Last Labor Day weekend I desperately needed to escape the disagreeable, torturous heatwave. So I made a last minute decision to fly to Seattle and bumbershoot. As luck would have it, my spontaneity provided for a much more temperate and rainless 70 degree haven.

The Bumbershoot Festival has been running 37 years strong and every year it seems to progress into a bigger and better animal. Situated within the spacious Seattle Center amidst the Experience Music Project and the Space Needle, Bumbershoot attracts nearly everyone within the Seattle area and even a few festival nuts like myself who make spontaneous decisions to travel out of state. Between seven music stages and nearly one hundred and fifteen artists to choose from, I certainly got my music fix for Labor Day weekend.

So I have this pretty fun tradition (aside from Three Rivers in the holidays), of going camping at Two Harbors on Catalina Island every Labor Day Weekend. The tradition originally began as a Jugglers' Festival, oddly enough, of which I was only a part due to my friend and her husband who are amateur jugglers, and because they are friends with some fairly accomplished ones. There was a juggling volleyball game on one of the early trips, where the ball was replaced by clubs and everyone had to catch them and keep juggling, pass them, and toss them back over. Needless to say, I was just a spectator...

But since then, it has dwindled down to just my friend, her husband and I, and a varying group of friends. And this last time they didn't even bring anything to juggle. What you do is have one person book the campground (waaaaay in advance, if you can, as in now, for next year), and everyone send him a check, (it's $12 per adult and $6 per child a night), and then each person books a boat ride on the Catalina Express (about $50) for whichever time works best and you all meet up on the island. Get a Bloody Mary on the boat trip and stand out on the deck; one hour later you'll arrive at Two Harbors, a little town with a beautiful beach, a restaurant, a bar, a little grocery store, and campgrounds up the hill.

Couple more pictures after the jump...

At 21 years old, less than two months new to town, living in my cousin’s back room in the deep valley, making love to a Thomas Guide every night, with zero frame of reference for my situation, I embark on a film career.

My first break, an independent film, hires me to be their production secretary. What’s that? I don’t know either. Here’s what I do know. The production office is at 6th and Alameda and it’s like working in abandoned city with an occasional sighting of a nomadic person and/or a fish market. After weeks of calling vendors and lining up everything from dolly track (which I have never seen or heard of) to craft service (which I have never seen or heard of), the operation packs up and moves to set. The fully assembled, and very stoned crew begins to shoot a film that will be ultimately repossessed by the bond company because the producers are stealing money.

Michael “Eddie and the Cruisers” Paré is the star of this picture show, and in addition to my other varying duties, I also get to be his morning driver. Upon meeting me, he insists I take him to buy underwear from Fred Segal. “Sure,” I say confidently. “Where does Fred live?” I am not trying to be funny.

Every morning I drive the epic stretch from Northridge to San Pedro by way of Hollywood, and every evening I drive back with an added stop in Burbank to drop off the film, and a jaunt to Woodland Hills to drop off the sound. I do this in my rented, unreimbursed Taurus. I do this for three months. I sleep an average of four hours per night. I eat a lot of El Pollo Loco tortillas. I make $242.00 every two weeks. I work production for a few more years before I realize that I don’t hate my life enough to continue. I am happy.

Photo (of an entirely different film) by jozecuervo via Flickr

After two years of college I had to drop out for financial reasons. I had stopped talking to my family, and needing loans to pay for school I had no one to cosign for them. Being wary of those bank loans I decided it better to drop out.

I went to a temp job and they placed me in an accounts payable position for a non-profit. Nine years later here I am still working in AP only now I’m a manager and have moved on from several companies.

My last job was with a manufacturer in the automotive parts industry. I started out as an AP clerk and got promoted to AP supervisor. A year before my end there they hired a new controller. He just received his MBA and thought he was hot shit.

One day he came to me asking if I would do some budget analysis. I declined since there was no offer of a raise. From that moment he started stripping control from me over my department, and I could sense my days were numbered.

But never did I imagine what would be the final blow. After the company holiday party, I found my job posted online. I quit right away and miraculously found my current job. Although I left without causing a stir, I had lots of ill wishes to them.

Within a year my replacement was fired for making personal purchases on the CFO’s credit card and the controller was forced to resign for misstating revenues on the fiscal year end reports.

By the way, last year I saw the controller at a bookstore shopping. He saw me, looked down and tried to walk away. Not being one to cause a scene I yelled to him, “Hey! Fuck you asshole!”

