The first job I ever had was at the now defunct Rick’s Surf City in Milford, CT. I was 14-years-old and I was paid $4.25 an hour under the table to make sure I consistently looked busy and cute. Much to my chagrin, being as awkward as I was at 14, and being as slow as Rick’s was as a retail establishment, looking cute and busy rarely happened simultaneously, if at all. I worked with a girl named Heather, who had light brown skin and green eyes and always wore the right clothes. She was a year or so older than me and was dating a boy I knew and so helped me get the job. In my eyes, she was the vision of trendy cuteness and I always felt like a frump next to her. (Put it this way: I used to wear an over-sized t-shirt with the likeness of David Faustino as Bud Bundy from the hit comedy series Married With Children! Yeah, I was cool.)
The clientele of this establishment ranged from 10-18 year old skater boys who were high on hip-ness and low on cash and the wealthy mums from Greenwich and Fairfield who were specifically directed by their ever-cool children at Christmas which Fresh Jive t-shirts or Burton snowboards to buy. (It is quite possible that these are no longer the cool things to buy, but those are the two names that stick out for me as I write this.)
Regardless, unless it was December 15-24th, there was little to do--occasionally help put together a skateboard (i.e. apply grip tape and assemble trucks <---does that make me sound legit??), and more than occasionally fold and unfold and re-fold again an assortment of Zoo York, Stussey and Stussey Girl t-shirts to keep up the ever-present illusion that I was busy and thus deserving of a job.
Looking back, I think the majority of my time was spent with my nose in the plastic screw-top container of the Mr. Zogs Sex Wax display which smelled so good it was all I could do to keep myself from unscrewing the lids of the hockey-puck-like canisters and smearing the stuff all over my face.
Rick, the owner, was rarely around, and if he was, he was in the backroom talking surf or board with one of his ever-present lackies who most-probably saw Rick as a model--surfing his way through 6 months of the year and snowboarding through the rest.
I think I worked for Rick for a grand total of approximately 6 months before one day, after sleeping in on a Saturday morning until maybe 9:57am or whatever the last possible minute before my mother had to drive me the 3 miles to work (remember now, I was 14 and license-less) for the 10 o’clock shift, we pulled into the five car parking lot, I turned to my mother and said the fateful words, “I cannot work here anymore.”
This, my dear reader, was the first in a long ( long I tell you) line of jobs I simply could not keep anymore.
My mother, perhaps in her ultimate role as, (ahem) enabler, looked me in the eyes, did not ask “Why?” did not question “Are you sick?” did not ask perhaps the more pertinent question “Are you sure?” She simply said, “O.k. I’ll go in and tell him you’re sick—“
I interrupted “But what about working tomorrow?”
She replied, “You didn’t let me finish. I’ll tell him you’re sick. Sick of working here.”
Ahhhhhhhhhh. What a sigh of relief. That simple. You don’t own me, buddy! I am sick of working here. I am not your slave!
Sure, I’ll miss the Sex Wax; I’ll miss the cute boys in their oversized t-shirts and their asymmetrical hair. But the freedom! Oh! That freedom! Of long Saturday mornings spent sleeping in, afternoons after school in which I can go home and sit in front of the telly!
That day, my mother instilled in me something, well, something akin to hope. Sure, it may have inadvertently led me along a path in which I take and discard jobs like yesterday’s bath water in the hopes of finding something new or better or simply different. I have learned that at every job there will always be some amount of Sex Wax to stick your face in and admiringly inhale and with that, some rich bitch mother insisting on looking at the one skateboard deck you need three ladders, a stepstool and a Stretch Armstrong to reach only to say “Oh, that doesn’t match the picture my incredibly talented and artistic and good-looking skater heir to the family fortune with the good hair son drew for me so that I buy the precise skateboard he wants, put it back, and let’s start over from the beginning.”
You take the good with the bad.
Sometimes, you hit the road. Other times, you hit the bank with a heavy heart and a paycheck. Sometimes you hit your head against your desk over and over and over.
Jobs. Can’t live with them, can’t eat without ‘em.
The two jobs most people get a kick out of hearing about and that stand out to me as the most interesting I have had, are painting ice cream trucks and decorating buildings for the holidays. I will no doubt speak more about these, and perhaps other jobs I have had in future posts, but here is the rundown of these two.
