Ditch digging was just one of them.

Teaching French generals how to lisp, working a 19-hour shift at Dunkin’ Donuts, sorting envelopes and even being paid $50 an hour for being American also top Karen Burns resume.

A Jack of all trades, the 57-year-old Kirkland resident has held many jobs in her lifetime – 59 to be exact. That is what has led her to her most recent – and 60th – job: author of her first book, “The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl: Real Life Career Advice You Can Actually Use.”

“I never set out to try to have a lot of jobs – who does that?” Said Burns, who will make her debut during a free and interactive event at 7 p.m. this Saturday, April 18 at Parkplace Books, where she will read from her book that just hit the shelves this month.

The Reporter chatted with Burns to find out why she has held so many jobs and what led her to turn her experience into a book.

Q: When did you start down your career path?

Burns: I started working at 10. My mother was always thinking of little jobs for me to do. She got me a little housecleaning job, and then a job in the church office, filing. She got me a job – this is terrible – in the cafeteria at my school as a dishwasher.

Back then when you’re working at the doughnut shop or some other place, it’s pretty boring after you’ve mastered your work, so I would just move from job to job, or if I earned more money, I’d move. So after only 40 short years, I’ve had 59 jobs.

Q: What was the worst job you’ve ever had?

Burns: I was going to college fulltime and so I got this swing shift job in a factory that’s mission in life was to send out junk mail. So it was this great, big warehouse filled with machines and they were printing the junk mail and my machine printed addresses on envelopes then spit them out onto a conveyor belt and I had to pick up the envelopes and flip through them to see that there was addresses on all of them and then put them in a box and that’s all I did. It was such mind numbing, soul-destroying work that I only lasted three weeks.

Q: Your best job? My best job was in Paris. (The company) was a design firm and they would go and pitch their services to big companies. They wanted to look as if they were an international company, so they hired me for their pitch meetings and I would go along and they would introduce me during the meeting and they would say, ‘And this is Karen Burns and she’s American,’ and then I would say, ‘Bonjour,’ and that’s all I had to do – just go to meetings and be American and I got paid $50 an hour.

Q: So why the book?

Burns: Through this book, I’ve sort of begun to define myself in terms of all of my jobs, although I never really saw myself like that before.

I was taking a class for fun at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle on humor writing and we had an assignment to write a series of short paragraphs. The theme had to be something we had to know a lot about. I chose jobs because I knew I had a lot. So I picked a few jobs and wrote a short story. And the teacher said, oh this is really cool, you should try to figure out how many jobs you’ve had. So then it became a thing where I was trying to remember all of my jobs and it took me quite a long time … So by the time I was all done I had 59 jobs and the teacher said wow this is really cool, you should write a book.

A couple people also told me I should illustrate the book (she did).

Q: Give us an overview of “The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl.”

Burns: The book has 59 chapters, one for each job. Each chapter tells a story of that job and then it gives advice related to what happened in the story. They are organized into three sections: clueless, confident and carefree. Important life lessons learned the hard way – that’s clueless.

It’s also written from the point of view of working girl.

Q: Who is working girl?

Burns: It’s a persona I created that is sort of like me. I mean, I’m not as sassy as working girl is or quite as bossy, but working girl will freely tell you what to do.

Q: What could someone learn from digging a ditch?

Burns: That job was in Czechoslovakia. That’s back when it was still a communist country and I had signed up to do volunteer work for building construction and I thought, well how hard can it be, I mean they’re giving this to volunteers.

It turned out to be digging a ditch. And the ditch turned out to be on top of a mountain, so every day we had to climb this mountain carrying our pick axes and our shovels and then work digging this ditch all day. And none of us volunteers were very happy about this and we started to quit work a little bit earlier every day until pretty soon we were only working in the morning. And then the next thing we knew they were only giving us bread and tea.

So that’s the chapter about expectations. You go in with expectations of something and it doesn’t always turn out to be what you were expecting and how to get smart about managing your expectations.

Q: Who is the book geared toward?

Burns: The target audience is for 20 and 30-somethings. I’ve heard from a lot of people in their 40s or 50s who’ve read it and enjoyed too.

Q: What do you hope people will get out of your book?

Burns: I would want a young woman reading the book to feel reassured that the decisions that she’s making are not irrevocable, that you don’t always make the right decision right off the back and it’s in fact okay if your first few jobs don’t turn out the way you think they’re going to turn out.

I hope that it’s a book that’s optimistic and that it shows people by example how it’s possible to recover from setbacks and problems and failures and that actually makes us stronger.

Q: What are your next moves?

Burns: When the book comes out it’s like all you’re doing is working on the book. I really can’t see my life after that – I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it (laughs).

Read the book

Find out more about “The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl: Real Life Career Advice You Can Actually Use” (Running Press, April 2009; $14.95 hardcover) at www.karenburnsworkinggirl.com