It did not feel like Christmas morning, or even a birthday, that late afternoon when I received my first job offer. It was 1974, I was 13, and before the end of the year I was paying Social Security taxes. I didn’t entirely understandwhat FICA was until a few years and jobs later, but I did learn in my early gigs, that Uncle Sam, among others, would always take a piece of whatever I earned.
Like many of my era, working as a teenager was considered a rite of passage.There were the kid jobs, paper routes, selling greeting cards and Christmas paper, mowing lawns ... and then later, jobs with an actual paycheck.
I was fortunate enough to host a local TV talk show aimed at teens for WSB-TV before I aged out with braces and pimples at 17. But at the same time, I had “real” jobs.My mother returned from a trip to the dry cleaners during my bicycle transportation years to tell me the bike/lawnmower repair shop next to the dry cleaner was expecting me to show up Saturday morning to become an “apprentice mechanic.” Handy or mechanically inclined are two phrasesnever used to describe me, but the owner was patient, I think a bit lonely for company, and paid me to tighten brake and gear cables on bicycles and occasionally rebuild gunked-up Briggs & Stratton engines.
In the years that followed, I would clean gutters, as well as work in several restaurants,both fast-food and fine-dining establishments.I would put in long hours at Winn Dixie on every imaginable assignment, from stock clerk and cashier to cleaning restrooms and tossing out old produce, bread, and dairy products at the end of each workday.
Several summers were also spent in the family newspaper business, initially as a copy boy, then as a back-issues archivist, and finally as a courier, running ad copy and proofs back and forth to advertising clients across a five-county service territory.
I learned life lessons at each of these gigs, though waiting tables easily taught me the most about dealing with the various types of people in this world.And for many of those summers, I held two jobs at once.
Now, as I resume domestic travel, I see“We’re Hiring”signs and bonus offers everywhere.
McDonald’s locations spent millions installing kiosks during the pandemic to reduce their need for counter help – as well as their payroll – but it has been nearly a year now, and when I walk into a McDonald’s with those kiosks installed, they often appear not to be in working order.
Maybe the kiosks came from the same vendor who gave them their McFlurry machines?
But employment and the experiences that follow remain a gift from any employer.They don’t have to hire you, or anyone else for that matter.
It is time to accept this gift and take a job, and literally, there are millions to choose from.It is time to again to put that nose back to the grindstone, or if you are unfamiliar with that saying, simply begin again expending effort toward funding the roof over your head, the car at the curb, and the mobile phone always at arm’s reach.
I have also worked for quite a few jerks along the way. And it is from some of them you often learn the best lessons.One particularly self-important assistant manager during the Winn-Dixie years was dressing me down over some trivial shortcoming on that day.He looked me square in the eyes, and said, “You can do anything you want, anywhere you want, with anyone you want ... this is America.ORyou can be here, get paid, and work for me.And if you are here, you are going to do it the way I tell you to do it, or you won’t be here. Are weclear?”
Yes, he was a bit of a jackass, but he also reminded me, in an at-will employment state, even if I know a better way, unless I’m the boss, I still need to follow the manual, and take direction.That is part of real life.Those lessons don’t always come from Mom and Dad at home or even school anymore, they come from working and the school of life.So, go get a job and get schooled.