I worked for an ice cream truck company as the only female (at age 19) in a mechanic’s garage where men (most of whom were from South America) took old milk trucks and Bonne Bell trucks (betcha’ didn’t know they had Bonne Bell trucks, didja’?) and converted them into Good Humor Ice Cream trucks. Once they were in “good mechanical order” I painted them. (O.k., I am going to be brutally honest here and tell you, I lied to get this job. I told them I was in art school, but really, I had never painted anything so much as a wall in my life. However, I was dating an artist, and he was in art school. And besides, this guy--the owner--was no vision of honesty. Especially when he took me down two long hallways, through three locked offices, and into a (I kid you not), body-guarded room on payday so he could rifle through a huge safe and pay me in small (often fives and tens) bills. More on this later, and Dad, if you are reading this, I never did anything else unsafe in my life!)
Anyway, when I say I painted them, I mean, I painted pictures of the Good Humor Man on the doors, the Pink Panther over the wheel wells, and ice cream cones over everything. Popsicles, sno-cones, a variety of Ms. Pac man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters (yeah, I am not going to link to all those things right now) ice cream bars--I painted it all.
Then, one winter, I took a job from a company in Skokie, Illinois decorating storefronts in downtown Chicago and the surrounding suburbs for the holidays. We would load up trucks full of pre-assembled (we assembled them in-house) Christmas trees and ten foot square “Christmas Gifts” and then go up in cherry pickers to hang lights and decorations in malls and on lamp posts all around The Windy City (and often during blizzards). We even got commissioned to decorate the Oscar Meyer Weiner Factory in Wisconsin, and let me tell you, the folks at that factory were nice, but their town stunk of hot dogs!
Sometimes, I feel ashamed for having had so many jobs. I feel like my resume, were I to include the (quite possibly) 750 pages it takes to list all my job experiences, would just come across as, hmmm, I don’t know, like a black hole??
But there are other times. Times, like tonight when I am trying to think of something to write, to share with you, gentle reader, when I think. Ah! Yes. So goes life. These are not just job experiences, but rich (if not get rich) experiences.
And I, in my interminable job quest, am trying to live (with) it.
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The first job I ever had was at the now defunct Rick’s Surf City in Milford, CT. I was 14-years-old and I was paid $4.25 an hour under the table to make sure I consistently looked busy and cute. Much to my chagrin, being as awkward as I was at 14, and being as slow as Rick’s was as a retail establishment, looking cute and busy rarely happened simultaneously, if at all. I worked with a girl named Heather, who had light brown skin and green eyes and always wore the right clothes. She was a year or so older than me and was dating a boy I knew and so helped me get the job. In my eyes, she was the vision of trendy cuteness and I always felt like a frump next to her. (Put it this way: I used to wear an over-sized t-shirt with the likeness of David Faustino as Bud Bundy from the hit comedy series Married With Children! Yeah, I was cool.)
The clientele of this establishment ranged from 10-18 year old skater boys who were high on hip-ness and low on cash and the wealthy mums from Greenwich and Fairfield who were specifically directed by their ever-cool children at Christmas which Fresh Jive t-shirts or Burton snowboards to buy. (It is quite possible that these are no longer the cool things to buy, but those are the two names that stick out for me as I write this.)
Regardless, unless it was December 15-24th, there was little to do--occasionally help put together a skateboard (i.e. apply grip tape and assemble trucks <---does that make me sound legit??), and more than occasionally fold and unfold and re-fold again an assortment of Zoo York, Stussey and Stussey Girl t-shirts to keep up the ever-present illusion that I was busy and thus deserving of a job. Looking back, I think the majority of my time was spent with my nose in the plastic screw-top container of the Mr. Zogs Sex Wax display which smelled so good it was all I could do to keep myself from unscrewing the lids of the hockey-puck-like canisters and smearing the stuff all over my face.
Rick, the owner, was rarely around, and if he was, he was in the backroom talking surf or board with one of his ever-present lackies who most-probably saw Rick as a model--surfing his way through 6 months of the year and snowboarding through the rest.
I think I worked for Rick for a grand total of approximately 6 months before one day, after sleeping in on a Saturday morning until maybe 9:57am or whatever the last possible minute before my mother had to drive me the 3 miles to work (remember now, I was 14 and license-less) for the 10 o’clock shift, we pulled into the five car parking lot, I turned to my mother and said the fateful words, “I cannot work here anymore.”
