Well, once again, it has been an action packed week full of interesting thoughts, challenges, and fun.
Last Saturday, right after finishing the weekly post, I learned that my nephew's recently started first job was already coming to an end; waiting tables for the first time in a busy cafe did not work out. Fortunately, it was kind of a mutual agreement for them to part ways, and that is part of the experience.
I reminisced about the first job experience with my sister and a few friends during the course of the weekend, and continued my reflection as the week started.
Briefly, for those readers eager to get an update on how my Goblet Squat Challenge is going, I am pleased to report that I finished this past Monday. I rewarded myself by taking a few days off from leg workouts, then decided to start a Reverse Lunge Challenge yesterday, thinking myself suitably fitter than ever.
Despite using dinky weights, I felt like my left butt cheek was about to fall off for most of last evening. That feeling quickly went away when I was awakened at 2am from a horrific bad dream in which I had my right calf muscle cramp up so much that I almost passed out, which was not a good idea considering I was trying to stand up and loosen the muscle. (visit the link: screamingcheek.de/day 2 was so much better/ for further updates on this new initiative.)
Back to the start of the week. I was standing proudly on my balcony thinking about how strong my legs were feeling and wondering if Jimmy Stewart ever did leg workouts when I noticed a little movement in the adjacent garden. At first, I thought it was a small animal, but then realized that it was a robotic lawn mower, moving very quietly and slowly across the grass.
As fascinated as I was, I also felt a pang of sadness. Perhaps in another decade or so, there will be less opportunities for young guys or girls to mow lawns. This is how I started earning money, first taking care of our family's lawn, and gradually took on the lawns of several other neighbors. This was pretty standard for every 13 year old boy in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, all the girls were busy with babysitting jobs. I never really questioned this, nor did I think it was particularly sexist. I think the folks of my parents and grandparents generation tended to deem certain tasks more appropriate for specific genders. In my case, my sister had the market cornered on babysitting jobs; in several cases I was taking care of the yard where she looked after the kids.
I did have a fair amount of lawns to mow at the peak of my landscaping career. It was not always fun to mow in the heat of the day, and it was pretty grubby work. But the money was decent, and frequently led to additional, albeit tough, jobs like removing shrubs, digging up tree stumps, raking leaves, and all the other outside jobs that home owners start getting tired of doing at some point. Why not use a dipshit kid to do those things instead of going outside to get all dirty yourself?
Turning 16, as we know, is a pretty big event in life. I was finishing my first year of high school, had just gotten my drivers license, and was starting to think about ways I could make even more money, in addition to the lawn mowing. As the school year was coming to a close, summer jobs was a hot conversation topic. There was always a classmate who was going to work in their dad's office in some cushy job (counting staples or whatever) at the rate of 10 dollars an hour, almost 3 times the average hourly minimum rate. A certain amount of envy existed here, this was a "dream" job after all, making a lot of money without having to get dirty, without having to do diddly squat, really. It is funny how people react to these kinds of things. We were all kind of jealous, since we knew that such jobs were few and far between. More realistic would be some job paying minimum wage. We dealt with the situation by ensuring that the lucky guy (high earner, thanks to dad) was always first out during dodge ball games in PE Class. (Many times, it was his own teammates who threw him out, taking particular effort to make sure it was a face hit)
Trying to find a "cool" summer job was a high priority, and the key word was "cool." Somehow, everyone wanted the more glamorous of jobs. I made a beeline to the shopping mall and applied at the record stores, sporting goods shops, and cinemas.
So did everyone else in my age group.
That meant that there was incredible competition for any jobs going, and I can only imagine how it was for those employers, all considering a bunch of applicants without any experience.
To complicate things, I was limited on transportation. I had a drivers license, but no auto. Thus, work location needed to be kind of local.
