Thirteen booksellers and Marilyn Dahl of Shelf Awareness shared first or worst jobs, but one of them is absolutely lying. Can you guess which one?

• Emily Adams, Third Place Books
• Worst job (best scenery)
• Fish processing in Valdez, Alaska
• Summer of 1996 (for about 2 weeks)
• Age: 23

I slimed fish in a processing facility on the docks in Valdez, Alaska, where fish were dropped off by the boatload (many thousands of pounds at a time). The fish moved down the line from the never-ending thunk of the de-header run by a man whose hand was chained to the table so he wouldn’t chop off his hand instead of a fish head—to someone who sliced them open, to the spooner, who scooped out all the guts, to me in the rinse tank, pulling any stray membranes or innards from the fish. Then they went onto the scales for a weigh-in before finally landing in the sorting bins.

I shivered in my rubber boots for 16–20 hours at a stretch, surrounded by a river of fish blood being squeegeed past my feet, my hands numb despite multiple pairs of gloves. Wet, wet, wet. This is the first job that made me appreciate having a college education and feel for those whose options for work were more limited.

Our glamorous accommodations for this engagement: a tent in the adjacent campground, with a glorious view of the snow-capped Chugach Mountains and Prince William Sound. The drawback? Bears in the neighborhood would sometimes roam through the campground, and everything I owned smelled like fish. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I wouldn’t have slept at all.

• Cindy Dach, Changing Hands Bookstore
• Worst job (for three days)
• Designer wholesale handbag company in New York, NY
• 1988
• Age: 22

I was hired to be an assistant salesperson. The company was owned by a husband and wife who had worked with this particular designer at another company. On my second day, I learned that the husband and wife had a toxic relationship and fought relentlessly and publicly. There was name-calling and object-throwing. On my third day of employment, the wife threw a stapler at the husband, just missing his head. I took an early lunch and walked to my apartment. I stayed at home for the rest of that day and never returned.

• Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, Greenlight Bookstore
• First job
• Sno Shack in Bakersfield, California
• 1993
• Age: 14

This would have been my worst job experience, except there was a lot of free time for reading while I sat alone in the blue metal shaved-ice stand in the strip-mall parking lot . . .

• Tom Campbell, The Regulator Bookshop
• First job
• Paperboy in Malvern, Pennsylvania
• 1961–1964
• Age: 12

I delivered newspapers after school and on Saturdays for three years—and during all school vacations, of course. I had a three-and-a-half mile rural/suburban route that I did on my bicycle, except when there was too much snow. Then I walked the route. I rang bells and collected money once a month, and kept records of all that. This was the classic old-time boy’s job. Built character and all of that. I never thought about this before now, but what I was doing then is pretty much what I’m doing now—peddling the printed word to one person at a time. Hey, maybe I should work out a way to bring the bicycle-delivery angle back?

• Jill Owens, Powell’s Books
• Worst job
• Temporary secretary at a chicken-slaughtering plant in Athens, Georgia
• Summer of 1997
• Age: 20

For about three months, while the regular secretary was on maternity leave, I sat in a room with a chair, a table, and blank white walls (except for a calendar with the company logo and the same picture of a cooked chicken on every page) and filed reports on chicken counts: How many baby chickens in a particular lot were alive and how many were dead? I think they were fighting and killing each other, though I was never sure. The reports were to check for sickness outbreaks. The dead baby chickens made me sad.

I also had to type up the weekly schedule for the line workers on an ancient typewriter. No white-out was provided, so if I made a mistake, I had to redo the whole grid. My one other duty was handing out paychecks every other Friday to the employees, who were generally flecked with blood either on their white uniforms or their plastic hairnets.

Since the actual work took up less than an hour of each day, I had tons of time to read. But when the regular secretary didn’t come back and they asked if I wanted to stay, I declined.

• Rachel Cass, Harvard Bookstore
• First job
• Projectionist at a movie theater in Peterborough, New Hampshire
• 1997–1999
• Age: 14

I worked the concession stand for a couple of years at the Peterborough Community Theatre, the single-screen movie theater in my hometown, and eventually learned how to be a projectionist. It was probably wildly irresponsible of the owner to leave a sixteen-year-old completely in charge of the theater for the night (I have no idea what I would have done if there had been a fire or any other emergency), but it was great. I either watched the movie, read, or did homework in the projection booth, and it was my first taste of small-business customer service. My particular favorite was working the afternoon Christmas show, after people had opened presents, gone to church, and hung out with their families—it was a lovely small-town tradition.