This, my dear reader, was the first in a long ( long I tell you) line of jobs I simply could not keep anymore.
My mother, perhaps in her ultimate role as, (ahem) enabler, looked me in the eyes, did not ask “Why?” did not question “Are you sick?” did not ask perhaps the more pertinent question “Are you sure?” She simply said, “O.k. I’ll go in and tell him you’re sick—“
I interrupted “But what about working tomorrow?”
She replied, “You didn’t let me finish. I’ll tell him you’re sick. Sick of working here.”
Ahhhhhhhhhh. What a sigh of relief. That simple. You don’t own me, buddy! I am sick of working here. I am not your slave! Sure, I’ll miss the Sex Wax; I’ll miss the cute boys in their oversized t-shirts and their asymmetrical hair. But the freedom! Oh! That freedom! Of long Saturday mornings spent sleeping in, afternoons after school in which I can go home and sit in front of the telly!
That day, my mother instilled in me something, well, something akin to hope. Sure, it may have inadvertently led me along a path in which I take and discard jobs like yesterday’s bath water in the hopes of finding something new or better or simply different. I have learned that at every job there will always be some amount of Sex Wax to stick your face in and admiringly inhale and with that, some rich bitch mother insisting on looking at the one skateboard deck you need three ladders, a stepstool and a Stretch Armstrong to reach only to say “Oh, that doesn’t match the picture my incredibly talented and artistic and good-looking skater heir to the family fortune with the good hair son drew for me so that I buy the precise skateboard he wants, put it back, and let’s start over from the beginning.” You take the good with the bad.
Sometimes, you hit the road. Other times, you hit the bank with a heavy heart and a paycheck. Sometimes you hit your head against your desk over and over and over.
Jobs. Can’t live with them, can’t eat without ‘em.
The two jobs most people get a kick out of hearing about and that stand out to me as the most interesting I have had, are painting ice cream trucks and decorating buildings for the holidays. I will no doubt speak more about these, and perhaps other jobs I have had in future posts, but here is the rundown of these two.
I worked for an ice cream truck company as the only female (at age 19) in a mechanic’s garage where men (most of whom were from South America) took old milk trucks and Bonne Bell trucks (betcha’ didn’t know they had Bonne Bell trucks, didja’?) and converted them into Good Humor Ice Cream trucks. Once they were in “good mechanical order” I painted them. (O.k., I am going to be brutally honest here and tell you, I lied to get this job. I told them I was in art school, but really, I had never painted anything so much as a wall in my life. However, I was dating an artist, and he was in art school. And besides, this guy--the owner--was no vision of honesty. Especially when he took me down two long hallways, through three locked offices, and into a (I kid you not), body-guarded room on payday so he could rifle through a huge safe and pay me in small (often fives and tens) bills. More on this later, and Dad, if you are reading this, I never did anything else unsafe in my life!)
Anyway, when I say I painted them, I mean, I painted pictures of the Good Humor Man on the doors, the Pink Panther over the wheel wells, and ice cream cones over everything. Popsicles, sno-cones, a variety of Ms. Pac man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters (yeah, I am not going to link to all those things right now) ice cream bars--I painted it all.
Then, one winter, I took a job from a company in Skokie, Illinois decorating storefronts in downtown Chicago and the surrounding suburbs for the holidays. We would load up trucks full of pre-assembled (we assembled them in-house) Christmas trees and ten foot square “Christmas Gifts” and then go up in cherry pickers to hang lights and decorations in malls and on lamp posts all around The Windy City (and often during blizzards). We even got commissioned to decorate the Oscar Meyer Weiner Factory in Wisconsin, and let me tell you, the folks at that factory were nice, but their town stunk of hot dogs!
Sometimes, I feel ashamed for having had so many jobs. I feel like my resume, were I to include the (quite possibly) 750 pages it takes to list all my job experiences, would just come across as, hmmm, I don’t know, like a black hole?? But there are other times. Times, like tonight when I am trying to think of something to write, to share with you, gentle reader, when I think. Ah! Yes. So goes life. These are not just job experiences, but rich (if not get rich) experiences.
And I, in my interminable job quest, am trying to live (with) it.