Jobs Are Weird

I got my first paycheck when I was 13. It was for $22 and some change. I can still remember the perforated edges and grass-green border of the check and how I took it to Huntington Bank at Tower Hill Plaza in Ft. Wright and slid it across to the teller, who handed me the bills. I had been hired by the Tri-City Y in Florence to be a junior instructor for gymnastic lessons (I was also on the gymnastics team ). I had babysat a little, but this was an actual check with my name typed on it.

With my timesheet and a payday on the 15th and the 30th of every month, everything was suddenly possible! It would be 15 years before I would swear off bosses and steady paychecks for the freedom of self-employment. But in that moment, tearing open the envelope that held my first paycheck, the ways in which working for others would disappoint me weren’t remotely a thing yet. I just wanted to be able to buy Guess jeans, and this was the way to do it. I was thrilled with that little sliver of financial independence.

All these decades later, I’m watching my teenagers navigate their first work experiences. My son got a job at Kroger after he turned 14, and he’s been working there for a year as a bagger and cart-getter. And my 13-year-old daughter—who already babysits, pet sits, and has sold her bracelets at the “Young Entrepreneur” booth at our town’s farmers’ market the past two summers—is eager to get her first payroll job as soon as she turns 14 in a few months. They are kids with bank accounts and debit cards and financial goals, and though my life in 1987 might as well have been on Mars for how different it feels from theirs, they’re very much like me in their eagerness to join the adult world of commerce and payroll.

Which means I know all the things they have coming. The mid-level manager who will be on a power trip. The policy that feels arbitrary and makes no sense. The coworker who’s difficult to get along with. The realization that every ounce of the working world is just made up: job descriptions, pay structures, procedures. All. Made. Up.

What I hope for them is what I’ve had: a sprinkling of good and bad, of frustrations and failures mixed with little moments of clarity that point the way ahead.

I stayed working at the Y, teaching and coaching gymnastics, all through college at NKU. I was paying for school myself—still a reasonable thing to do in the mid-1990s—so I picked up two more jobs.

The first was at Piece Goods, a fabric store in Edgewood. My mom had taught me to sew, and I’d been accompanying her to fabric stores my entire childhood. I loved everything about sewing and patterns and fabric, so getting the chance to work at one felt like a dream. People who sew are generally a nice crowd, and I wasn’t subject to much rudeness. Probably nothing like my three older sisters, who’d all worked at the Roy Rogers in Covington.

I learned to hustle behind that cutting counter. I would roll out a bolt of fabric, use my thumb and forefinger to measure, stabilize my wrist to cut, and then fold it up in a perfect rectangle. I could work the keys on the cash register at lightning speed. I knew what was on sale each week. I knew where every single thing in the store went. I had so much confidence.

These days, I don’t trust myself to do even the most basic math in my head. I ask Siri everything. Back then, I didn’t need the register to tell me the change.

I had a huge girl crush on my manager, a woman in her late thirties with a big personality and great sense of style. I would have done nearly anything to please her. One day, she called me aside. I was doing great, she said, but my attitude could use work and I should smile more. I still remember the sting. The initial shame, which soon turned into distrust, because I knew that I was polite and competent and trustworthy. I did as I was told, but the place wasn’t the same after that.

Then there was my second job at NKU’s Writing Center, which I told everyone I loved (I had to love it! I was an English major!) but secretly hated. Working there should have been my first inkling that I didn’t like working with students. They’d come with their poorly written papers, and I just wanted to rewrite them. We were supposed to be teaching people how to fish. I wanted to give them the fish (sentences that made sense) and tell them to go away.

But no! I would be a college professor! It was my dream job, dammit. When I got into Miami University’s master’s program with a teaching assistantship and a $7,000 yearly stipend, I was sure I was on my way. My job was teaching two sections of college composition. We had a structure to follow, but the classes were mine, and I had to create the syllabus and lesson plans and do all the grading.

Those first few months, I was in love with the idea of myself as a teacher. But once the honeymoon was over, somewhere around Thanksgiving, I realized I low-key hated it. I loved my graduate work and my seminars. I wanted to read books and write papers about 19th century American literature. I did not want to deal with students every day.

After I got my third set of negative student evaluations, I realized that being a college professor was not the best path for me. The decision to forgo a Ph.D. after I finished my master’s degree hollowed me out and left me feeling purposeless at age 24. I thought I would be debating the racial and sexual politics of anti-slavery literature. Instead, I had to figure out health insurance.

I stumbled through a series of jobs after Miami, working for six months each at a publishing company (sales) and a start-up (office manager) and for two years at an agency (copywriter and account manager). The positives of those years of employment: I got my head out of clouds, I made friends and felt like a young professional, I learned how to be a copywriter, I learned how to network, I learned how business and client service worked, and I was able to buy a car and rent an apartment in Oakley.

But I also learned, painfully, that I didn’t like other people being in charge of me and I certainly didn’t want to be in charge of anyone else. I learned that I was wretched at selling something I didn’t believe in. I learned, mostly, that I couldn’t contort myself to fit into other people’s terms. Smile more! Be perky!

I had the good fortune to get laid off, which led me to freelance writing—the thing I was born to do and have now been doing for 22 years. Every so often, one of my longtime clients will say, When are you going to come work full-time for us? to which I usually respond with something like, How about the 20th of Never Ever? It’s our joke, and I say it with all the levity and charm they’ve come to love about me. But I’m not kidding. I’m the last person anyone would want as an employee.

But what a benefit to have been one. So with every complaint my son has, every story about getting in trouble for something that “totally wasn’t my fault,” every frustration with a policy, I think, Soak in all in, kid. Get paid to learn about who you are. If you’re really lucky, you’ll fail, have an existential crisis, and then get knocked on your ass.

It’s so weird how jobs empower us even as they disappoint and disillusion us. If I had gotten that Ph.D., I’d be able to whip out some Marxist theory right about now. Instead, I write my kid’s Kroger schedule on the calendar and make sure his apron is hanging in the mudroom.

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