It’s a rough time to be a twenty-something looking for work right now. All three of our boys fall into this category and they are in one stage or another of flux: going to school, just finished school and between jobs. The pandemic-economic climate has made job hunting – and keeping – difficult, especially when you haven’t had a lot of traction yet.
One thing that keeps me optimistic about their situation is remembering all the odd, crappy, weird jobs that I had when I was just trying to pay for my own schooling and make the rent. Oh, and be able to take myself to restaurants. At one point, I quit school and seeing the last of my student loan in sight, I needed to find work and I couldn’t be picky.
The summer of ’87 first found me selling ice cream in a semi-temporary booth in downtown Edmonton. Some entrepreneurial friends I knew (from church!) took a chance on me and I became – as my co-worker Barb liked to call us back before we were PC – a “scoop-chick”. It really wasn’t a bad job except I often worked the semi-scary late shift alone (on Jasper Avenue!) and there was no bathroom on site. It also probably wasn’t that great that I got to eat all the ice cream I wanted either. (My love of ice cream still knows no bounds.) A highlight of that summer? In the middle of an Oilers cup race during which we sold our trademark blue-and-orange-striped ice cream, I scooped a cone for Philly goalie Chico Resch which he bought for his friend Ron Hextall. (He picked vanilla.)
I was, however, still short a few hours of full-time and when I became friends with the franchise owner’s son, he put a good word in for me at his place of employ where I could work extra hours around my scooping job. The okay part? It was at a store at West Edmonton Mall which, in those days was where my friends and I spent a lot of time between the waterpark and the movie theaters and Bourbon Street. The not-so-okay part? I was HIGHLY UNQUALIFIED to sell automotive parts and accessories.
Working at JB’s Automotive definitely rings in as my WORST JOB EVER. If they would have let me just work the till, I would probably have been fine. But noooooo, THEY made me LEARN stuff. About CARS. Ew. On my very first day, I took apart a floor model of an engine, forever sealing the word “manifold” into my vocabulary. And then there was the time when I was called “dumb” because I couldn’t locate a certain part to order in the four-foot long catalog collection that rested behind the counter. At one of my next shifts at the ice cream shop, I overheard the same guy tell my boss about how he liked to go to JB’s and ask the girls there to look up parts he knew did not exist.
OHHHHH!!!
As summer was coming to a close, ice-cream was less in demand and I had to find another job to offset the angst of my auto-parts-sales job. It turns out, it’s always who you know. Another friend recommended me for a part-time teller position at the bank where she worked and so I became a “money waitress”.
Working for Canada Trust had its advantages with it being open till 9pm, especially since I elected to go back to school the following September. Classes filled my days and a decent-paying job filled my evenings. But being a teller had its sore points: we routinely ran out of cash (Cash? What is Cash?) during high seasons like Christmas and I was robbed once by possible gunpoint (it was in his jacket pocket so it could have been a fist-and-finger). I was a happy teller until the end of the night when my exuberance for serving customers was overshadowed by my propensity to make data entry mistakes. My supervisors were very disgruntled with me when I kept them overtime because I had trouble with my manual balancing at the end of shift. Their solution: they promoted me to Part-Time Teller Supervisor. Once I had to balance other tellers, I never had trouble again!
I worked at the bank for four years, paying for my schooling as I went until I graduated, pregnant and unemployable. Oh, and married. Which led to another chapter of odd jobs: wife, mother, homemaker…well, the list is kinda endless. Because there is ALWAYS something to do, right?
And even if I didn’t always like my jobs, I am happy that I have the stories. Plus, I survived the ’87 tornado unawares in West Edmonton Mall probably selling radar detectors and fuzzy dice. At least I knew what those things were.