2021, Business, education, Family, Kids, Uncategorized, work

Fledged!

37 Comments

Despite still living at home, YA is pretty independent.  One of the characteristics of this independence is that I sometimes find out about things after the fact.  When she changed her employment five years ago, from one gym to another, she told me about it the day after she accepted the new job.  Two years ago I found out she was thinking about an MBA program after she had already applied and been accepted.  I’ve never really challenged her on this; I assume she sometimes doesn’t want to be swayed by any strong opinions that her mother might have.

As the end of her MBA program loomed, I knew she was applying for various internships and jobs and occasionally I would hear about it.  When she was approached by a recruiter and did a few interviews, it came up for discussion.  When she applied to the FBI, we talked briefly about how long she would have to go to Quantico for training (I don’t think either of us thought this would pan out).   The first I heard about the last job application was when she informed me she had an interview.  At my company.  I do see all the job postings for my company but most of them have long lists of requirements that she doesn’t fit, so I hadn’t been actively looking at all of them.  When she got a second interview, I was a little surprised because I know how competitive it is out there and she hadn’t even officially finished her graduate degree.  When the third interview went over an hour, I had a good feeling and I was correct; they called and offered her the job the next morning.

In the Travel division (in which I work), we call all the other divisions “the other side of the house”.  I don’t know if those other divisions call Travel “the other side” but I expect I’m about to find out.  And it’s a little weird that in two weeks she’ll be working more hours than I will (since I’m still only at half time).  I’ve noticed in the last few days she’s been slightly more interested in what I’m doing for work although it’s not a “I’m going to have to do that” kind of interest.  Just a “oh, she’s doing work for my company” kind of interest.  At least that what it seems like.  We’ve talked a little about going this weekend to check out the building she’ll be working in and a little bit about timecards.  We discussed carpooling, although I won’t be going into my building until the summer is over so it won’t be an issue until then. 

I’m very proud of her but it’s impossible to know if I’m just a bit extra proud because she’s joining me at a company where I’ve been very happy for 30+ years. 

What was your first job?

37 thoughts on “Fledged!”

  1. My first, off the farm paying job, my dad found for me through a person that he knew. It was summertime at Anderson’s Formal Wear and the wedding season was in full swing. My job was to press suit coats, pants, and vests. It was only about three or four hours a night and only about three or four days a week. I think I was in 10th grade, maybe 11th, and the entire A squad of my high school basketball team also worked there. Of course I wasn’t friends with those guys, we got to know each other a little bit over the summer, it was a decent job and fairly fun even if hot and humid. That’s where I learned most of the time the boss will be a jerk and it’s your coworkers that make a job bearable.

    And then one day I came to work and there was nothing to do and they told me to go home and they’d call me when they needed me and I never heard from them again. Evidently the wedding rush was over.

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  2. Rise and Go To Work, Baboons:

    I feel rocked by the passage of time when I discover that our former “Teenager,” now YA has an MBA and will soon be employed. When Anna announced that she was taking Darling Daughter on a college tour, quickly followed by Renee’s comment that Grandson is three years old, my head started spinning. Of course, I am seriously considering full or near-full retirement in 18 months. So if time passes for me, I suppose it passes for the younger set, too. But Still….

    I have levels of jobs. I babysat waaaay tooooo much as a young teen for a number of families. I was the world’s worst babysitter, because I used those jobs only to get away from my mom. Then at age 16 I was a carhop at Tony’s Drive in for $.85/hour. THat was my first non-professional job. After college I was program manager for a Work Activity Center for disabled adults in Iowa then mosied on to grad school at the U of M where I got a degree (MSW) that always ensured employment.

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      1. Absolutely. I was raised in a world in which I found it advantageous to have a concrete job I could do, and I never wanted to return to a living with my mother. It was best to be employed.

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  3. My first “real” job was at our local hospital. I worked as a Master’s level psychologist under the supervision of a Doctoral level guy from1987 until I started working for the State at the Human Service Center in 1999. It was a good job and I was able to finish my Doctoral degree along the way . If all goes as planned, I will have 25 years of service with the State when I retire. Husband worked at the same agency for 27 years. It was his first ‘real’ job as a psychologist.

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  4. Since we went to grad school in Canada, we couldn’t legally work off campus. That really limited us and kept us pretty poor.

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    1. Ha ha. Luckily this isn’t in the cards. They just announced a new vice president for travel beginning July 1 (because the existing vice president is retiring). So the chances that they’ll need a new vice president of my division before I retire are slim to none. The only layer of management between me and the vice president is my direct boss who is the kind of woman who will probably work until they carry her out.

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  6. My first non-babysitting job was working at a floral shop – I have written about the quirky, wonderful owner of that shop. She was a character, but I learned a lot (including how to make a corsage). I have driven by the little house she ran the shop out of and while it looks cozy still, without bedding plants and her hand-lettered sign out front (I sometimes got to make those too – tape a fresh piece of floral paper onto the sandwich board and make note of deals on roses or mid-season annuals), it has a little less life.

