My Jobs, Pre-College

I've talked a lot about managing your career, so I thought it would be interesting (maybe, maybe not, you decide) for me to detail the jobs I've held in my lifetime, what I gained from each of them, what I learned, how I grew my income, etc. I'll be doing this over a series of posts that will last a couple weeks or so. We'll see how it goes.

Today I want to detail the jobs I held before I started college -- basically the jobs I held while in high school. As I've noted previously, students simply need to get work experience, ANY work experience, during these years, and that's just what I did.

My first official job was as a grocery store carry-out boy. I worked at the local grocery store in our small town for several years. It started as a summer job, then I worked 15 hours or so during the next school year. In the summers following it bumped up to 30 to 40 hours a week (the regular guys took vacation) and in my senior year of high school, when my class load was lighter, I worked about 30 hours a week. I stocked shelves, sorted cans (no machines back then, so beer and pop bottles and cans returned for deposit were sorted by hand -- it was a huge, ugly mess) and, of course, bagged and carried out groceries.

I learned several things from this job including:

• How to get along with co-workers and bosses. It was my first "real-world" job and I learned the basics of work here.

• How to be on time, do the job that was required, and so on. Again, more basics.

• How hard work (and time) could lead to advancement. I started out as the low man on the totem pole. This meant I was the first to answer the call when a checker said "carry-out please" over the intercom (no one liked this job because it was hot outside in the summer and freezing in the winter.) I was also the primary bottle/can sorter -- the job everyone hated. But over time, I did well, others left or were fired, and I advanced. When I left, I was the highest-ranking carry-out boy in the store and my main job was the "plum" position of stocking shelves.

• That I didn't want to do this as a career. I saw that several people (the "management") were earning a barely livable wage and weren't doing tasks that much different than what I was doing. I KNEW I was going to college and DID NOT want to do any job like this in the future.

• That hard work and pay don't always correlate. This was one of the physically hardest jobs I ever had and was also one of the lowest-paying ($3.35 per hour -- which was minimum wage back then.) Again, another reason to go to college and become qualified to do something else.  Then, after I had worked so hard for such a small amount and had saved much of it, the bank I had it in failed. Ugh.

• The good feeling from a job well-done. I had one of the assistant mangers tell me a few times that I was the best worker in the store and he always wanted to work with me as a result. Of course this made me feel good about myself and my work, though I didn't particularly like the guy (he was lazy) and was dismayed thinking that I was always going to be working with him (it didn't turn out that way, though I did work with him a lot.)

My second pre-college job was for one (very long) summer that I did in addition to working at the store. I "walked beans." For those of you who are unfamiliar with this horror of a job, here's what it entails:

• Get up very early (while it's still dark), so you can arrive at the field just as the sun comes up.

• Get a long pole with a sharp hook at the end.

• Walk acres and acres of beans growing, cutting down the weeds by wrapping the hook around them and pulling up.

• No bathrooms, no water (or much) that was close, and blistering hot days (we usually knocked off by 1 pm or so).

• $2 per hour.

Don't ask me how I got roped into this job, but let's say I was naive and didn't get the full details before I agreed to do it. This was the biggest lesson I learned in this position. Thank goodness I only did it for a month or so.

In the next post in this series, I'll detail the jobs I held while in college.

Comments

[MrAtoZ]

In high school for work (among other things), I detasseled corn in the summer, which is a corn belt ritual that basically neuters corn so it doesn't pollinate. It was hot, muddy, sweaty, crack of dawn, very physical labor that paid minimum wage. It was also a great right of passage and a way to bond with other adolescent boys, and quite a few girls as well. It was by far the hardest job I've had in 30 years. I also walked beans, which is tough, but becasue you don't have as many weeds to treat, not as physically-demanding. Of course, Roundup has essentially obviated the needs for weed control by hand - better living through chemistry!

[MC]

Working at a job while in High School (& during college) is a wonderful experience for young adults.

For me, it really brought home that I needed to focus my education so I could get a good paying job that I actually enjoyed. Particularly, I learned how traditional "pink collar" jobs like secretarial work and child care are deadly boring, low-status dead-ends that also pay abysmally.

During High School I worked as a babysitter (nothing like watching 7 kids under 12 all day long to make you wish you had any other job!), housecleaner (very hard, very dirty work, and very low paid), secretary (hard work, low pay, with sexual harrassment thrown in!) and church organist (very low pay for high skills & ridiculous limitations on what you can do on many evenings and weekends). During college I had multiple work-study (financial aid) jobs, mostly secretarial with some low-level laboratory tech jobs. And the summer between my freshman and sophomore college years, I took a higher-paying construction job (!), learning that no amount of feminist theory could compensate for my lack of the muscles necessary to do that work!

[Jim]

Thanks for bringing back memories - both good and bad - about walking beans, detasseling and other summer jobs.

Walking beans was hot, grueling (this was in the days before soybean chemical weed control) and like a prison sentence when my dad announced that "we will start on the beans tomorrow." I remember one summer I got a "break" one day because I chopped the end my finger with the corn knife, so got to sit out the rest of the day in the hot pickup with a rag wrapped around my bloody thumb. Guess my mom and dad (also out there with us kids; they always worked hard, too) didn't think it was bad enough for medical attention. Yet time spent in the bean field was also good for "confession" - I think the heat made my brother, sister and I more likely to reveal all our past sins to my parents as we walked down the endless rows.

In summer while in college, I worked for the local seed corn company detasseling. Got to use a cutter one year that topped off the corn plants and removed most - if not all - the tassels. It was like driving a tall machine with several lawn mowers with rotating blades hanging in the air. But it was top-heavy and one time I hit a low spot in the field and the whole thing turned over. Luckily I escaped the rotating blades before falling to the ground.

Another two summers during college I worked for the county mowing rural road ditches. Never turned my little Massey tractor over, but there were close calls. My two buddies I mowed with and I had lots of experiences mowing through water in the ditches, getting stuck in the mud, breaking sickles, seeing how steep a slope we could mow and finding the coolest (meaning temperature) culverts under the road where we could find a shady place for lunch.

But through all these jobs I learned many of the things mentioned in this post. Guess I am lucky to have lived through all the experiences, now that I think about it.

[My Life ROI]

I bussed tables (and eventually) in a retirement home restaurant and worked at Best Buy throughout high school.

On top of that I did lawn care for my parents neighbors.

Interesting take on the store managers of grocery stores, I know a lot of them actually make pretty good money and get good perks. But each store is different!

[My Life ROI]

Eck, "and eventually WAITED tables"

Busboy -> Waiter

There we go.