Maybe you cut the neighbor's yard for a few bucks a week. Maybe you flipped burgers at some fast-food joint. Maybe you bagged groceries at Piggly Wiggly, or maybe you just gave out BJs in the parking lot for a quick buck or two...It doesn't matter, the point is, everyone remembers their first paying job whether it was good or bad. When you're 15 or 16 years old, you'll take a the $4.25 an hour and think you're well on your way to being the next Donald Trump.
$4.25 an hour, that's what I made at my first job. That was the minimum wage in 1992. I got a gig working at a local sandwich, slash ice cream shop because the lady that owned it went to my church and my parents thought it would be good for me to get a little work experience. I wasn't that thrilled about it, but one of my friends was working there too, so it made it a little better. I don't think he was too keen on working either.
It's not like the job was hard or anything. You pretty much just ran the drive-thru, scooped some ice cream, and mopped the floors. It wasn't so bad. We got a 15 minute break and a $5 allowance to buy food. Some days you got to change the message on the sign outside or do something cool like sweep the entire parking lot. That was about as good as it got.
Most of the time I was manning the drive-thru, something that I hated to do, although I did get mad tips. Actually I only got tipped once and it was only 15 cents. I don't think I had taken an economics class up to that point, but somehow I knew that 15 cents added to my minimum wage salary was not worth the opportunity cost of having to clean out the women's bathroom. You might as well have been sending me to clean out the reactor at Chernobyl 'cause to me, it was one of the most godforsaken places on Earth. I remember the first time they sent me in there, I was thinkin' it couldn't possibly be as bad as the guys bathroom, after all, women are the fairer sex. Man, I was in for a shock. First off, this place stunk like I don't know what, kind of like someone took a dump in a can of Starkist. There were spent tampons and pads all over the floor, it looked like a war zone. I didn't want to touch that stuff even with my rubber gloves on. I pretty much just held my breath for as long as I could until I could saturate the whole place with bleach. Then I would just flush the toilet and get the heck out of there. It got to the point where that was pretty much all I did...Flush the toilet and spay some bleach and be out with the quickness. It wasn't long, however, before the boss lady called me into her office, telling me that I needed to do a better job cleaning the women's restroom. Not long after that, and this is no coincidence, I decided that I had better focus more on my studies and playing on the baseball team and that I really didn't have time for all this and a job, so I decided to quit.
It was sort of like this when I had to clean out the women's restroom...
Yes, I will always remember my first job. Although I don't list the skills I learned from that job on my resume, nor do I hearken back to those days to answer questions during an interview. I will say that the things I experienced are forever burned into my cerebral cortex whether I want them there or not.
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