First Job.

[Chris Grieb]

P J O'Rourke said that he stopped being a socialist after he got his first pay check and saw how much was taken out. Ronald Reagan told how about a business who arranged with holding so that it was only in the early part of the year and said one employee owned additional money from his paycheck.

[Darrell Hougen]

My first job was driving an Acme Icecream truck and selling icecream to little kids in Fort Dodge, Iowa. It lasted for about a month, until my family went on vacation. The job was ok except that there were some mean kids that would try to steal money from the truck.

Darrell

Edited February 27, 2007 by Darrell Hougen

[Chris Grieb]

Darrell; I'm surprised they didn't try to steal ice cream. When I was a street vendor my fear wasn't robbery but the stealing of merchandise.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

One of my weirdest gigs was selling cemetery plots door to door when I was in high school. I lasted 2 weeks at it. Some things bothered me about it and I didn't like learning high-pressure sales. Lessons learned were:

• Never use the word cemetery, but use "memorial gardens" instead.
  
• Never say "grave," but say "resting place" instead.
  
• When telephone canvasing, only call during the day to schedule a visit, when the man of the house is probably not in. Say only you are for "Mount Comfort" and would like to stop by later to deliver a free "community service" package, which was nothing but a series of envelopes to put documents in so they will be organized when a person croaks. Obviously one of the envelopes was for a plot. The idea is that women are usually dingbats and too busy with housework to understand correctly. Later when you show up and the man asks why, you claim you cleared it with his wife.
  
• Never sit in the most comfortable seat in the house as this is usually the man's seat.
  
• Try to sit so, if it is still daylight, the light is in the eyes of the customers.
  

I could go on. (Wow, this is really taking me down memory lane.) This job was before I first read Rand and the gross manipulation of customers to get them to buy something they did not want to buy simply turned my stomach. I made my first sale doing all the right moves, then spouting fire and brimstone to scare the wits out of the poor couple at the end, but I knew they would default on their payments since they were obviously struggling. In an attack of conscious after the whole thing was over, I said (ripping up the contract), "I can't do this. If you want a grave, go down to the cemetery and buy one." Then I left. The next day I turned in my equipment and quit. I think I still have a business card from back then, but it is in Brazil with some of my other things.

Another episode tickled me over the years. I grew up always hearing my parents say, "I don't care what you do in life, so long as you are the best. It doesn't matter if you are the President of the USA or a garbage man, or a doctor or factory worker or whatever. Just so long as you are the best." They repeated variations of this over and over, but always including the garbage man for contrast. One summer I applied and was accepted at a garbage collection company. The pay was about 3 times more than I would have earned at almost any other summer job. When I told my parents, they had a fit.

"No son of mine is going to be a garbage man!"

So I went and worked at a drive-in movie theater concession stand for one third the money that summer. Now it is funny. Back then it wasn't.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Michael, you should have said "sanitation engineer!"

--Brant

[Tee-Jay]

My first job was at a restaurant. I was a drive-thru girl.