Early lessons from the World of Work

My son was excited last week to receive notification that he'll be getting a check as part of a settlement from a former employer, but I warned him not to get too excited. I was party to a similar settlement as a teen after a restaurant where I'd waitressed went bankrupt, and for several years I received an annual check. I think the biggest one was for 59 cents.

I never cashed the checks. I was more interested in messing up their accounting than in spending the 59 cents. Like my son, I was not party to the lawsuit and to this day don't even know what the settlement was for, but I guess it was nice to be remembered.

That restaurant was one of a sad series: for a stretch of three years during my late teens and early 20s, every company I worked for went through bankruptcy either while I was working for them or soon thereafter. It was quite an education for a naive kid just starting out in the world of work, and it took me a long time to get over the fear that I had somehow jinxed all those fine employers. Well, maybe fine isn't quite accurate. Pick your own adjective:

The restaurant was my first real job, and I confess that I was not a great waitress--but in my defense, it wasn't a great restaurant either. I started waitressing at 17, and by the time I quit eight months later, only one other waitress on the afternoon shift had worked there longer. Training was hit-or-miss, and I made a lot of mistakes. I was really good at keeping things organized and working efficiently, but I was very bad at what they call "soft skills," meaning I wasn't willing to flirt with every idiot who walked in with the price of a cup of coffee in his pants. I also wasn't willing to spend time in the breakroom with the skeevy hosts, who would guide the best tippers to the tables of waitresses who didn't mind getting groped.

I got into trouble once after I got caught in a sudden storm on the way to work and ran my mom's car through water just a bit too deep. It stalled out and I decided, in my adolescent wisdom, to leave the car where it was and walk the remaining mile to the restaurant, because abandoning my mom's car somehow seemed less horrible than being late to work. However, I couldn't bear the thought of walking through knee-high water in the ugly leather waitress shoes that had cost so much of my first paycheck, so I took off my shoes, hiked up the skirt of my ugly uniform, and walked in my panty hose through the deep water. By the time I got to the restaurant, I was drenched and exhausted and my panty hose were shredded, which the manager duly noted as he reamed me out. He was not impressed by the dedication that propelled me to walk a mile through knee-high water, and my parents were even less impressed by my stupidity in driving through that water. But I don't think you can blame the restaurant's decline on that incident.

And you definitely can't blame me for my next employer's problems. Sears was already in bankruptcy protection when I started working in the regional HR office. I did a lot of typing and filing and answering of phones in an office staffed entirely by women--except for the male HR director, who wasn't around much and never learned my name. I remember once a girl I knew from church came in for an interview wearing a tight dress slit up to there, and afterward the HR director came out and announced to all the women in the office, "I think we'll hire the dress and you can all take turns wearing it."

But that was a part-time job and I needed full-time when summer hit, so I started working in the office of a citrus processing plant that suffused my life with the bitter smell of burnt oranges. At first I worked primarily in the Traffic office, where I typed and filed paperwork related to deliveries, but then they started moving me around to whatever department needed a hand, which is how I briefly served some time processing complaints--and trust me, you don't want to know what kinds of things people reported finding in their orange juice. After another employee was fired for lying about having a high school diploma, I was placed in charge of processing and reconciling daily bank deposits, which should tell you something about the company's problem finding qualified accounting help. I spent the rest of my time there, two summers and a long winter break, working on various projects in Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable.

Early in my tenure, the Powers That Be decided to put me to work on a big pile of paperwork at a spare desk in a small office in which the only other person was the twentysomething son of the company's owner. This son had to be treated with exaggerated respect whenever he turned up despite the fact that no one could ever figure out what he did for the company, but that day I found out how he spent a large proportion of his company time: talking loudly on the phone, recounting sexual escapades in great detail to whoever was on the other end. And all I could do was sit there with my back to the owner's son and try not to hear.

That company went bankrupt a year or so after I quit, to no one's surprise. For a little while I worked for a small community newspaper, which was my dream job until my first paycheck bounced. I don't recall how long I worked there but one day they just closed up with no further word, and a year or two later I heard that the owner was in legal trouble over some kind of fraud. 

The next small community newspaper I worked for--in a different state but essentially the same job--closed up in the middle of summer without any warning. I showed up one day to collect my final paycheck and the owner told me there was no money to pay me the $60 he owed me. I told him I didn't have enough money to fill my car with gas to get home, so I would just sit in his office until he found my money. It took a while, but he paid me--in cash. That $60 had to get me through the rest of the summer, so I wasn't about to leave without it.

 

That was the summer after my sophomore year of college, so I was all of 20 years old and flat broke, but fortunately, that was my last brush with bankrupt employers. I later worked for a truly horrible newspaper that maintained a healthy bottom line by allowing the advertisers to call the shots, and then later I moved into the heady world of academe, where everyone complains about budget cuts but at least the paychecks don't bounce. And I don't have to flirt with idiots, get groped, or listen to some moron's sexual escapades just to remain gainfully employed. I still do stupid things once in a while, but no one's going to require me to wear ugly shoes while being reamed out. 

 

The best part is that every once in a while I get an unexpected reward for my hard work--and it's usually a little more than 59 cents.