I’ve been following Linda over at All & Sundry for ages (since even before her oldest son was born, I think) and her posts are always well written, insightful, and usually quite hilarious.  I enjoyed this post (and the subsequent comments) so much that I had to write one too.  (Because I am nothing if not a copycat, and seem to be suffering from a touch of writer’s block lately anyway.)

The very first “real” job I ever had was at a small restaurant owned by a church friend of my mother.  This lady had owned a successful catering business for awhile and decided to try her hand at a sandwich shop.  I think I was 15 at the time, and she offered me a waitressing job along with a couple of other teenage girls from our church.  And oh, how I hated that job.  The owner’s daughters were the managers, but they were not much older than me so I thought they were bossy and they thought I was a brat.  In addition to that, I hated taking my turn on kitchen duty (hey, maybe that is why I hate cooking so much), loathed waiting on cranky old people (what are the chances that a husband and wife are BOTH allergic to lemons?!) in the dining room and spent every one of my shifts watching the clock.  I was honestly thrilled when she called my mom a few weeks in and said that she’d hired too many girls, and since I didn’t seem happy would it be a big deal if she let me go?  Fine by me, although a bit humiliating.  (Incidentally, this woman is still a good friend of my mom’s and we get along just fine.  She even catered my wedding, so no hard feelings.)

After that experience I decided to wait awhile before trying to find another job (besides babysitting).  I ended up getting hired at the local two-screen movie theater a few weeks before my senior year of high school.  (Now, this could be an entire novel by itself, because N was an assistant manager and his mother ran the place, but I’ll get back to that another day.)  I started out working concession (eventually working my way up the ranks, to box cashier then assistant manager), and for some reason I remember that my very first shift was on the night that Tin Cup opened.  I quickly discovered that once you learn how to slide along on buttery floors without falling, selling popcorn and drinks could really be a lot of fun!  I mean, yes, customers are idiots a lot of the time but that is true of any job.  My coworkers were great to work with – I met my first-ever boyfriend (late bloomer, yes) behind that concession counter, and a few years later started dating my husband-to-be after many, many shifts working in the box office with him.  I worked a few shifts per week my entire senior year, then came back for summers and extended school holidays once I went off to college.

In college I drove buses for the university, which was petrifying at first but once I was comfortable maneuvering those 40-foot monstrosities then I really enjoyed it.  The hours were set (we chose shifts at the beginning of each semester based on our class schedules), the pay was pretty good ($8/hour if I remember correctly) and we could pick up as many extra shifts as we wanted.  I usually signed up for the wee-hours weekend dorm shuttle – it was just a 10-passenger van, so easy driving, and no one ever used it so N would come along to keep me company.

Right after N and I got married, we moved out to the Denver area where I was a teller at a credit union.  It was a pretty decent job, but unremarkable and pretty boring a lot of the time.  Payday was the last day of the month, so we would be swamped that day but pretty slow the rest of the time.  That was the first job I ever had that included medical benefits and such.

I quit that job about two weeks before AE was born to stay home full-time.  When he was a few months old I was offered seasonal employment at the Discovery Channel Store in the mall near our house.  It was a temp location being managed by a friend of a friend.  That part was nice because I could pick and choose the hours, N worked full-time at the same mall so we had to stagger our shifts since AE was so small and we didn’t have family nearby.  That job wasn’t too bad (although I HATED working the sales floor, preferring instead to stay behind the cash register given my experience as a cashier/teller) but it cost us far more money than I made since N had an Incident with our car while trying to drive around and calm a screaming baby.  Short-term employment FAIL.

That was the last hourly job that I had.  I went on to work at Texas A&M – Commerce during our unfortunate stint in The Armpit of Texas, but even though the pay was meager that job was technically a salaried position.

My current position is a far cry from those early days at the theater, scooping popcorn while wearing a bowtie and visor, but it certainly has moments where I feel like I could be back in high school.  Like Thursday morning, for example:  I was in the breakroom doctoring my coffee when PSHHHHHHHHHHH – the machine had been filled too full so the newly brewing coffee spilled over the pot and kept going, all over the counter and onto the floor.  Just as I finished cleaning it up, our HR director walked in with another employee.  Their mugs were already sitting on the table, so I knew they had probably been the culprits.  So I wheeled around, pointed at them and screeched HEY.  HEY!!  Did YOU do this?!  DID YOU?!!  It is COFFEE, not ROCKET SCIENCE!! Heh.  Poor guys were so surprised, all they could do was stutter their apologies.  On my way out, I heard HR guy whisper to his cohort, GEEZ.  Sometimes working here is SCARY.