A guy from my math class, who was kind of a friend, mentioned one day that he worked at a local grocery store, and they were hiring. Since none of the places I had applied to had contacted me, I decided to go up to the store and apply for a job as a "sacker," the not so glamorous job of putting groceries into the shopping bags at the check out counter of the supermarket.
I had already resigned myself to minimum wage, but really went for the opportunity because of the guy. I did not know him well, but figured I might get to know him better at work. My real goal was to make money, but a friendly face at work would certainly be welcome.
Somehow I landed a part time job at the store, and once summer vacation started, I started a few shifts per week. The key word here was "few." I may have worked a total of 30 hours in the job over about three weeks. Ironically, I worked only once with my buddy from school. Then, due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to abruptly quit the job, have surgery on my hip, and went on to spend the next half year on crutches.
That is a story (although it has been told many times before) that will be told (or re-told) another day, but I really struggled during that time, particularly from a financial perspective.
Up to that point, my parents had always put the kibosh on working during the school year. As I was beginning my senior year of high school, hopped up on Who albums (think Baba O'Riley), no money, and a whole lot of pent up anger, not to mention a real need to start building up my leg muscles, I convinced my folks to allow me to seek employment during the fall semester. I needed to make up for the lost opportunities of the previous year.
Still limited with location, but no longer interested in anything other than earning money, I headed up to the flagship grocery store that had opened up during the previous summer and applied for a job as a bag boy. Again.
I got the job, and was soon working several hours a week. Initially, they had put me on the work schedule as a full time employee, which required a quiet discussion to get sorted out, as I was still a student with a mother who still had some rules with regard to working Sundays (church and youth activities) as well as getting homework done, etc.
This job was what I really consider to be my first job; the previous experience was too short (barely a memory) to count. I kind of knew one of the guys that worked there from school, but soon met other coworkers, several of which were also attending my high school. True, my school was pretty big, but this was my first experience meeting schoolmates who I had NEVER seen before in the previous two years at the same school. As the school year went on, I hardly ever saw them at school, but only at work.
My parents raised me to be diligent and helped me establish a good work ethic, so even though the work was not necessarily tasking, I quickly showed my employers that I was taking the job seriously. Along the way, I discovered that I was having fun and enjoying sacking groceries, meeting the other employers, and dealing with various customers and shoppers.
The job came at the right time for me, and I really embraced it. The money was not great, but I discovered that the more I worked, the less time I had to spend the money, so I had more and more money in my pocket. The whole grocery store culture was a real eye opener for me, as I working with people from different back grounds and age groups. Those of us that were still in high school made sure to have as much fun as we could on the job. Some of the workers were studying in college themselves, thus working only part time. Others, as I came to realize, were doing this as their full time profession.
For years, I always considered the job to be simply a means to get me through high school and through the summer before starting college, where I would earn my degree, then go on to bigger and better things. I never considered myself above any of those employees who were "lifers" at the grocery store, working the lower paying jobs. True, I had no aspirations to wear a gold blazer and be the store manager, nor did I want to be trapped behind the cash register or behind the counter in the deli.
It was easier to enjoy the good times and mucking around that comes with being a bag boy. We had the freedom to help customers (usually women, frequently very attractive) take their shopping to their cars, but we also got to do a bunch of other odd jobs as required. I took on most all of the tasks with a positive approach. Okay, cleaning out the dumpster was not so much fun (in fact it was fucking gross), but as I got more tenure, I got to avoid some of the grunt work. But, even when I was called into action for some of the more yucky work, I still embraced it.
Making money was cool, but I did not initially realize how many people were paying attention as I went out performing my job. I simply got on with it. Thus, I was kind of surprised one day when my supervisor mentioned that management was seeing as me as an exemplary employee. I enjoyed working with the customers and coworkers, and people noticed. Obviously supermarkets handle a lot of repeat customers, and being a neighborhood store, I regularly encountered the same wives and mothers (in most cases, as it was during that era) each week as they did the family shopping.
