I’ve had many jobs in my short working life – several labs, chemistry stockroom, Girl Scout camp, sandwich shop, refereeing.

But most of all I’ve worked for my parents.

My parents work together. They are professors – anthropologists – who work in public health. I have worked for them, often as slave labor, since I was coordinated enough to fold a letter or brochure. They went so far as to actually hire me and actually pay me when I was in college.

I’ve done all sorts of things for them – stuffed envelopes, folded brochures, alphabetized their lives, reviewed transcripts, entered data, coded data, built datasets, proofread, and even wrote a paper. My absolute favorite thing I did, though, happened the summer after 4th grade.

This entire situation is improved by knowing that my grandmother, who thought all little girls should be prim and proper, was staying with us at the time. I was 10 – not so little what with pushing 5’3” or so at the time. My dad needed several hundred cassette tapes with interviews destroyed.

Anyone who has ever been bored in the presence of cassette tapes (or possibly bored while being 5 in the presence of cassette tapes) knows precisely how to destroy one: pull out all the tape and break it in a few places. Bam! No more cassette tape.

That’s not how this went. Every evening after dinner, my dad sent me out to the driveway with a banker’s box full of tapes and a sledgehammer.

And thus the tapes were destroyed.