• Jessilyn Norcross, McLean & Eakin Booksellers
• Worst job
• Stagehand for Cirque du Soleil for two years after my senior year of high school
• Age: 18

It’s not true when they say the French hate Americans—they were very kind to me. It was the Hungarian acrobatics team that was the worst. They would constantly move things backstage, put them in the wrong place, and intentionally make things confusing for all of us. Unfortunately, this ended in disaster when a fifteen-year-old contortionist from Spain was unable to make his exit from the stage before we lit it aflame. I’ll never forgive those Hungarians.

• Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness
• First real job (that didn’t include picking strawberries)—and the worst
• Dining room server at The Hearthstone retirement condominium in Seattle, Washington
• 1964
• Age: 18

This was the worst job I ever had, due to the Swiss martinet who was in charge and made us carry hot soup tureens on a slippy-slidey tray, above our heads, using just one arm. And then there were the fetching hairnets . . .

• Wendy Hudson, Nantucket Bookworks
• First job
• Field hand in Nantucket, Massachusetts
• 1988

My first real paying job (besides oodles of babysitting) was here on Nantucket after my first year of college. I was turned down as a chambermaid, so I went to work in the fields of Bartlett’s Farm, hoeing and weeding, picking strawberries and beans, and falling in love with the island. Here I am still.

• Julie Wernersbach, BookPeople
• Worst job
• Receptionist security guard for the Nassau Inter-County Express bus system office on Long Island, New York
• Summer of 2000
• Age: 19

My mother was the office manager for the security guard company that staffed the Metro-Transit Authority (MTA)’s bus system office in scenic, exhaust-ridden Hempstead, Long Island. When the guard there finally quit for the last time, my mother, in a pinch, offered my services.

The polyester pants were uncomfortable in ways I won’t recount here, and the big American flag patch on the shirtsleeve ruffled my college-age, screw-the-man feathers. But what really made this job the worst on my personal record were the employees. No one who works for the MTA Long Island bus system is happy. No one. I sat behind bulletproof glass (installed, one white-haired employee gleefully told me, after the last “incident” involving an unhappy bus driver and a gun) and tapped a foot pedal to let office workers in and out. They resented me for my small station of power. I was yelled at when I transferred calls to the wrong people; yelled at when I let bus drivers past the bulletproof glass without prior approval from HR (that “incident” clearly left a mark); yelled at when I didn’t get a FedEx box upstairs quickly enough. On my lunch hour I ate Power Bars in the front seat of my car and watched them all smoke their cigarettes and carry sacks of fast food across the parking lot and wondered why they didn’t just quit. I would have, if my mother had let me.

The upside? In between absorbing misdirected angry outbursts of regret over clearly unfortunate career choices, I had nothing but time to read.

• Dan Chartrand, Water Street Bookstore
• First job out of college, and worst job evah
• 4 am–12 pm shift at Pearson’s Candy factory on West 7th Street in St. Paul, Minnesota
• September to October 1981

You haven’t worked the worst job ever until you’ve shown up for work hungover in a candy factory. Burnt sugar and hangovers do not go together.

Both of my shift supervisors died from motorcycle accidents and I was asked to take over the role. I quit right after they offered me the “dead-end” supervisor spot and went to work for Dan and Michelle Odegard at Odegard Books instead.

• Adrian Newell, Warwick’s
• First (and worst) job
• Family ministry across the entire USA
• 1961–1973
• Age: 5+

My father was an itinerant minister, so my first and definitely worst job was the forced participation in the family ministry . . . although working in the wig department at May Co. in L.A. in 1973 was almost as bad. Bookselling seems so easy by comparison!

• Emily Crowe, The Odyssey Bookshop
• First real job (beyond babysitting)
• Lab assistant at Georgia Pacific in New Augusta, Mississippi
• 1991
• Age: 18

I actually loved this job. I was a total science geek and enjoyed being in the lab and running tests all day. Less fun was having to wear a hard hat and steel-toed boots every day, but I did look kinda badass.

• Kelly Evert, Village Books
• First job
• Toys “R” Us in Phoenix
  1985
  Age: 15

It sucked.

*Jessilyn Norcross of McLean & Eakin Booksellers was, um, not so much telling the truth about her first job with Cirque du Soleil. In fact, she made the whole thing up.