So I was talking this week to a friend of mine whose daughter is graduating from college in June. I asked him if she was going to look for work or go to grad school. “I think it’s going to be grad school, since she wants to delay having to get a job as long as possible,” he said.
I arched an eyebrow, but only on the inside, since my Life Rule #32 is to never comment on how my friends raise their children, seeing as how I’ve only raised a dog. But if Life Rule #32 didn’t exist, I would have said something along the lines of, “Get a job.” Because this kid, who I like a lot and is smart and kind, has never really worked. Sure, she’s had a few housesitting gigs and maybe she did some chores around the house when she was younger. But she’s never actually filled out an application and then a W-4 and then showed up somewhere on a Saturday to cast her lot with a bunch of strangers and learn how to work the cash register or the meat slicer. And that’s too bad.
LIke most of you reading this, I’ve had a lot of jobs since I was a kid. Heck, some of us had those jobs together. And I gotta say, however mundane and poorly paid those jobs were, and however ill-equipped or overly qualified we were when we had them, each without fail provided some seriously good times and excellent life lessons.
My first job was a paper route at age 12. I got up at 5 a.m. seven days a week to deliver the San Francisco Chronicle on a Schwinn Varsity 10-speed that was way too big for me. Sound horrible? You would be so wrong. I would ride that bike in the dark quiet of the morning, a transistor radio attached to the handlebars with duct tape, singing along at the top of my lungs to free-form FM and flipping papers left and right with no one to bother me.
I had that job for two years and this is what I learned: Some jobs pay way better than others even though the jobs require the same skill level and experience (which, when you’re 12, is approximately zero in both departments). Compared to baby-sitting, washing cars or anything else you could do at that age to earn cash, the paper route paid a fortune. I earned about $120 a month including tips, more than enough for me to buy all the Elton John and Stevie Wonder albums I wanted and to join a private tennis club and pay the monthly dues myself. (See, even in grammar school I was a snob.)
I also learned how to apply teamwork and ingenuity to do my job faster, better and more efficiently in order to have more time to goof off -- a skill that serves everyone well in adulthood. I accomplished this by cutting a deal with a friend of mine that involved us surreptitiously using his older brother’s motorcycle, rather than our bicycles, to deliver our newspapers a few mornings a week. This reduced our “workday” by approximately 75% without sacrificing quality. And since we didn’t own helmets and only vaguely understood the workings of a motorcycle, it could have also cut our life spans by an even bigger percentage. Our mothers never knew. Until now.
Many of you know that I seriously considered going to culinary school to become a chef and worked in a restaurant during high school and college. Like everyone else, I started out by doing the prep work, a job that began as the sun came up. I would stand on a damp concrete floor in front of a freezing cold stainless steel countertop and dice approximately eight million carrots, crack 40 million eggs and peel 8 billion potatoes. I eventually worked my way up to running the breakfast shift and working on the dinner line a few nights a week. It took me about three months to realize that cooking professionally was hideously grueling work and that it wasn’t the career for me. However, I kept the job a long time despite that, and this is what I learned: The workplace is, basically, improv theater -- comedy, drama, musical, tragedy or a combination thereof depending on where you are -- and you really should try to enjoy the show and also learn from it.
Case in point: The head chef at the restaurant where I worked was a beady-eyed guy named Bobby. He was maybe five-foot-two, built like a bowling ball and had a serious coke habit, often doing lines off the top of his desk in his tiny office near the walk-in freezer to energize himself for the dinner rush. Unfortunately the drugs also exacerbated his foul temper, general sense of imperiousness and loathing of the wait staff. (Bobby was a strong advocate of the traditional social order in restaurants dictating that the kitchen staff, or the “back of the house” will show only impatience and contempt toward the “front of the house” and vice versa. Not that this kept a lot of them from sleeping with one another, but that is another story for another time.)
All of this came to a head one night when a waiter that Bobby particularly hated dared to take one step into the kitchen to ask about an order that was slow in coming up. Bobby picked up the foot-long fork we used to turn hunks of meat on the grill, whirled around, and plunged it into the waiter’s calf. This is the precise moment I learned how to arch my eyebrow on the inside. The waiter was carted off to the hospital for a tetanus shot, Bobby retreated momentarily to his tiny office and I continued to sauté mushrooms.
I also learned at the restaurant that you will sometimes be rewarded in ways you can’t anticipate. Work is a funny place and people do funny things and sometimes it ends up in your favor. You shouldn’t wait for it to happen, but at some point it will -- probably more than once in your career.
For example, after I had graduated from college and was starving to death on my reporter salary, my mom called to tell me that a mysterious, legal-looking envelope had arrived at her house with my name on it. I went over to take a look and when I opened the envelope I saw a check made out to me in an amount equal to about six months of my take-home pay at that time. Apparently, the managers of the restaurant had been skimming money from the waiters’ tips for years and eventually had been caught. Unbeknownst to me, there had been litigation and since I, like everyone else in the “back of the house” had been paid a percentage of the tips each week, I was reimbursed for my stolen wages as part of the case. I bought a futon and a stereo, paid my rent, took a vacation and got my car fixed with the money.
These are just a few of the many things I learned from my early jobs. But probably the most important thing I learned is how much fun it is, when you’re much older, to continue performing the many inane and largely useless skills you learned along the way. I can still crack six eggs at a time, ignite really big fires on the stove without blowing up the house and I am very comfortable with sharp knives. I can also toss your newspaper onto your porch without hitting your front door and I could probably do it even while riding a motorcycle.
