My First Job

In 2004, at the impressionable age of 20, I got my first real job.  Real in the sense that the money was all mine to keep and do with whatever I wanted.  I've "worked" since I was 9 years old.  For lack of a better term, or just because it sounds more interesting than "I sold stuff", between the ages of 9 and 12, I hustled.

Kind of like this, except there were no drugs or bootleg Star Wars holiday special VHS tapes involved

I sold everything from flowers to cakes to candies.  I think it started when a neighborhood kid with whom I was acquainted came over to my house and asked if I could come outside to play.  I'd like to say he was a friend, but as I've mentioned, I rarely got to leave the house and we didn't spend much time together.  I don't remember much about him except that he was Chinese and that his name was Richard, and in retrospect, precociously business-minded.

My mother, in a rare display of leniency, relented but said I wasn't allowed to go across the street or any farther than 2 houses away from my own.  Once we were safely outside, Richard produced 3 candies.  I jumped on them, as sweets were a rarity in our household, both because my mother was into health food and seldom allowed us the good stuff, and because she learned soon after I could walk that providing an ADHD kid with sugar was just a bad idea.

Somehow, Richard persuaded me that instead of eating them now, there was a way we could multiply those candies.  I wasn't too keen on the idea of postponing the sugary bliss, but I went along with it, as more was undoubtedly better.  He sold the candies to a passerby for a quarter, then made the perilous journey across the avenue to one of those little bodegas you find everywhere in Queens, emerging with some more candy, which was promptly sold to another passerby for 50 cents, and so on.

Each time, the return was double the investment, and each time, he'd go back to the store and spend all of the money on more merchandise.  After about an hour, when my mother called me back in, we had about 5 dollars and a bunch of candy.  We split the spoils and went our separate ways.  When I first walked in through the door, my mother looked at all the sugar in my hands with a great air of unease (due to its vast potential as a weapon of mass destruction), but after explaining its source, the wheels in her head started turning, and a few weeks thereafter I was selling candy on the steps in front of my house.

One tootsie roll would have me looking like this.  Up the ante to a pixie stick, and you could have your condemned home demolished in no time

Over the years the product shifted from candy to baked goods (my mother is a pretty good cook), to flowers a couple of years later, until I was walking around the 'hood with a bucket full of roses in an old baby stroller.

Of course, I never enjoyed all this.  It might have helped if I got some more money out of it than the nominal 2% of profits, or even an allowance or monthly wage of some sort.  And I would have liked to be just like all the other kids, with friends, video games, and after-school activities, but such was life, and there wasn't much I could do about it.  My family was not very well off, mom and dad poor German immigrants, so we needed all the income we could fit in our lederhosen.

So it came as kind of a surprise to me when my father announced we'd be moving to Africa as missionaries/aid workers.  I said that I was on board as long as I didn't have to sell the damn flowers any more.  They agreed, and a few months later, shortly after my 13th birthday, we moved to Equatorial Guinea.

No, not Ecuador.  No, not New Guinea.

The 6 years I spent there will probably give me enough material for many posts to come, but in the interest of staying on topic, I'll just say that my main job was as an English teacher in the school my parents ran out of our house there.  About a year after I graduated from high school, I had scraped enough money together to buy a plane ticket back to the States.  I had only the vaguest of ideas of what I was going to do, but I really needed to get away from home and start my own life.

In 2003, I came back to New York.   I soon realized everyone in the northeast was an asshole, so I moved to the west coast, settling in California.  I couch surfed for a bit, did some volunteer work with a church youth group, and started going to Community College there a year later.  This was also when I started looking for a job.  It was pretty dismal.  I was in a particularly odd situation, as most people my age still had their parents to fall back on for lodging or money.  I had no one.  No one seemed to be hiring, either, and the meager amount of money I had brought with me was fast drying up.

I finally found my first job at the college's career center.  They were looking for someone to tend their garden and possibly help out with things around the house.  The pay would be $8/hr and the schedule was flexible.  They'd like to help a college student out, they said.  So I show up at the house the next day and after initial introductions, I got to work digging weeds out of the garden.  The owner was a nice upper middle class old lady who lived with her 50 year old son.  Her husband had been an engineer, and they had a couple of nice cars, a boat and a small plane at the airport.  The house had all sorts of interesting trinkets related to her husband's old job, all of which I would have to clean once a week.  It started out fine, just working in the garden, with her giving me verbal instructions on what to do.  After a few weeks, though, it started getting to be too much.

For one thing, she micromanaged everything.  I appreciated having a source of income, but seriously, there were things she could have done herself instead of standing behind me, constantly telling me what to do and how to do it.   I may be coming off as harsh, but she was pretty spry for an 82 year old, and climbing on the roof to clean leaves was all well and good, but she might as well have wiped down the table herself.  Or at least given me a list of things to do and return later to check on them.

Another thing that got on my nerves was the way she referred to non-living items as if they were sentient beings.  Some things were prescribed their own names (the garden shed was named 'Weg'), and objects were always referred to as 'he' or 'she', never 'it'.  I don't know why it bothered me so much, but it did.

After a while I found another job, put in my two weeks notice, and left, but not before the old bird flipped me the final bird.  You see, I had been operating under the assumption that I was being paid under the table, and indeed, my paycheck was for the full $8 for every hour I worked, but when I received my W-2 in the mail from her and filed my taxes, it was abruptly and unpleasantly brought to my attention that I owed the IRS $144.

Exactly like this, except metaphorically

This was money I didn't have.  I was barely making ends meet as it was, and I didn't have 144 extra dollars to give to the government.  I had finally qualified for a credit card with a $500 limit, and that was already used up on frivolous purchases like gas and groceries.  I couldn't believe the old hag had done this to me.

Reporting someone to the Man is, like, the lowest you can sink, man

I begrudgingly sent them a check for the amount owed and received a check back for about $50 a few weeks later.  Apparently I hadn't done my taxes very well.  In my defense, it was my first time filing, and those forms are confusing as hell.  At least they didn't try to squeeze some more money out of me.