Welcome to the World of Work, Young Man...

I have always worked.  From the time I was about 14, I have never, ever been without a job for any significant length of time.  I’m addicted to work.  But in a good way (as all the addicts say).  In my next life I’m going to be addicted to sex.  I’ve decided.

My very first job was going door to door selling greeting cards and chatchkis from a catalogue.  I sure didn’t get rich at that, but it introduced me to cold calling and rejection, which was excellent preparation for the world of dating that was just around the corner.  

I had a flyer route, which was a horrific experience.  With no notice whatsoever I'd wake up on Saturday morning and a truckload of flyers would be sitting in my driveway and they had to be delivered that day.  Sometimes it was the typical grocery store flyer, which was no big deal, but every couple of months, the Sears catalogue.  This is certainly no reflection on Sears as a company, but holy crap their catalogues are heavy.  Reward for delivering Sears catalogues to my entire neighbourhood in one rainy or snowy afternoon?  $8.00.  The experience?  Priceless.

In grade ten, I secured my first real job, and it was the first evidence that there was some value in being the teacher’s pet (read:  total geek with no social life and no hope of ever getting a girlfriend).  I was hanging around the library  at Delta Secondary School during my lunch and breaks between classes, as all the really cool kids did.  Sometimes I would help the librarian, whose name was Mrs. Butt.  Yep.  Mrs. Butt.  I was kissing up to Mrs. Butt, and before you knew it, I became a paid employee of the Hamilton-Wentworth Board of Education.  That’s right…$3.25 an hour to shelve books during spare periods, lunches and after school. 

What I didn’t know then was that this would turn into my first career.  I worked for Mrs. Butt and Mrs. Heritage (now there’s a name for a librarian) for the next four years (easy now, we had grade 13 in those days, I wasn’t held back).  If you were on staff during the school year, you also got a summer job.  Who knew that people actually worked in the library during the summer?

Perhaps to use the word ‘work’ to describe this summer job is to give the experience too much of a formal flavor.  We showed up (the other geeks and me) each day, watched TV, talked, fixed a couple of busted up old books, alphabetized the card catalogue (yep, no computers), went to lunch, did nothing in the afternoon, then went home at 3:30.  What an introduction to the world of work.  

Mrs. Butt was off for the summer like all the other teachers, but Mrs. Heritage was there to supervise.  I’m not sure whether it was her punishment, or why she got stuck being the summer librarian, but she was, and she was awesome.  As a boss, extremely flexible, she was generous, and on occasion, tough.  She would remind us gently in July that the major project for the summer was ‘shelf reading’, which for you non-library types means making sure all the books are in the right order on the shelves, was due to be finished before Mrs. Butt came back at the end of August. 

In the first week of August the reminders came more regularly, and by mid August, the reminders became warnings.  By the last week of August, our super cool gang of summer library geeks was going cross-eyed because we were trying to do a full summer’s worth of work in one week.  No wonder nobody could ever find the Shakespeare they were looking for.  My very first introduction to project management.  Who knew that would lead me to a life of Gant charts and MS Project.

The library job kept me going all the way to university.  It sure didn’t pay too much, but it was an introduction and an experience I won’t forget.  

It also likely won’t be a surprise then, when I share the big secret that I never got laid in high school.