Musings on Summer Jobs

Riding into work this morning in a light rain, I got to thinking about summer jobs of years past.  I think days like today just have a way of triggering thoughts like that.

I’ve had a lot of odd jobs.  My first was as a combo dishwasher/busboy/waiter/coat checker at the wonderful Liverpool Country Club, where I worked wedding after wedding for a couple of years starting the day I turned 14.  The receptions were usually on Saturday nights and we came back in on Sunday mornings.  Four or five 14-year-old guys working with little supervision- probably against some labor laws- makes for an interesting time.  After that I worked at Wendy’s, doing just about everything but making salads.  Making salads was the girls’ job.  Sexist?  Maybe.  But that’s just how it was.  We also employed an old woman who spoke only Italian and her only discernable responsibility was to go wipe down tables every 15 minutes or so.  There was also this guy Chad who basically only worked the bun warmer.  And before you get to thinking that maybe the bun warmer was difficult to operate, the bun warmer is a microwave that’s been crippled so there’s only two settings: 1 dozen buns and 2 dozen buns. 

Then after Wendy’s I moved on to my most glamorous job of all – car washer!  There was actually nothing glamorous about it, but I came to love it, three summers’ worth.

I got the job at the Honda dealership near my house and it was my first 40-hour/week job, with the hours only getting worse from there.  I started out a timid high school grad and finished it a foul-mouthed college guy.  The job didn’t actually make me foul-mouthed, but it did teach me that sometimes telling your boss to fuck off may not only be appropriate, it can be fun!  Granted, my boss was a strange guy.  If we weren’t yelling at each other across the garage then that was actually a bad sign.

It was a solid job, though.  Now I can was a car in 6 minutes with the right tools and can do a damn good detail on even the filthiest car in an hour or two.

There’s just something about working in the summer, I guess.  I think people who didn’t have summer jobs are strange.  I mean… what were these people doing with their time when all their friends were working?  And you could divide them into two groups – the ones who were annoying because their parents gave them plenty of money to do whatever they wanted and the ones who were annoying because since they didn’t work they never had enough money to so much as go out for an ice cream cone.

My summer jobs also gave me a lot of stories to tell.  Weird stories, funny stories, stories no one actually cares to hear… lots of stories, which may eventually be told here.  But we’ll see.