Working as a hospital gift shop cashier in high school actually helped me figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I volunteered at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and was eventually placed in the gift shop. There were a bunch of volunteers--mostly a batch of senior citizens who wore ugly pink smocks and fought over who got to work the cash register. One particularly feisty lady named Adelphine would steamroller herself straight to the register and take over even if the manager was working there already.

One year the gift shop got a pushcart to set up in the hospital lobby as a sort of satellite store. I became the full-time pushcart employee.

It wasn't particularly busy, so I read a lot of magazines from the cart. I would spend time analyzing the editorial differences among them--who were their intended audiences, and were the articles interesting? Who were the editors and who were the popular writers? Ultimately, I decided to try writing and editing magazine stories instead of just reading them.