The cosmic shift in my life was to leave 25 years of lawyering for an uncertain future as a writer. It’s easy to forget that I had many other jobs which were much less fun than writing. Here’s one of a series:

Have you ever wondered why the prize in the cereal box is always maddeningly at the bottom? I sat on a hard factory chair for a month with a large cardboard box on my lap, filled with little red plastic boats, sealed in plastic. The boats, not me. A spider-like machine of whirring and twisting metal arms folded boxes of Count Chocula cereal with wax paper linings. The empty boxes bobbed along the conveyor belt towards me, and I threw a boat in each box as it passed. Actually, I flipped the boats in the air, counting their revolutions (for extra points from my co-worker) before they usually landed in the moving cartons. If I missed, the correct thing to do was get off my chair and walk beside the moving conveyor to find the boatless box. Too much trouble, so the next box got an armada. I figured it all evened out. Once the boxes passed me, a hose from the Count Chocula mothership filled them with its sugary namesake, and another machine glued and sealed the boxes. Every little boy wanted a little red plastic boat because once filled with baking soda and placed in water, the resulting chemical reaction would propel the boat around the bathtub.

What stupid job have you had?