hi everybody adam savage here in my cave uh with a live stream q a
uh the questions have come from tested patrons if you want to know how to be a tested patron
in the comments below you'll find everything you need um and the questions today are about
my employment and employment history um and this is a really interesting subject uh and i want to
start out i have here two pages of questions and they are awesome questions i want to get
to literally every single one so i may end up talking fast but i'd like to say up at the front
when you're watching stuff like this especially okay the subject is my early work history so
i'm going to assume that the people that are going to watch this the closest are people who
are curious about their own employment future and wondering how they can find their way into
some of the industries or things that i have done in the past and specifically
if some of my experience is applicable and that is a totally reasonable thing to do
um but let me give a couple of caveats up front about that which is every story from
its current vantage point looks every life story from its current vantage point looks fairly linear
from the outside uh it is anything but from the inside i would wager if you let's say you're
doing something that you studied to do well your life was going to look like a pretty linear track
from like being a kid deciding in high school to concentrate on the thing going to college for that
getting your master's degree getting hired in that now you're doing it that all looks really
linear but i am sure from the inside it was all triage as it is for all of us right we are
trying to make life work while life is happening and all these things are getting in your way and
i just want to make it clear that while my life and my career trajectory looks in many ways quite
linear it was anything but from the inside and the other person that makes this point all the time is
chris hadfield and chris decided he wanted to be an astronaut when he was 12 and still
he's really clear that his path there was not linear no matter how it looks to the rest of us
mortals and i think of the rest of us as mortals compared to chris hadfield um so there's one is
life stories are non-linear and yours won't be either and that's all right number two luck plays
a humongous role in it luck plays a massive role uh luck and privilege and both of them have played
tremendous roles specifically when we're talking about my employment history and the ways and like
i will say things like i quit that job because it was a terrible job those were decisions i was
able to make because of the support i had from my family my family absolutely has supported me
um my whole life sorry in the things that i want to do and there were points at which i needed
financial support because i was working at a terrible job and they gave it to me that it turns
out i was a good bet but that is a privilege that is a tremendous privilege my parents gave to me
uh and it's not one that everybody benefits from so like lest there are some lester is
some illusion that there's some personality court that led me to live this life it is a combination
of all of these things luck and privilege and timing and personality and everything so um
those are the caveats lucky privilege linear those were my notes for the front
and now let's talk about my employment history adam g says what was the first job you ever had
the very first job i ever had that i was paid to do was making dollhouse furniture making
dollhouse findings uh so my mom grew up in a place in new york called sneden's landing it was just at
the edge of the palisades on the western side of the hudson river opposite around jobs ferry
if you know the hudson river valley uh and in that neighborhood uh there was a couple helen and andy
norman they had wonderful kids they had this big beautiful house and the normans threw this
christmas party every year that everybody went to um they were awesome human beings old family
friends i grew up going to that house and knowing helen and andy and helen was a a a pioneering
dollhouse accoutrement manufacturer so she's the first one to i believe take a
modern product and throw it into the dollhouse world she took the bloomingdale's big brown bag
the famous bloomingdale's big brown bag uh and she made a miniature of it and this is in the 70s
when this kind of thing wasn't happening and she sold a gazillion of them and i
was like nine or ten years old and she hired me maybe i was 11 or 12. she hired
11 at the most she hired me to make some of the bloomingdale's big brown bags and this involved
um she had them printed and then there was a cut out template and then once you had it there was a
folding template for folding the flaps and then there was a gluing template like this piece of
wood in the shape of the bag and you put the thing over it and put some glue here and there
and you assemble and i did that and then she also had some bottle and glass sets so she had
even had tooling made for injection molding and was doing these fine little glassware sets and
i had bags of like six bags one for each kind of glassware and i was grabbing some from each
bag and then putting together packages and i specifically remember doing this job terribly
i remember coming to her and going all right well i did seven hours worth of work and she was like
seven hours really you did all this wow you did it in the least efficient way possible and you kind
of are charging me too much for this because you took too long i know that seems like a weird thing
to say to an 11 year old but i mean in retrospect i know that she was right i'll just i don't have
i don't have any specific examples of stuff that helen made which is
we probably do in my family but i don't have it in my personal collection but like this is the kind
of stuff she would make does this can i show that like a little tiny a little tiny stein of beer
is that showing up yeah right like that kind of stuff helen was making this so that's the very
first thing i ever did for money in terms of making things then i had a paper route
i worked as a page and book uh book replacer at the local library warner library under the um iron
tutelage of miss sabashkov who you did not want to you did not want a stern look from mr poshkoff at
the warner library back in the 70s and early 80s uh and then uh right after being a library page
at the same time there was a local public access station uh and i started working there i started
teaching i started taking classes and using video equipment then i started teaching them
because that's how public access works it's like you know how to use it do it teach someone else um
yeah those were all those were all the earliest jobs eric conthern says tell us about the charming
commercial okay so for those of you don't know when i was 16 i played mr whipple's
stock boy in a charming commercial for anyone under the age of 40 um when we were kids charmin
had this spokesman who ran for like 30 years and he was mr whipple and he ran a local store and uh
the set of commercials over decades was you know various problems in the store that were always
solved by the fact that sherman was the strongest bathroom tissue ever and i was timmy or jimmy the
stock boy and the issue was that the roof was leaking all over the new charmin and i went
okay so i was 16 and i had just decided that i wanted to be an actor i had found my people in
the drama club in high school and my father had been a commercial director and so he said you know
if you want to be an actor i think i can help you find an agent because charlie is doing really well
and by charlie he meant charles kimbrough charlie kimbrough played uh jim dine on murphy brown uh he
also happened to start a whole bunch of television commercials my dad directed back in the 60s
uh and they had stayed really close friends charlie's an amazing human being i actually
got to see him in the original full production of sunday in the park with george with bernadette
peters and mandy patinkin on broadway anyway charlie got me an agent uh doris mance at icm
and doris got me uh an audition for the charming commercial literally all this happened inside of
like 10 days and i went to this audition and i remember standing it's my very first audition i
remember standing like in the middle of this room and i can't see anyone else because there's bright
lights on me and there's a camera kind of right there and i can hear people chatting about me
and then i can hear a guy go man he's a cute kid in me
and like that's how a commercial gets cast a week later i was on a sound stage with mr whipple and
we shot for 14 hours and because that was a sag job i got paid something like for a 14-hour day
time and a half plus double time i made like 850 bucks for that day which for a 16 year old is like
it's like scrooge mcduck backed up a truck to my house it was amazing
i will tell you mr whipple the actor's name i can't remember and i really should
have looked it up and prepped for this and i apologize to the world for not knowing his name
began his career as a background dancer in hollywood specifically in the movie yankee
doodle dandy the movie uh uh uh a musical a musical starring james cagney who's sang
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