Don’t you hate it when you’re at a dinner party and you get to talking with someone you just met, and they ask you what you do for a living, and you tell them and you ask them what they do, and they say they’ve been a professional ostrich wrangler in Australia, a stunt double for Matt Damon, captained a shrimp boat in the Caribbean, served as a mercenary in the Congo, worked as a sous chef at a four-star restaurant in Spain, played bass in Louis Armstrong’s band and most-recently taught sign language to orphans in Calcutta.

That’s the point in the evening I usually switch from ginger ale to Thunderbird.

My first job was as a busboy at a Marie Calendar pie shop in Whittier, CA. Whittier is not exactly the French Riviera or Nepal, and busing tables never seems to make it into the pages of Outside Magazine. I was a sophomore in high school and made $1.65 an hour working nights and weekends. The only real excitement came on those nights when after work we’d head up to a gym at the local high school where one of the guys had a key, and we’d play midnight basketball.

I eventually worked my way up to head busboy and then short-order cook, which is not as impressive as it sounds when you consider that the only non-pie items on our menu were hamburgers, tuna melts and hash browns. On Saturday mornings we made pies on a large white rotating wheel that looked like a torture device designed by demented medieval bakers. Busboy work was repetitious and tedious, but to this day I can hold my own against any dishwasher on the planet.

Later in high school, I got a job working in the fast-paced and exciting world of food services at Disneyland in Anaheim. My sister got me the job and was my boss. If you think that means that I got to screw around or didn’t have to carry my weight, then you don’t know my sister. At Disneyland, I worked within view of the Matterhorn, which is a fact I try to work into every cocktail conversation I have, at least until anyone asks which Matterhorn I’m talking about.

After high school, I got a summer job with Pacific Telephone Co. in Compton. This was back when the telephone company owned the telephones. My job was to remove disconnected telephones from homes and businesses, and then replace the old phone jacks with new modular connections. The work was neither physically nor intellectually challenging, but I did get to wear a cool tool belt and drive around all day in a vintage green phone company van. It had a manual three-on-the-tree transmission and a surprising amount of pep for such an old beater.

After a couple summers in Compton, I was transferred to the phone company garage in Rosemead, CA. Most days my route had me driving past El Monte Legion Stadium, where the marquee announced upcoming shows by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Johnny Otis, or Question Mark and the Mysterios. Most days I’d stop for lunch at the public library in Temple City and read through a Stephen King novel an hour at a time over the course of a week.

On my way home every night I’d swing into the Winchell’s Donut shop in uptown Whittier and grab a cup of coffee and a maple bar to tide me over until dinner. I like to think that my work for the phone company wasn’t all that much different than running with the bulls in Pamplona or surfing the outside break at the Pipeline.

When I got to college, I got a job in the USC Bookstore, thinking it would be a good way to meet girls since many of the young women at USC actually bought books and attended classes. As it turned out, I was assigned to the shipping and receiving department, which was located underneath the actual bookstore, an area notable for its complete lack of any people of the female persuasion.

I’d unload boxes of books from a truck, open them, check the contents against the shipping papers and our order forms, stack and price the books, and put them in a dumbwaiter-like device where they’d be carried upstairs for some other lucky stiff to actually place on the shelves while chatting up cute freshman English majors.

The lesson in all of this escapes me, but I suspect it involves never asking someone what they do for a living unless you know in advance: (a) what it is they do; and (b) that whatever it is they do, it’s even more boring than what you may be doing.

Besides, living on the beach in Australia with an aspiring supermodel or ski-bumming your way through the Rockies is vastly overrated. The real action is in doing dishes.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classics” file.