Currently, I advise college students on their academics and discuss their potential job prospects in the fashion, retail and marketing industries. I look over their resumes and aim to guide them to gain “relevant” experience towards their ultimate goal. I am a liar. I also realize I was lied to. I had no ultimate goal and my career journey has been working jobs I don’t like, working jobs with some things I like, then trying to find a job that has more of what I liked and less of what I didn’t like at the last job. I always have the hardest time telling them they need to deal with the parts of their job they don’t want to deal with if they ever want to get somewhere in life. A student asked me, “What did you learn from your first job?” I laughed and replied, “My first job taught me I hated my first job.” Okay, so this was true but I couldn’t even access the WHY.

 
My first job ever was working at my dad’s office. His office staff was all female and it appeared that a prerequisite for getting hired was hair cut above your chin, a sweatshirt or sweater with iron on appliques, a love of baked goods and a general fake pleasantness. One that could fool your male boss into thinking you loved your job but not your fellow female co-workers or the newest hire (fifteen year old me). When you’re at your first job and your brain isn’t fully formed, you don’t know it’s hard to get a job and you don’t know why your dad’s staff would be put off at the idea of having the boss’s daughter there to do bitch work they don’t want to do. The second part, I’m still unsure of. I’d like to think they probably didn’t like my dad very much because when he walked me in the ladies were all smiles. But the moment my dad headed out the smiles stopped and the head office lady made a point to give me the un-sexiest tasks imaginable. I was hoping I would sit up front and file. I wouldn’t have to talk to scary strangers but I could still see patient interaction. I had seen Romy fake how she was business woman in Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. I had practiced saying my best Romy voice, “I invented Post Its” before my first day. It was a learning curve to even understand what business casual dress meant.

 

It was here that I first learned middle aged, church going women are not to be trusted. The office manager smiled and never wavered from her sweet as pie tone as she led me to the unfinished office basement with an electric paper shredder on its way out of this world. The cement floor was cold and there were cardboard boxes of old medical files piled to the ceiling. She told me to start in the corner and work my way across the room with shredding the oldest files first.

“The shredder is delicate. It can only handle up to 4 pages at a time or it jams. We have had this shredder for a long time and kept it in good condition. Don’t jam it.”

 

So here’s what my first job taught me:
It is necessary to test out rules under the radar. Immediately after she walked up the stairs and shut the basement door I stuck 5 sheets of paper into the shredder and what do you know the thing jammed! I spent the next ten minutes wrestling paper shreds from its locked jaws.
You shouldn’t let any boss treat you poorly. Even if you’re fifteen and you probably didn’t deserve the job in the first place. I was aware my boss didn’t like me solely because she didn’t like her boss. Thanks, Dad. I was also aware that this was not my fight to pick but that I wouldn’t take my dislike for one person out on another when I became a boss. I also would always be nice to the new hire.
If you are so low on the totem you are viewed as an afterthought by your boss, figure out how to continue to teach yourself. I love other people’s stories. I learned a lot about these patients who had passed away. I shredded enough paper in the morning to pass a mid-morning check. Did I have a pile of hamster litter shreds in a wire garbage can? Check. She’s doing her job. After lunch, there were no checks on me. I dug into the medical files and tried to read EKGs. Thumbing through Ethel’s old medical charts, I remember wishing there was a required diary entry patients filled out while they stayed in the hospital. I became obsessed with wanting to know what these people died of and who they were when they were still alive. Did they want to die? Were they ready? Had they lived lives they were proud of? You know, the normal things a 15 year old ponders. I created entire back stories for these characters who were actually real people who were dead. I imagined knocking on the doors of their loved ones conducting interviews on how they were remembered. I knew what ailed them and the rest I made up.
If you don’t like your job, you’ve got to make moves.
And make moves I did. I was just starting to get attention from boys and really that was the only thing that motivated me in life at age 15. Everything in my life was divided into two buckets at this time: Sexy and Not Sexy (just ask my journal during these years). In the Sexy bucket was being tan, J.Lo, flirting with boys, blond hair, being at the right locations where flirting with boys was even a possibility. Not Sexy included working in my dad’s office in the basement shredding paper, my mom dropping me off anywhere, being seen with my entire family anywhere ever. As soon as I focused in on my priorities, I set my sights on finding the sexiest work environment I could. I wanted to be a lifeguard at the local pool.

Reasons why I wanted to lifeguard at Splash Landing in Bettendorf IA:
• The pool manager was in his twenties, could grow a beard, and was the sexiest Ben Affleck look alike I had ever seen.
• Boys took their shirts off at the pool
• Everyone gets tan at the pool in the summer

Reasons why I was terrified to try out to be a lifeguard:
• I had to pass a swim test for Ben Affleck and while in my mind I was a sassy flirtatious queen, in practice I wouldn’t utter two words to Ben.
• I HAD TO PASS A SWIM TEST FOR BEN AFFLECK and I’m 15!