Everyone
hates their first job and, I am no exception. At the start of the summer of my
junior year of high school, my parents decided that I needed to do something “productive”
over summer and told me I needed to get a job. Despite my protests, I
eventually gave in and went on my first job search. Like many things in life,
the first job search is always the worst. I looked in the classifieds of the
newspaper to try and find any available job openings but, I didn’t have any
experience so did not qualify for any of those positions. Due to this, I decided
I would just walk around town and pick up applications from anywhere that
looked semi-interesting.
My
door to door job search was quite an experience. I choose first to go to all of
the local restaurants, which I considered kosher, to apply for a busboy or
server position. This included many pizza places and sandwich shops. Mexican
and fried food restaurants were definitively off my list as desirable places of
employment and thus, were avoided. After I had exhausted every restaurant in a
ten mile radius of my house, I moved on to other obscure opportunities of
employment. I applied everywhere from a job at the car wash to a life guard on
the lazy river at the waterpark. Eventually after about a week of searching I was
hired at a local Ice Cream shop called “Ojai Ice Cream”.
It
was awful. Going into my job, at the ice cream store, I thought it would be
fun. I would get to hang out in an air conditioned room all day and eat all the
ice cream I wanted. However while I could eat all of the ice cream I wanted, I
did not consider the potential downsides to working at an Ice Cream parlor. The
first thing I realized was I would have to deal with little kids. My typical
customer client interaction would go something like this: Little Johnny would
walk in with his mom screaming “YAY ICE CREAM!” Next he would go along the
entire pane of glass, which protects the ice cream from the kids, and shout
every flavor he knew, while in the process getting fingerprints and spit all
over the glass. Finally after about five minutes of debating, he would pick a
flavor, always Rocky Road. After this, he and his mother would go sit down at a
table to eat the ice cream and Johnny would spill it everywhere and get
everything sticky. Then they would leave and, I would have to clean up the
soiled glass pane and clean the three foot radius, around where Johnny ate his
ice cream, with a mop. It was an awesome summer.
At
first, I thought I was going to have to quit in the first week but, eventually I
became semi numb to the effects of children on a sugar high. However, one part
about my first job, at the ice cream shop, that I can really remember well, was
my first pay check. It was for 192 dollars. I remember cashing it in at the
bank and thinking “this job isn’t that bad”. That first pay check was a big
step in growing up. I recognized it was the first time that I had earned
something. I wasn’t given anything. I earned it. To this day I still look at that
ice cream shop and cringe but, I will never forget that it was where I earned
my firt dollar.