A walk down memory lane

I did some work for my undergraduate university, and the tax form required info about whether I'd been employed there before (yup) and when (huh?). You know how everyone makes a big deal about children who go to college and don't even know how to do their own laundry? Well, that you figure out after one red item goes into the whites, problem solved. So you have some pink towels. As a parent, what I would teach my children is to keep meticulous records of what work you do for whom, on which exact days, and what you were paid for it, and do so starting from the age at which this doesn't even seem relevant. (Here's one problem being an unpaid intern solves.)

Email tends to answer such questions, but I only got gmail in, what, 2004? And all email from my undergraduate account (including a couple from someone who's now a NYT columnist! waa!) is now in the abyss. Or [insert predictable NSA joke here]. Whatever.

Anyway, while this information is surely also in tax forms I don't have in front of me/in my apartment, period, I figured that it was probably elsewhere as well. Like, say, in an old resume. But what I needed to find was the information about my book-shelving job. This is something I had apparently removed from the resume fairly early on in my post-college job search, and had evidently not passed along to grad-school recommenders. Probably at the advice of the career office, although in retrospect, maybe I ought to have kept it on. Did my contributions to the Chicago Criterion (does that even still exist?) merit a whole line?

Searching, searching, then, found it! It was in a resume, but one I'd prepared especially for... Petit Bateau, the French t-shirt store. I had evidently applied to work there in 2005, and a great many other places along those lines that I'm almost entirely sure never got back to me. Things were evidently not so rosy pre-recession, either.