Just out of college, I worked at a small record store that was actually a front for a much larger music bootlegging operation. The owner was a coke-fuelled mafia wannabe, who rarely stopped by the store, except to empty the register. I would always have to give customers huge discounts, because I couldn’t make change for them.

The boss was completely moody and unpredictable. You never knew if he was gonna scream at you because sales were bad, or if he was gonna tell you to close the store early because he was taking everybody to Benihana's.

In the days before you could download just about anything on the Internet, a bootleg CD could cost you anywhere from $25-$40 bucks. A lot of the store’s revenue came from the sales of the “rare live imports” that we kept in boxes behind the counter.

One day, after working about a month in the shop, my boss asked me to accompany him on a short drive. We drove to a storage unit in Riverside, loaded his car with boxes and boxes of bootleg CDs, and started driving up the coast.

Over the next three days, we hit every cool record store between here and Sacramento, selling the CDs to store owners for a whopping $21 a pop - an especially insane amount, since I knew my boss was only paying $5 a disc!

more after the jump

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

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.

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.