Buzz Aldrin has done it. So has Monica Lewinsky.
Ellen Degeneres has joined in, alongside Stephen Colbert.
All of them can thank Juneau singer-songwriter Marian Call.
With an Aug. 4 tweet, Call started a wave on social media that’s inspired people around the world. Called #first7jobs (also #firstsevenjobs), this hashtag on Facebook and Twitter has collected the thoughts of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It simply asks participants to share the first seven jobs they worked.
“That’s why the internet’s amazing to me,” she said of the way her brief message has collected the thoughts of the world’s famous and ordinary alike.
“I’m happy that if I had to have a thing go viral in the traditional sense, that it was a really positive thing that brings out something different in everyone,” she said. “It’s not snarky, it’s not mean. It’s really happy and it’s really storytelling and it’s really personal, so I feel lucky that way.”
Call was researching material for songwriting and asked her Twitter followers a simple question: “What were your first 7 jobs?”
She answered her own question to get the ball rolling: “Babysitting, janitorial, slinging coffee, yard work, writing radio news, voice-overs, data entry/secretarial.”
“I just needed a few more ideas of how people work and how people work when they’re kids,” she said on Tuesday afternoon.
The answers didn’t have to be in any order, and if someone didn’t have seven jobs, that was OK.
As she went to bed, her question bounded around the world. Answers came first from friends and acquaintances, but others seemed to like the idea and ran with it.
“Wow, my #7firstjobs question took off overnight,” she wrote the following day.
On Aug. 6, Twitter listed the hashtag among its trending topics, drawing thousands more people to the subject.
Like a desert arroyo, it collected scattered raindrops and turned them into a flash flood of information.
Regina Spektor added her thoughts, and so did Lin-Manuel Miranda, the mind behind the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
The Twitter account behind Lava Beds National Monument in California offered its contribution (“Molten lavascape” was among its “jobs”), and so did the account dedicated to the Tyrannosaurus rex at Chicago’s Field Museum. (Its career started with “Egg.”)
Call even said she’s had an offer to help her sort through the many, many responses that have answered her, well, call.
“I just got a call from IBM and some folks who work with Watson and they want to help me filter the data, so I’ve got to talk to them right after I talk to you,” she said.
Some of the most common answers she’s seen? Paperboy, lawnmowing and babysitting. “I’ve seen paperboy like a million times,” she said.
Call isn’t a stranger to having her work spread across the internet. Last year, she published a parody of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” with lyrics containing only the thousand most-common English words. Designed with absurd humor, it’s garnered 210,000 views on YouTube.
The following of #firstsevenjobs has passed even that, however.
While she knows the experience will be “fleeting,” she hopes the wave she started will get people to stop and think.
“There have been some celebrities tweeting out their seven things and the thing they’re famous for is nowhere on the list, and I think that’s really encouraging,” she said.
“I think the natural impulse to share, let me share my experience, is what drove social media at first, and now it feels like it might be getting drowned out by political news or by crazy stuff or people trying to make their cat go viral or whatever, but that original impulse, just to share everyone’s experience and that everyone’s experience is interesting. … I think that’s still the better corner of the internet.”
• Contact Empire reporter James Brooks at 523-2258 or james.k.brooks@juneauempire.com or @AK_OK on Twitter.
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