That senior year of school, I was also involved in the rah rah squad that ran the school mascot (a horse on wheels) up and down the track after a score was made in the football games. One of the perks of this was getting to be in closer proximity to the cheerleaders and players on the team, the more popular people in the school. I was not chasing popularity so much, but it was nice to be acknowledged in the hallways at school. And, these classmates also had parents who shopped at the grocery store, so frequently during the autumn (football season), some random mother (or father) would be at the check out stand as I was sacking their groceries, and they would mention they had seen me the night before at the school game.
Let me be clear, I was not obtaining celebrity status, but I was a long way from invisible. And, as I mentioned, I liked dealing with various customers as they did their shopping.
At the holidays, things got really busy at the store, and I got really speedy at sacking groceries, learning to add a little flair in my technique (think Tom Cruise in Cocktail), and also learning that overfilling a grocery sack just because all of the goods fit does not mean that the customer can actually carry the heavy bag by themselves.
I learned to laugh when there was a wet clean up needed on a particular aisle, and also learned to be a very competent shopping cart surfer.
If I thought fall of 1987 was good, spring of 1988 was even better, and I did not yet know how good a summer it would turn out to be.
The pay raise I received at the beginning of 88 was certainly very welcome, but I kept thinking, I am really enjoying this job. The supervisors and managers had already been pleading with me to start checking groceries, but I was still reluctant to do so. Part of this was my fear of handling money, learning produce codes, and the other elements of being a checker, but what I really was liking about being a sacker is that I never had to sit still. There was always another customer to tend to or a task to be handled.
A few times, I did get called into emergency action to act as a checker, and I actually felt thrilled when I was doing it, even though I was really anxious about a so many things, like accepting checks, operating the register, etc. I did so well during those urgent moments that the supervisors almost demanded that I become a checker, but I convinced them that I could be more useful in my role as head sacker. By now, I was training the new sackers, which sounds kind of pointless, but the role had a high turnover, and as I had discovered, a lot of people really do not understand the science (however basic it is) of properly sacking groceries.
My confidence (and maturity) continued to grow, and I worked more and more hours during the final semester at school. This allowed me to be in prime position for the best summer shifts, maximizing my work hours around my personal schedule.
I remember a lot of the faces and some (not all) of the names of my coworkers. There were some particularly entertaining experiences both at work and also outside of work; getting to hang out with colleagues after our shifts became routine.
I grew to respect some of the coworkers, especially some of the ones who I never would have met had I not been in the job. Sure, they came from different backgrounds, and quite a few them had never (and would never) have a collegiate experience. But as I got to know some of them, I learned of their own perspectives, ambitions, and while, not quite the same as mine, were still equally important.
Over the years as I do my own shopping, I always look at the various employees at whichever store I happen to be in and think about them. I tend to have my favorite check out people at my local store here, and wonder if they are having as much fun as I did. My father is on a first name basis with a lot of people at his local store, and while I do not have quite that same level of relationship (German shoppers are not quite so chatty, nor, as it seems, are the workers), I will keep trying.
The summer of 88 was a brilliant time for me, and not least of all because I met a couple of life long friends at the job. The experience itself was so priceless, but above all, I never stopped having fun.
It was this specific thought that came to mind this past week as I thought about my nephew, the first job experiences, and my current boss, who almost always ends each meeting with "have fun at work."
This was a particularly fun week at work for me, and I am discovering that I am starting to have that same mindset again, just like I had in 87-88, where it was all about making it "your store," running up and down the aisles, helping people get the box of cereal off the top shelf, chatting with exceptionally attractive women who came dressed in their sundresses to pick up the deli-trays for their summer afternoon parties, tipping over overloaded carts in the middle of a rainstorm, being in a good mood and enjoying being in a good mood with customers, colleagues, and friends.
Make it fun.
So forgive the countless run-on sentences and 80s references from today's post, and think about how much fun it was. If your right calf cramps up, you'll know you read it right.
see you out there
bryan
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