    First out-of-college job lasted just a few months (working at a group home for adults with severe developmental delays) before moving into an office gig processing student loan claims from lenders. The former didn’t pay enough to cover rent and my student loans – hence the move to the office gig. Working with student loans was… interesting. Processing death claims could be educational (and sometimes icky) – one truly sad claim was for a person presumed lost at sea. That was balanced out with the humor value of a Richard Nixon (not the famous one) filing for bankruptcy and asking to have his loans forgiven in the bankruptcy…

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      1. It’s odd – even though that was a paying gig, I never think of it as a “job.” It felt more like playing with my friends and getting some money to pay for food, expenses, and a new bauble or two (or three). 😁

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  8. Besides babysitting, my first job was filing charts for $1/hour at the medical clinic where my mom worked. I later worked there as a receptionist and, even later, a nurses aid. I had no intention of becoming a nurse at that time but eventually decided it was better than being a History/German major. My first “real job” was at the U of MN Hospital. 34 years later I retired from there (having been through all the incarnations of that hospital system beginning with the Fairview merger back in the 90s). Despite enjoying my career, as far as I’m concerned nothing beats retirement.

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  9. OT – your title and header photo reminds me of a recent occurrence. My older sister and bro-in-law (who live in VA) have had a bluebird house for several years. This year they finally got the camera in the house to work and she had posted pics of the 4 eggs, the hatching, and the feeding. It was very fun to watch their progress. Then, about 2 weeks from fledging, a rat snake got into the house. Even though they HATE snakes, my sis and bro-in-law managed to get the snake out of the house before all the babies were killed. One survived – they named him (?) Nemo. At first he seemed very lonely – chirping constantly. His parents continued feeding and encouraging him. Finally last week he fledged. So a happy ending despite the tragedy.

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  10. This is so fun to read about, VS! I’m with Jacque and all who can’t believe she’s old enough to be doing this.

    First post-babysitting job was as a lab assistant at Mercy Hospital (no longer) in Marshalltown, IA – washing glass beakers and tubes, wheeling people to x-ray… I even developed x-rays. This was a very old hospital, with the ancient elevator doors…

    Next came an office job in a local factory, and the following summer working out in the factory, drilling threads into metal pieces. In college there was serving in the cafeteria line, and a stint as a cocktail waitress at The Safari downtown. Then several temp secretarial jobs in San Francisco before I finally landed my first kindergarten.

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  11. My first non-babysitting job was actually in my father’s law office. It was during the long break between semesters at Carlton and I was a good typist so I filled in for a couple of secretaries while they were taking some holiday time off. This morphed into a full-time secretarial job when one of the secretaries went on maternity leave exactly while I was home the following summer. And then the following summer I did a little bit of paralegal work-not that much fun. Then I moved away from home and that was the end of the law jobs. My dad was heartbroken because up until that time he was hoping that I would catch the law bug and follow him into his practice.

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  12. As scrap boy during construction of Nelson Hall, now Minnesota State University Moorhead. On weekends, my job was to collect the empty floor tile boxes, tile debris and get the junk into the garbage truck. Typically, the installers would cut the tops on three sides leaving a cardboard box with a lid. On one occasion, rather than crush them down, I folded the lids into the boxes and collected them thereby making a train. The building has a circular design, so eventually I collected so many cars that I was unable to see the caboose. It was time to derail the train into the open-bed of the truck 3 floors below. Out the construction window they all went at the same time whereupon they became parachutes. Not a single one hit the drop zone.

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  13. First non-babysitting job was working in a fancy hotdog stand on Ulrikkenborg Plads in Lyngby. Unlike most hotdog stands in Copenhagen, this one was a small, permanent structure, so it was always in the same place. It was a fun job because of the people who frequented it, but I quit after a couple of months after repeated sexual advances from the owner. No job its worth holding on to if you have to tolerate that kind of behavior.

    Next up was the summer between my junior and senior year in high school. I have written about it before on the trail. The summer where I was working in the Flamingo iron factory. It was in a historic building in a lovely setting in Charlottenlund, and with a bunch of fun and interesting co-workers. The work itself required very little in the way of skill, thought or attention, so there was plenty of opportunity to talk. By the end of the summer, I was pressured by my coworkers to join the union, and that’s when I told them I was headed back to school. The building itself has since become a part of the Danish National Museum, and houses all kinds of old artifacts from the area; a pretty interesting place.

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  14. Don’t think that would have changed a thing back then. 1958 was still pretty much a man’s world. It was considered normal, their prerogative, but I wasn’t having it, so I left.

