Me and Jobs, Part I

The first job I ever had was when I was in high school. A local company published a paper on antique collecting, and each issue was stuffed into a paper bag before being mailed. They hired kids for piecework to stuff the papers when a new issue came out, and my older sister and I found out about it and showed up to go to work. We collected some papers and bags and got them stuffed, and went back to collect some more, only to find that a line had formed. There wasn't a steady supply of papers and bags, for some reason. And, as it quickly became clear, our timing was fated to continue to be off. By a strange coincidence, the daughters of the publisher always turned up to collect more supplies right when large stacks of the raw materials came out, and it quickly became evident to my sister and me that we, and everybody else there, were there to sit around and waste time on our own dime until we were needed to pick up the slack on what was basically the publishers' daughters' job. As soon as we figured that one out, we went home.

After that, I didn't have a regular job until I was a senior in high school and in need of some spending money. I hadn't learned to drive, because I knew I didn't have enough money to get my hands on a car; much less to buy gasoline and pay for insurance and taxes and other related expenses. (Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me that someone else would pay for all this for me.) I did, however, sneak out of school on a regular basis with my friend Sylvia, who had a Ford Maverick, and we would go out to lunch or out to the mall. I needed a little bit of money. I got a job at the Waffle House in Northport, where another friend of mine was a cook. I waited tables after school a few nights a week.

I got paid a little over a dollar an hour, which was a high starting pay, since I was recommended by my friend. Anyway, I ended up working the shift which ran from after school to about 9 pm, which was when all the drunks in town hung out, drinking coffee until they left to hang out at the dive bars along the highway. I was seventeen, which made me the oldest person on the shift much of the time. We had another waitress, who was sixteen, and on some nights, a cook who was fifteen, but being the cook and male put him ex officio in charge. I was supposed to wear a dress, but since I was barely five feet tall and had to lean all the way across the counters and booths to wipe them down, and given the lecherous nature of the boozy good ol' boys who made up the afternoon Waffle House custom, I defied convention and wore pants. The first thing I learned was how to fend off friendly come-ons in a vague and breezy way. I was supposed to work half the restaurant, but if the other waitress didn't show up, I got to work the whole restaurant and run the cash register, for the same pay, and any shortage in the take came out of my pay. Any errors in the register's favor, of course, didn't go to me.

I worked there two months, under three managers. The third manager's girlfriend needed a job, so I was out. School was about to be out by that time, so that was okay by me.