Over the three years I went to school at LCC (I eventually ended up getting a degree in still photography because I was not well suited to begging for money) I had a wide range of part time jobs.  I babysat, photographed weddings, sat in pitch darkness and spliced together huge reels of film that became driver’s licenses (no matter how bad my photo is, I have seen much, much worse) and even cut together a training film one of my instructors made (he had done all the editing and I put the A and B rolls together from his work print).  The job that stands out in my mind though was the 6 months that I spent as a phone solicitor for a cemetery.

Monday thru Thursday from 5 pm until 9 pm, myself and four or five girls just like me would sit at folding tables and attempt to set up appointments for the sales staff who would then offer a two plots for the price of one deal.  Needless to say, since we were calling at dinner time to discuss dying, we were not exactly popular.  From this I learned to take rejection.  It has also made me more empathetic to people with crappy jobs since I was always grateful to talk with someone who was able to say “no thank you” pleasantly.

What made this job memorable (besides the fact that the crematorium was in the next room with a temporary body storage room next to that and it got really dark out at night), were the team of women I worked with.  They were all fun and interesting and ready to hang out after work.  We dubbed ourselves “The Cemetery Girls” and that was the absolute best opening line ever.  We would go to the bar or to parties and just own the place.  We used to compare bad opening lines, and wound up with a tie between "Are you a model?" and "You have the lips of a fawn."  It was the first time that I realized that the people you work with can make a crummy job better or even great.  I really enjoyed it then, but had I realized how long it would be before I’d work with such an exceptionally entertaining group again, I’d have savored it so much more.  

The Butcher