What was your first job, and did you enjoy it?

[susandennis]

A while back curiouswombat asked me about my first job. My very first job was babysitting. I did a lot of that. I was in demand. $1 an hour + pickup and delivery - you come get me and you bring me home. I was a good deal. But, then, we had had some of the best babysitters on the planet growing up so I had learned from the best.

But, my real W-2 first job was as a shop girl in a dress outlet. It was the Summer I was 16. The shop was located on the highway between Boone and Blowing Rock, North Carolina. It was really more of a tourist road side stop. My parents' friends, the Thalheimer's owned it - more specifically Mrs. Thalheimer. My job was to do whatever she wanted me to do. The shop only sold loose cotton dresses - back then called house dresses. They were kind of an upgraded robe - meant to be worn to do the housework in.

My brother often says he was born on 3rd base meaning he was born a straight white male into a family with more than the average privileges. I was behind him between 2nd and 3rd. (I had the same privilege, just no penis.) And we had no internet so I knew squat, really, about the rest of the country and the people who lived there.

Most of the people who stopped to shop were the kinds of people I had never ever seen before. Most of them were on a vacation road trip just looking. They were often rude and my way of dealing with that was to be rude right back. I was not an ideal shop girl. So I actually did spend a lot of my time in the back room taking dresses out of boxes and steaming the wrinkles out and putting on price tags. This was long before the EPA and the odors of the textile inks are embedded in my memory... deeply.

I was in the shop waiting on customers one day when this guy came in with a girl/woman and two small girl children. They walked in - no car - from the woods. They were black with dirt. The three females never spoke. The man, who had no teeth, communicated that his women each needed a new dress for the summer. They were wearing muddy purple velvet dresses. I, incorrectly assumed he wanted choices. He did not. He was three dresses. Now. And here was his money. Dirty wrinkled 1's and change covered the probably $25 that the three dresses cost. He sent the woman and girls into the dressing room and they came out wearing their dresses. They walked out the door into the woods and left their velvet clothes in the dressing room.

The whole incident was a shocker to me. I'd never seen anything like that. Memories even now, some 50+ years later are vivid.

I really came to hate the job. And it was the first time in my school life ever that I was grateful and happy to go back to school in September.

BUT, that little gig taught me a whole lot. I realized that Summer that, in fact, I could actually work and make money. Real money. A check that I could put in my bank account. It wasn't much. It wasn't nearly enough but it was money. I could do it. I sure didn't want to make money that way so I needed to figure out how to make money a better way. But the idea that I could do it. I didn't have to get married. I really actually could earn my own money. That was a biggie.

And the realization that I needed a degree to get to a better job to make that money is what got me through college.

Comments

[zoefruitcake.livejournal.com]

I wonder what happened to the little girls? I like to think that they spoke to each other about the girl they saw in the shop and decided when they were old enough they needed to run away and have a life

[susandennis]

I actually never did wonder... until now and I'm going with your scenario because I love that.

[underwear-slave.livejournal.com]

Thats so crazy, the people coming out of the woods. I wonder what they were doing and what became of them.

[susandennis]

Actually, back then (and maybe now) there were a fair number of people who lived way back deep in the hollars (think Dolly Parton early days ) of the mountains. That they would come out in public and as a family was the odd part.

[lostincandyrain.livejournal.com]

My first job was also in retail - at the Gap. It was terrible. I spent most the time trying to hide from customers by doing stock stuff in the back... This is what taught me that I probably needed a job that didn't require much interaction with people. ;)

[coffeeguy777.livejournal.com]

Boone,that must have been a swinging place back then.I live about 2 hours south of there.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Something of an eye-opener in more ways than one, that job!

[celluloid-jam.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I want to high five you for being kind-of-but-not-really-at-all twinsies with me re: varying experiences. My first job was shitty retail that I hated, too, and realizing that I wasn't qualified to do more than retail work and was destined to die in that f-ing store with the rude-ass customers was a major catalyst in my decision to go to college. :) I learned a ton from that job and have a lot of memories, and sometimes I look back at it and kind of chuckle to myself about how seriously everyone took themselves. Like. It's CLOTHING, people. It's not rocket science or the end of the dang world. But back then it certainly felt like it was both of those things.

[susandennis]

©2016-2018 meowmeowcat123

[celluloid-jam.livejournal.com]

Heee!

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

That sounds like an eye-opener of a job. My first real job was working for my uncle's photography studio at Southcenter mall in Tukwila. I got to drive my uncle's spare car from Gig Harbor, across the Tacoma Narrows bridge and onto really big highways, which I had never driven on before, to get there. Looking back on it, I have to wonder whether my parents had any clue about what I was doing there. I have a hard time seeing how they would have been okay with the driving part of it. Long distance phone calls were expensive back then, so we probably never told them what I was doing until I went back home. Finding out that I was better at the work I was doing then pretty much all of my uncle's permanent employees was a different kind of eye-opener for me.

[susandennis]

I never knew of your Pacific Northwest connection! Forget driving a major highway, I'm impressed your parents let you come across the country. Oh wait, were they on the east cost? And yes, learning that you had better skills than those regular adults would have been quite the eye opener!

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

My mother is from Olalla (or more accurately Fragaria) in Kitsap County. We used to spend weeks driving across the country every three years or so. One year I somehow talked my parents into leaving me behind for several weeks after we got out there. I flew home at the end of the summer. Flying at all was a much bigger deal then, but flying alone at 16 didn't cause much fuss. The next year I flew both directions alone. I think we drove again the third year I stayed with my uncle.

The argument I can remember my parents having about me staying with my relatives was over the fact that they are Jehovah's Witnesses and would expect me to attend their religious activities. My mother is rather rabid where that's concerned. My father won the argument and I stayed. Their attempts at converting me bored me and taught me that I wasn't Christian at all. I never informed either of my parents about the last part of that. It didn't seem like a good idea.

[susandennis]

That's wild.