I was scanning adverts on how to make millions online when I came across a report about movie stars and their previous jobs.

“Did you know Shah Rukh Khan was a concert hall attendant in Delhi before he became the ‘baadshah’ (emperor) of Bollywood? Or that Rajnikant of South-Indian cinema was a bus conductor before entering the magical world of movies,” asked the report.

Scanning further I was intrigued to know that some of the top Hollywood celebs worked in ‘normal’ jobs such as a limousine driver (Brad Pitt), or as a telemarketer (Johnny Depp) or that Sean Connery, the most macho Bond of all, was a gravedigger and presumably buried dead people before he became a sexist spy and a killer in Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Since people love to know how the rich made their money, I decided to place this report on LinkedIn, a social media site that tries to make money from jobless people, and on Twitter (an online social networking service that earlier limited the banalities you uttered to only 140 characters and now has lifted the restrictive rules that limited your free expression).

I could see that people immediately started clicking on the link (you can see how your Tweets are doing at the Twitter Analytics section) and that set me thinking on what my first job was. I knew that I wanted to be a bus conductor, maybe because I had watched a Bollywood romantic movie about a bus conductor who falls in love with a pretty passenger.

But when I took the bus a couple of times when my motorbike broke down, I lost all romantic notions as it was a sweaty, pushy ride and was even more crushing than the Metro at peak office hours.

Not tough at all

One summer day, my friend announced that there was an easy job offer from an international company and I should try it out. The job was not tough at all and required going to schools and giving away free stuff to the pupils, he said.

At a briefing by the sales manager in his room at a five-star hotel, I found the free stuff was chewing gum and that I had to carry loads and loads of cartons of gum on my mo’bike. To cut a long story short, I became an instant hit with the children, but all the school principals in the area under my jurisdiction hated me for creating such chaos in their sober educational institutions.

I remember at one point picking up the heavy carton and heaving it at the crazed crowd of children, rushing out of the school gates, jumping on my bike and speeding away as the tyres screeched trying to get a hold on the road. I lost the job as I was supposed to give one packet of gum to each child and not throw that whole supply at one class.

Later I heard that school bullies had gummed up the hair of the meek boys in the classes and that it took days of rubbing with kerosene and paint thinners to get the chewing gum off the heads of the unfortunate children.

Then jobs became complicated. “This is the hedge fund guru,” said the bureau chief, pointing to a North American guy who did not look like what my perception of a guru was, as I waited to take a test for a financial journalist’s job.

As the years passed by, the job titles changed wildly. “Chief Thinker” sounded like a good job as I usually tend to overthink and “Social Media Digital Overlord” was something out of Star Wars.

But even after all these years, I never became super rich like the celebs who once worked at normal jobs like Steven Seagal as a deputy sheriff or Boman Irani as a waiter.

Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mahmood_saberi.