I love karma.

AP Flowchart Photo courtesy Moi

I've had some frustrating jobs in the past--mostly in retail--but there is nothing quite like the pain and humiliation of stumping for a cause and a minimum wage paycheck. When I was a mere young'un, at 18, I spent six months working as a door-to-door canvasser for Greenpeace. Yes, I was one of those annoying neo-hippie crusader types (mind you, I bathed and shaved and did not spread any funk, unlike some of my crystal-gazing coworkers) who rang your doorbell at dinner time, carried a clipboard emblazoned with "Save the __________!" stickers, and asked you for money. Even then, if I'd come to my own door I'd have hated me too.

Working for an often radical group like Greenpeace had a surprisingly rigid and almost corporate feel to it. We all drew a base salary (I would probably be ashamed to admit what it was in 1995, if I still remembered it) but were required to fill a quota of financial support each week. Every night a manager would map out our individual "turf" and give us photocopies of the area from the Thomas Guide marked up with our designated streets. We also were given cards that listed past donors, and were urged to hit them up first for renewals. This was by no means a guaranteed strategy to make quota; many times the past donor listed had moved, had abandoned their do-gooding attitude, or, in the worst case, were dead. I'll tell you, there is nothing like knocking on a door and asking for Mrs. So-and-so, only to be informed by a still-grieving widower that his wife was no longer with us. But that was just one reason why the gig was a nightmare.

Photo by jovike via Flickr

As I try to do anything but labor on this Labor Day, I reflect on my nearly 10 years working in office jobs to support my freelance habit. So while I spend my 9 to 5s at work-work, I've held myself to certain standards.

I believe I act with integrity. I've tried to treat people – regardless of my personal feelings for them – with dignity. And I've worked hard because (besides being a Type A personality) it's what my bosses paid me to do. And where's it gotten me?

Absolutely nowhere.

So for those of you who are new to the working world and really want to move ahead, collect those big bonuses, earn those raises and eventually find yourself in the nice corner office, here are a few tips that I've learned over the past decade by watching the "best and brightest" at my companies move up in the world... after the jump.

Everyone's favorite secretary is set to become the new celebrity face for the self-proclaimed "most erotic lingerie in the world". The upscale, reservation-only, lingerie shop on Melrose, Agent Provocateur has taken the torch from the coke-stained claws of Kate Moss and handed them to Maggie Gyllenhaal, an honor once bestowed upon Kylie Minogue and Dita Von Teese.

The UK's Daily Mail has a handful of the photos from the Alice Hawkins photoshoot of Jake's sister and Kirsten's BFF.

According to the Agent Provocateur website (totally not safe for work, but it's labor day, fuckit), Gyllenhaal's "Lessons In Lingerie" launches Friday and we wonder if Maggie will bend over backwards for the company the way Kylie did not that long ago.

I used to work in an extremely uptight government office. My one saving grace was my friend, Karen, who was the only normal person there.

We ate lunch together every single day and went out together after work. One day we were talking about how everything men say leads to some sexual innuendo. So I told her about one of my favorite Lynda Barry cartoons where the men only speak in phallic symbols.

She asked me to copy the cartoon for her. So a few days later I brought a copy to work and stuck it in Karen’s mailbox. I decided against writing a note and including my name in case it was accidentally found by someone who wasn't in on the joke...

When i was still a teenager, i got hooked up selling sunglasses on a street corner in Inglewood. It seems like a random job, and it was, but man that shit paid like whoa, paid in cash, and plus i never had to worry about new shades. The sunglass stand was on La Cienega and Arbor Vitae, and it was ran by this weird Italian guy who lived in various motels around town, chain smoked joints, and never came by the stand.

I got the job after quitting my first 9-5 job doing data entry. Quitting because i was statistically the highest-producing/most-underpaid employee; taking the new job because my buddy already worked there, he said it was smooth jams, and easy money. I was put on the schedule immediately, with my buddy as my trainer.

The sunglasses gig was awesome. We were merchants of cool, and our stand was rigged with cons all over the place. First off there was huge signs that read "$3.99" to bait people in, when really the $3.99 rack was small, and had nothing but crap to choose from. Second, we were instructed to say, "Welcome! Today is buy one get one free day!" But the gimmick was that everyday was buy one get one free day. We just doubled the price of everything, so they were really buying two. There were other more subtle cons, but in sunny Los Angeles, sunglasses practically sell themselves.

