Adventures In Employment: In The Beginning

You know, I've had a lot of jobs. Boxer, mascot, astronaut, imitation Krusty, baby proofer, trucker, hippie, plow driver, food critic, conceptual artist, grease salesman, carnie, mayor, grifter, bodyguard for the mayor, garbage commissioner...

If someone asks, how do you describe your first job?

Not shockingly (if you’ve known me at all in the last three or four years decade) I’ve been thinking rather hard about the road to my current point, as far as the professional (or at least employed) realm goes. And I don’t know how to describe my first job.

Well, okay. I suppose what I don’t know is what to consider my first job.

There’s the first non-chore thing I did to earn money, which involved putting together bridge reports for the family company. They’d give me an envelope of photos and a photo log from the day’s inspections and I’d sit on the floor in my mom’s office, gluing photos onto sheets of paper and carefully writing out the descriptions. My penmanship was impeccable and it kept me occupied; as a result, I was pretty young when I learned to identify bridge sections and differentiate the damage.

And then, of course, there was the babysitting. I was the oldest kid in the neighborhood and the only willing babysitter-aged teen within walking distance. It was good, steady income for a middle schooler.

But as for real jobs – ones that required tax forms and everything – there was a summer at Subway.

This wasn't ours, but ... yep, there it is.

Quite frankly, I don’t have much of anything to say about that. Those memories are two decades old and it was a three-month span of my life. It was fine. I didn’t much care for it at the time, but it probably had as much to do with the job as it did with the grey Aerostar I had to drive to get there.

It didn’t last. I didn’t like it, they didn’t like my schedule, and the after-school commute would have been too far to be economical or reasonable. One and done with Subway.

With that first out of the way, high school continued. The following summer I got to go out on real bridge inspections as they converted the old paper files to spreadsheets. (Guess who was recruited because she liked Excel and could type at a reasonable rate?) Just a handful of outings for each of three summers around soccer tournaments and band camp, but enough to keep me in gas money.

Then, that first summer after high school, there was the daycare.

Oh, the daycare.

As jobs go, it wasn’t too bad, and I appreciated the hours – a 7AM shift would give me a mostly-free afternoon to be a somewhat normal-ish 18-year-old. I would return there the summer after my freshman year at Mines – which, as it happens, is also when I started this blog. Longtime readers (reeeeally longtime readers – so, you know, hi Mom) might remember the gerbil story.

Note: I wonder how she’s doing now. I mean, it’s been almost 17 years. She could very easily have kids of her own.

College was, of course, the turning point, just as all those nineties movies promised...

...mountain climber, farmer, inventor, Smithers, Poochie, celebrity assistant, power plant worker, fortune cookie writer, beer baron, Kwik-E Mart clerk, homophobe and missionary. But protecting Springfield, that gives me the best feeling of all.
- Homer Simpson