Jobs I had as a teenager

My friend at work told me once that she worried that her teenaged kids would have negative first job experiences, and this would impede their desire to work hard and get ahead.  I considered my early job history and wondered if my current ethic has somehow been compromised by my initial encounter with the working world.

Like many other girl-children of the 70's, my first jobs were babysitting.  Before the advent of modern parenting paranoia, any local tween or teen, known or unknown to a family, was a candidate for watching bratty children while parents cavorted about town.  During the 70’s people drank, and that included parents.  Expected parental activities included: donning excruciatingly visible attire; driving to pick up an strange local teenaged gal; kissing the kids goodbye after explaining what kind of goodie could be expected for dinner and dessert; driving to an exciting local eating establishment; quaffing significantly with other willing adults at the restaurant bar while waiting for a table; driving home to pay a strange local teenager $1/hour for keeping the household children alive; and then driving the strange local teenaged gal home. 

Generally, the trip from my house to the family’s house alone in the car with the strange dad was disturbing.  The hallmark, “So what grade are you in school?” never really broke the tension and I am sure I presented as uptight and dull.  However, the frightening drunken dad drive home nearly smashed any innate desire I had for seriously working.  I felt small, insignificant and ashamed as I was ushered home by a gin-and-tonic-breathing local baron of industry, only to be further dismissed by a handful of folding money and a dangerous, “Sheeya later kiddo….I left ya ya a little tip in there.”

The summer after my Junior year in high school, I obtained a job at a local cultural resort where my family sometimes vacationed.  I lived in a cramped, stifling bunkhouse over the kitchen of a rotting Victorian hotel with “fast” kids who sometimes couldn’t get up in the morning to go to work.  Because I could type and miraculously traveled downstairs to work each day, I was awarded extra tasks of banging together the daily menu and mimeographing it on an ancient tumbling machine in addition to my waitress duties.

Possibly due to my taking on extra work without complaint, (read: malleability,) I was recommended somehow to do some personal tasks for an elderly woman whose caregiver had to leave for a week.  She was a round woman of old-fashioned slumping enormity.  Her body sagged like suet melting in a woodpecker feeding bag. Her hair was shaped rather than styled, and somehow the combs that held it together seemed wedged into her skull.  You could detect the exact smell of her head from any corner of the room.  Smiling, she somehow reminded me of those drunken dads driving my home from babysitting, expecting that I would seem subservient and grateful to earn a small wad of bills.  She found me at the restaurant and explained, “I need a girl to do some things for me while Miranda is away.”

Between meal shifts, I arrived at her boarding house on the day and time upon which we agreed.  She greeted me with smug enthusiasm, lightly asking how my summer was going.  She requested that I take all of the contents out of her handkerchief and scarf drawer, and iron them, which I did straight away.  She asked me brightly from across the room to turn down her bed, and to move a suitcase from under her bed to under the bureau.  After a light dusting of the interior of her modest cultural retreat abode, I was dismissed, and told to return the following day at the same time and place.  She paid me a couple of bucks for my time.

The next day, I returned to a duplication of tasks: empty the handkerchief and scarf drawer; iron everything; turn down the bed and lightly dust.  I did these items quite cheerfully and silently, and again received payment and instructions to return again tomorrow. 

On the third day, Madam requested me to start on the handkerchiefs while she went into the bathroom.  I considered not actually ironing them, as they were still quite crisp from two days of hot flattening.  I could hear her start a bath, and I dutifully did what I was told.  After ironing several handkerchiefs, Madam called for me to come into the bathroom.  There, in the stagnant bathroom that smelled of poorly ventilated antediluvian woodwork entombing a half-century of mouse nests and old lady fannies, stood Madam, wearing only a full-body corset that laced in the back like a pair of ice skates. 

At that moment all the questions I had about why she needed her damn handkerchiefs ironed everyday were answered: Madam was trapped in her ancient brassier.  She was held together by sepia-colored undergarments engineered like suspension bridges and without the nimble fingers of Miranda or some girl to unlock her cage, Madam was not going to have her weekly bath.  My stomach fell into my knees.

First I had to unlace her, which was way too intimate for a 16-yr-old girl who presents as uptight and dull, away from her home for her first real summer job.  I could smell Madam’s ancient flesh and knew suddenly that my doggedly ironing and folding the handkerchiefs was a test to see if I could take direction and be trusted to be quiet in her presence.  After peeling the cruddy garment from her body, I had to help her with her granny pants, and then assist Madam into the tub.  Looking away from her and around the crumbling bathroom to maintain both of our dignities, I saw with horror a similar stained old back-lacing brassier hanging from the shower rod.  Only Miranda could have put it there, and I anticipated the awfulness of my next obvious task.

She told me that while she was bathing, I would have to soak and then scrub her brassier.  Then I would scrub her back, help her from the tub, dry her off and contain her body in the dry torture garment in the bathroom that Miranda had left her.  I was mortified as I completed these ghastly instructions.

When I look back upon this day, I am ashamed that I was disgusted with an elderly matron who loved culture and summer, but could only retain her caregiver for the first week of her annual stay.  She was so very alone and possibly trying to maintain a lifetime tradition of three weeks on Lake Chautauqua, attending the symphony and strolling on the mall, noting every building and tree of her youth, joining an author discussion or historical lecture.  I was 16 years old, and it was 1979.  My unpreparedness for being Madam’s bra and girdle scrubber and bath valet spooked me and I was so embarrassed I could never return, nor could I tell anyone about it.

Madam came looking for me at the restaurant later in the week.  I saw her hairdo bobbing up and down out the window and hid from sight.  She asked the other waitresses in a loud, entitled, impatient tone why I didn’t come back to work for her; sadly, after that bath she’d wanted me to return in a couple of days and I could tell that she wasn’t going to have me iron the dusty handkerchiefs anymore.  It would be all baths and bras from now on.  I hastily told her I would do it but then I never showed up.  As I hid from her at the restaurant, I could tell she was desperate for a bath and a change of undergarments, but I couldn’t bring myself to assist her.

I hope that I grew from these early work experiences.  Today I consider myself to be a hard worker, but clear about what the duties are up-front.  I don’t like to be surprised by anything and always ask a lot of questions.  I can speak truth to power.  I show up when I am supposed to.  After the initial embarrassments that I experienced of not being able to discern intimacy from service in the cars of my babysitting bosses and in Madam’s bathroom, I better understand that sometimes I have to be able to talk to people I don’t know, and sometimes I have to roll up my sleeves and get the unpleasant tasks underway.  These are soft skills, learned the hard way.