By the time I got to Gorky's Russian Cafe, its communist-leaning founder had sold out to a south bay capitalist named Fred. He hired me as a server, promoted me to cashier, then made me manager -- of the 1am-9am shift. From 2-6, I was the only staffer there at the corner of 8th and San Julian downtown.

People would come in after Jac Zinder's dance club, or a show at LACE, arty people cooler and older than me. Sometimes they'd spot our well-stocked international beer cooler and beg me to sell them a bottle after 2am, and occasionally I would. But mostly I followed Fred's rules, which included charging cops half price. The neighborhood was pretty rough then -- a block down was serious crack corner, and Fred thought greasing the gullets of the LAPD would get him preferential treatment. One cop realized the deal and made me re-ring him up: giving cops a discount was illegal, he told me. I felt bad; the food at Gorky's wasn't all that cheap, and most of his buddies just went along with their discount.

I only had to call the cops once. I was restocking the beer cooler, around 3am, when something made me turn around. Behind me was our emergency exit, a glass door. On the other side of the door was a huge guy with his pants around his knees, jerking off as he watched me. I ducked away and grabbed the phone, trying to stand where he couldn't see me. I told the LAPD what was happening, and they said they'd have someone out in about 20 minutes. "Thanks anyway," I said. "I don't think he's going to take that long."

"Hi, this is Jackie Payne with Impact Distributers...I'm just calling to let you know that you have won one of FIVE fabulous prizes!"

Yes, I worked phone sales...I was the lowest of the low. In fact, it was not only phone sales - it was a phone scam. When I was 18 I used to work at a place called Impact Distributers in a high-rise in Marina Del Rey. My ex-boyfriend Harlan got me the job. Harlan was like a cross between Charles Manson, Ratso Rizzo, and the lead singer of Kaja-goo-goo. My other co-workers were Dave Markey, Janet Housden, Steve McDonald, John Press, a Latina housewife, and various random young girls who came and went. I was actually one of those random young girls myself now that I think about it.

I guess I worked there for 5 or 6 months, although it seems like years. We had a nightmare of a coked-out English boss who used to scream at us and pound on our card tables if we didn't stick to the script word-for-word. He would scream the script in our faces, "Does that make sense to you???" He was obsessed with the "yes response". He believed that if people said "yes" enough times during the conversation they would say "yes" to his scam out of habit. So he wanted us constantly chanting, "Does that make sense to you???" I can still hear that coked-out limey voice screaming in my head. "Stay with the script! Does that make sense to you???"

For quite some time i was one the guys responsible for illegally installing 200-400 promotional signs on people's property throughout the city (aka street spamming) while i simultaneously monitored 15 "signwalkers" spread out within proximity at various big intersections and freeway off-ramps. A signwalker is a person who is standing on a street corner holding a 10 ft. sign that will direct traffic to the sale we're promoting that particular weekend.

You have to understand, normal people do not signwalk. Ask yourself if YOU would do it? Probably not. It appealed mostly to either kids under 16, the homeless, the drug addicted, parolees, halfway-housers, people on unemployment or disability trying to cheat the system, and those who insisted on working where they can chain smoke or dance all day long. It meant a lot of firing and hiring, and finding people on the spot when someone wound up arrested, drunk, missing, or just didn't show up to begin with.

After graduating high school outside of Chicago, most peers of mine got jobs as lifeguards at the beach, day camp leaders or book worms at Borders. For me, I went straight back to the place I was so excited to leave... to be a janitor for the summer.

My high school was not just any public school, it was New Trier, a well tax-funded North Shore suburban institution, standing four stories high (five if you include the radio station) with a basement, and known for high academic success and a TIME Magazine cover story about rich kids who smoke and deal weed . We all saw John Hughes' classic, The Breakfast Club, and even though it was filmed at a nearby campus, it was based on the sobriquet Trevians gave their detentions (I got a Breakfast Club once in junior high and the teacher actually called it that when I got it in front of the whole class)

In the 80's my oldest sister went there and spent every school day with Liz Phair in her morning advisory class. She said Liz was so happy and go-lucky, it was sickening. Charleton Heston went here in the forties, writer Scott Turow in the sixties. Other Hollywood transplants include producer Edward Zwick and actors Rock Hudson, Ann-Margret, James Eckhouse and Lili Taylor. Oh yeah, and one dude went to Washington D.C. -- his name is Donald Rumsfeld.