I have a friend who recently got a job programming light bulbs for Britney Spears’ underwear.

Ok, it wasn’t so much her underwear as it was her costume, for the current Femme Fatale tour, and it’s not so much light bulbs as it is LED lights that change colors to the beat. The light patterning was conceived by a mutual friend of ours who is a designer in such hot demand that he and his business partner recently had to tell Lady Gaga they were too busy to light up her smalls. Punching in the light patterns wasn’t a particularly challenging job, or as my friend described it, “A trained monkey could do it – just typing the codes. Beep beep boop.”

But she will always have a good answer to the “what was the strangest job you ever had?” question. Plus when she goes to see Brit Brit in concert, she believes that if she types in just the right combination of numbers on her cell phone, she may actually take over control of the lingerie light show.

My oddest job wasn’t nearly as glamorous, but did involve typing. In high school I had an after school job at a restaurant that lies directly on the Erie Canal, an old stop for the barges and their passengers that, by the mid ’80s when I worked there, exuded a Miss Haversham state of decrepitude or charm, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing. Twice a week I’d drive on over to the Spring House, take a phone book and a stack of blank envelopes from my supervisor and sit down at a typing station. I, along with three other high school aged girls, were charged with addressing the envelopes into which a coupon for 10% off or a free drink or some such enticement would be dropped and then mailed to prospective customers all over the Rochester area.

I’d take my supplies and open the phone book to the assigned page number. Then I’d type the addresses of everyone in Rochester named Meyer one day, Myer the next day, and Myers the third day, for three hours.

Every fifth week or so, I’d come to the end of a long list of names, smug about the high stack of envelopes on the table next to me, only to realize that I’d typed Olsson, not Olson, on every single one. Quality control must have scared me more than inventory control, because I’d just sweep the offending envelopes into my school backpack and head for home, tilting the entire load into my parents’ garbage can before going inside for dinner.

Younger readers are thinking, “Weird! Individually typing envelopes instead of running them off the printer using a database file!” No, dummies, that wasn’t the weird part, but you’re cute for thinking that. Everyone hand-typed everything then. The odd part was where the teenage typists sat to do their jobs.

In a chicken wire cage, in the middle of a dark basement hallway.

I don’t know what its original intent was, but the cage – built of two by fours, probably 6 feet wide by 8 feet long and 8 feet high with chicken wire stapled all the way around and on top, was the sole provenance of the typists. We must have looked like a zoo exhibit to the busboys and servers who scurried around the Spring House basement each afternoon, prepping for night service. After our supervisor left each day, the bakers pushed warm biscuits to us through the wire of the cage. But only if we balanced a ball on our nose first. (Ok, that part isn’t true.)

We weren’t locked in or anything Triangle Shirtwaist factory like that. And I wasn’t about to complain since it was indoor work, minimum wage, and clearly, what with all the missing Olson/Olsson envelopes, not closely supervised. It just occurred to me, years later, that putting teenage girls in a chicken wire cage every afternoon might have been playing into someone’s weird male fantasy. Just like Britney’s light up underwear.