Day 329: Getting your first job
Oct. 19th, 2012 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66I had to click through a lot of snoozers before getting this adequate topic.
I got my first job in seventh grade. I mean, apart from babysitting my sister and other children, including infants. (Now I look back and wonder what the fuck were parents thinking letting a seventh grader babysit their six month old baby, or their six year old and his three year old autistic brother, until 2 AM or later sometimes... the 1970s were a freewheeling decade, for sure.)
In fact, I got my first job because the older sister of a boy I babysat told me about it, because she was quitting. The job was as general dogsbody and cleaner at a boutique in downtown Evanston called Kay Campbells, right on Church Street, a block from the Evanston Public Library. After it closed my second year working there, it became an Indian imports shop called The Peacock, which was a store I loved. I didn't love Kay Campbells so much. At all. My job was tedious, tiring, and also ripe for humiliation, since girls I went to school with would routinely show up to buy sleeveless cotton button down shirts and sneer at me (literally) as I scrubbed the floor at their feet. And polished the pedestals of the shirt rack/rounders. And mopped the changing room floors. And took out the garbage and washed the mirrors and steam-pressed the newly arrived clothes. Ugh.
Since I was only thirteen, I couldn't work legally, so the manager paid me out of petty cash. I believe my hourly wage was $3.10. That was more than I got for babysitting. I think I got $2/hr for babysitting. With my first cash from that job, I walked a block over to Kroch's and Brentano's Bookstore, and bought three books: George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, and an incredibly right wing edition of The Communist Manifesto. It was all they had, and the introduction was classic Cold War propaganda 'know your enemy' stuff. I worked at Kay Campbells all through 7th grade and 8th grade, after school and during the summers, until the store went bust. Then I got a job, at age 15, at the Evanston Public Library, and after that, at the Northwestern Library. Parental pull was involved in both places. I never had a teenage job like waitressing or fast food. Only books, after Kay Campbells.
I got my first job in seventh grade. I mean, apart from babysitting my sister and other children, including infants. (Now I look back and wonder what the fuck were parents thinking letting a seventh grader babysit their six month old baby, or their six year old and his three year old autistic brother, until 2 AM or later sometimes... the 1970s were a freewheeling decade, for sure.)
In fact, I got my first job because the older sister of a boy I babysat told me about it, because she was quitting. The job was as general dogsbody and cleaner at a boutique in downtown Evanston called Kay Campbells, right on Church Street, a block from the Evanston Public Library. After it closed my second year working there, it became an Indian imports shop called The Peacock, which was a store I loved. I didn't love Kay Campbells so much. At all. My job was tedious, tiring, and also ripe for humiliation, since girls I went to school with would routinely show up to buy sleeveless cotton button down shirts and sneer at me (literally) as I scrubbed the floor at their feet. And polished the pedestals of the shirt rack/rounders. And mopped the changing room floors. And took out the garbage and washed the mirrors and steam-pressed the newly arrived clothes. Ugh.
Since I was only thirteen, I couldn't work legally, so the manager paid me out of petty cash. I believe my hourly wage was $3.10. That was more than I got for babysitting. I think I got $2/hr for babysitting. With my first cash from that job, I walked a block over to Kroch's and Brentano's Bookstore, and bought three books: George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, and an incredibly right wing edition of The Communist Manifesto. It was all they had, and the introduction was classic Cold War propaganda 'know your enemy' stuff. I worked at Kay Campbells all through 7th grade and 8th grade, after school and during the summers, until the store went bust. Then I got a job, at age 15, at the Evanston Public Library, and after that, at the Northwestern Library. Parental pull was involved in both places. I never had a teenage job like waitressing or fast food. Only books, after Kay Campbells.