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  15. My first job was as a grocery bagger and carry-out, but then an art teacher in high school put in a good word for me and I got a job in the display department at J. C. Penney. I worked there until college. While I was in college, I worked for about a month (in the middle of winter) pumping gas at an all night gas station. That couldn’t last, so I got a job working in an art supply store. That’s where I met Robin. I worked there until I got my bachelor’s degree (we were married by then). At that point, Robin resumed school to finish up and I took a job with the display department at Dayton’s. I worked there for about a year and then moved on to a job in the display department at Donaldson’s. After Robin finished school, I went back for a while to work on a master’s degree in fine arts and worked on campus jobs as a janitor. Before I finished my master’s degree, I came to the realization (which seems obvious now) that it was only good for qualifying to teach other art students (who, if they got a degree, would only be qualified to teach other art students), so I left the program and got a job with one of the big advertising agencies downtown. I worked there and at three other agencies, then took a job with a sort of hybrid agency/publisher and worked there for thirteen years. After that, I worked freelance for the next 20+ years.

    Getting a job in the twentieth century was so much simpler than it is now. Often, after an interview, they would tell you whether you were hired or not.

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  16. newspaper jobs
    first the weekly sun suburbinate delivery
    then a daily and sunday route
    picking corn
    mann france ave drive in
    willows convelescent center
    working construction picking limestone out of a limistone quarry
    sales
    my job history in total

    i’ll be back

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      1. i was hired as a janitor but it was a small home with 3 floors each having 20 rooms so total of 100 people
        i cleaned the rooms the halls the cafeteria and kitchen but ended up chatting with all the residents who were there and the job eventually turned into my helping the residents with shaving and haircuts and whatever else was needed
        it was a nice place that did a nice job with people
        i enjoyed it

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    2. my picking corn was memorable
      you wore a belt with 2 bent nails to hang a burlap sack on and you’d walk the rows picking one ear off each stalk and sticking it in the bag right left right left when you hit 60 the bag got left and you put on a new bag and continued a pickup drove behind as the pickers went forward and was able to drive over the corn because after it was picked it was done for the year
      bag was heavy when it got over 1/2 full and you dragged it between your legs grabbing another 30 ears before you got to switch again
      but every now and again the old farmer who hired us would bring a load of watermelons and he’d crack them open and let us all eat as much as we wanted
      fresh picked and cool crisp sweet watermelon was never more appreciated and wonderful

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  18. My second job was a field reporter for ASCS – “ agricultural stabilization and conservation service”. (Now known as FSA, “ Farm service agency”. ) It’s where you go to file all your farm related paperwork and the other one is that handle government payments to farmers.
    I’ve mentioned it before, it’s where I learned to read maps, and find my way around the county. Went to a lot of farms and measured fields and measured grain bins. It was just moving into computerized records and we spent a lot of time entering paperwork into the computers.
    There was (and still is) a program called the conservation reserve program, the CRP program, and the farmers would come in and ask about the CPR program.
    It was a good job. My aunt worked there; she told mom and dad about the job.

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  20. I worked at a KFC when I was a senior in high school. It was then called Kentucky Fried Chicken. They shortened the name to an acronym a little later. I think there was a general move toward shortening names to acronyms around that time, and it also became less appealing to acknowledge that food was fried. Fried was not the thing anymore. So it became KFC. They do still actually fry the chicken, though, in case you didn’t know.

    The franchise was owned by three guys in their late twenties or so. They were all married, and hired a lot of girls around the same age as me, and there was a fair amount of inappropriate interaction between the owners and the employees. One of my co-workers, who lived across the street from me and was a year younger, became involved with one of them and wound up pregnant. I was the recipient of the occasional unsolicited shoulder massage from one of them, but he didn’t get any more suggestive than that, and I was certainly prepared to walk away from the job if I thought it was necessary. Another of my co-workers, my age, had also been the focus of his attention and confided to me that she had been considerably more accommodating than I was. At the time, though, as PJ said, it was sort of normal. There really wasn’t anyone to complain to. Probably most teenage girls getting jobs in those days were in similar situations, and most guys who didn’t have to deal with it just didn’t know how lucky they were. I didn’t really think much about it myself, at the time. Looking back in the context of Me Too and Time’s Up, I think, what was up with that? Why were we so willing to shrug it off? I guess the stakes were low because the job wasn’t worth much.

    First real job was as a copywriter at a country radio station. I also recorded some newscasts and that sort of thing. The station was mostly automated, but there were times when it went live. The most awkward moments I recall involved broadcasts from a remote location that sponsored a personality from the radio station’s associated TV station – the weather guy. I was assigned to introduce him. At the station where I worked, he was an affable fiftyish guy who loved to talk to people. It was arranged for him to go to some advertiser’s location. often a car dealership, and encourage listeners to come out to test drive a new car and enjoy refreshments, hot dogs and lemonade and that sort of thing. He was supposed to do a pitch or about ten or fifteen minutes maybe three time an hour, and then we would play music between live segments. But he would get involved in a conversation with someone and when he was supposed to go back on live he was often not paying attention, and didn’t pick up his cue. I think he was usually offered something stronger than lemonade at the remote location. Those broadcasts…mistakes were made.

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