Scott Reeder

My title is sales supervisor, and I run the advertising department for all the magazines here. There are, like, 30 magazines. There's Dog Fancy, Cat Fancy, Bird Talk, Horse Illustrated, Quarter Horses. There's one called Hawaii. There are trade publications as well. I've been doing it for about five months. It buys me new cymbals. They know I'm in a band, but it's not something I try to accentuate. People tend to have an impression of musicians and think they're undependable and stuff like that. If anything, this job makes me want to do music even more. I don't have a passion for working. I have a passion for playing rock all day long, but [this job] pays the bills very well and allows me to have more financial stability than most people I know who are in bands. I went through a period of time when I was greatly stressed-out about some stuff that was going on with the band, so I decided that I wasn't going to deal with band business at work because it was counterproductive to both things. The only thing I would do would be calling people for booking shows, but as far as dealing with managers and record labels and stuff, I decided not to deal with any of that at work because it tended to get me really aggravated. I like the people I work with. Everyone has a really good sense of humor. There are some people who have menageries of pets, and we had to institute a policy that you couldn't bring your pets to work because one time someone brought in an iguana and set it on the computer in the front office, and somebody walked in for an interview and thought the iguana was fake so he went to touch it and it hissed at him. It was somebody who was there meeting the president of the company, so he got pissed. Another time, I'd just gotten off the phone with somebody who had two female monitor lizards, and he was telling me about how when they're in breeding season they can get really aggressive and these two females attacked each other and one of them ended up killing the other one, and I get off the phone and walk around the corner and what should be sitting in the front office but a 5-foot monitor lizard in a crate that some guy brought in for the editor of Reptiles to look at, and he's like, “Want to pet it? He's really docile,” and I'm like, “No, thanks.”

As told to Alison M. Rosen

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