September 2, 2012

Happy Labor Day! Remembering my Past Jobs, part 1

Labor Day has never really meant anything to me other than a day off work and the start of football season. Apparently is was created to “celebrate the economic and social contributions of workers”. Personally, I think a paycheck is celebration enough, but I certainly appreciate the day off. I’ve always been fortunate to have decent jobs and in celebration of Labor Day, I’m taking a look at my past jobs. I’m going to break it up into two parts because while I haven’t had a ton of jobs in my life, it’ll get pretty long. I didn’t work much in high school except in the summers because I played volleyball, basketball, and track most seasons. I ended up with a partially torn rotator cuff (which actually ended up being an impinged scapula) during my senior year and had to quit basketball after a few practices because I couldn’t use my arm at all. I was a little bummed, but basketball wasn’t my favorite sport – I just played because I was good and was expected to play. I never knew what people who didn’t play sports did after school, so I just ended up getting a job.

High School:

Dishwasher at a bar – My sister and brother-in-law owned a restaurant/bar for a few years and sometimes on the weekends they have me come in to wash dishes and help out in the kitchen and cut potatoes into fries and such. I actually didn’t mind the dishwashing, since I didn’t have to do a lot by hand, and cutting the fries was fun because they had one of those big fry-cutter tools that you just had to pull down the lever to cut a whole potato at once. I’d usually just work for a few hours in the morning during breakfast/lunch and I wasn’t “technically” employed there because they’d just give me some cash. I did play on the softball team for a bit and remember pitching one time and being terrified because I pitch flat and was sure I was going to get a hard line-drive to the face from one of the guys.
Server at a local country-style restaurant – I think it was actually called Country Corner: I had to wear an incredibly ugly dress/apron combo for this job. It was essentially one of those old school nurses uniforms with a frilly apron on top. I can’t remember what type of shoes we had to wear, but I bet they were pretty. It was a fairly easy job for a 14 or 15 year old. My best tip there was a group of bikers that came in – there were probably 12 or so of them. I think most of them got the salad bar, so they were very easy and were incredibly nice, as many bikers are. Back then, the servers didn’t personally cash out the tables – they went to a cash register. The cashier called me over very excitedly after they left because they left my tip with him and it was over $100. Since the restaurant didn’t serve alcohol and it wasn’t expensive, my tips were probably rarely over $5, so that tip was awesome. Other than a very short stint at a restaurant after I moved to Columbus (I quit when I changed shifts at my full-time job), I never served again after this job. Even though I always made decent tips and didn’t get complaints, I never felt like a particularly good server.
Giant Eagle cashier – I think I started working here my senior year when I couldn’t play basketball because of a bad shoulder injury. I loved working as a cashier for some odd reason. I also really loved stocking shelves. Most of the people working there were fun and it since it was a smaller store it was never very busy and didn’t stay open very late.
Manager at a Pager Store – Yep a pager store…this was before regular people had cell phones. When I graduated high school, I started working at a pager store that a couple of guys who graduated 3 years ahead of me. They were good friends with my sister and at first just needed some help for a couple of hours each day so they could work their other jobs. Once I was fully-trained and clearly able to handle the rigors of the pager world, they only worked when I had classes. The store was only 15-20 minutes from college, so I’d just go before or after my classes and they paid me pretty well compared to Giant Eagle. It was a fairly boring job because only about 10-20 people would come in each day. Eventually one of the owners sold out to the other and his wife hired a complete biotch to work when I was at school. She was constantly complaining about having to work around my class schedule and volleyball weekends, but she was pretty much hired to work when I couldn’t. We started selling cell phones during this time, but they were those TracPhones that you had to load minutes onto, so nothing that you’d talk on for very often. I had a really sweet pager too that gave me news, sports, and weather updates. The other owner eventually sold the business to a random guy who lived 2 hours away. He was very nice but things got a little shady and I’m pretty sure he was just using the business as a front for something else (though for what, I have no idea). After several months he started cutting down my hours so he could be there himself more and eventually he cut them down so much that I finally quit. I don’t think the store lasted more than 3 months after that because I was the one who handled everything and he (and the other girl) really didn’t know how to run the business and handle the repairs and such.
Freshman Volleyball Coach – I thought coaching would be awesome. A guy who I played volleyball with got a reserve coach volleyball position at the high school his son went to and talked me into applying for the freshman coach position. The first reason I shouldn’t have taken the job is that it was 40 minutes away from home, which made it 70 minutes away from school, which is where I’d be coming from most days. Even as cheap as gas was, I’m sure I paid more in gas to drive there than I made. The freshman that I had had never won a game in 7th and 8th grade, so I didn’t have a lot to work with. They ended up winning 1 game the whole season and they were so stoked about that. I came from a high school where we barely ever lost in volleyball or basketball – we went to state my junior year in volleyball and our tallest player was 5’8 – so losing wasn’t really in my skill set. I really didn’t take the loses personally, but I did realize that I’d much rather play than coach, so I didn’t reapply the next season. The next year only 2 of the girls on my team made the JV team – that’s how little I had to work with, or how little I helped them improve!
Back to Giant Eagle, though this time I was a front end manager so I was in charge of all of the cashiers. I had a lot of fun because if one of the other managers was working I got to go help in produce or the meat department or do whatever other jobs I wanted. I think this is when meat department people started loving me. I used to drink in the car with the meat department guys after our day shifts on Fridays occasionally. They were much other (and married) and it was in broad daylight, so no funny business – we’d just make fun of people at work and stuff. Bub always drank Pabsts (it wasn’t cool enough to be called PBR then) and I think Andy bough MGD, so I had to drink some pretty crappy beer. To this day, meat department people love me – at every store. I never really noticed, but Loren pointed out how they always are particularly interested in helping me and doing extra work for me. It’s not always guys either – an older lady at Whole Foods told me to call her directly so she could save something specific for me when they were having a sale that she knew would sell out. Another guy waved me down when I was in a different department to say hi – a month after I’d picked up a phoned-in order from him. I barely remembered I’d ever seen him before, but he remembered me. I should also point out that I almost always shop when I’m on my way home from the gym or volleyball, so I’m usually looking pretty nasty – so I don’t think its an attraction thing at all. I wonder if they’d be disappointed to find out that I almost always make my husband handle the raw meat because I find it gross.