My latest piece on Huffington Post is a reminiscence of my arrival in Chicago many springs ago, and the stumbling, bumbling job search that ensued.
It was Mark Ragan and his late father Larry who ended my post-collegiate desperation by hiring me to work at Ragan Communications.
Larry had his own stories of misguided early employment, none better than this one, which I refer to briefly in the HuffPo piece. Here's a longer version, from Larry's family memoir:
U.S. Dental Co.
Triangular building at the
intersection of North Ave., Damen and Milwuakee
June to Sept. 1946
This company sold false teeth by mail. I worked as a sales correspondent. There is no other way to put it: I was dumb.
What blindness prevents us from avoiding such dumb decisions? Was there nobody to tell me that surely, int he post-war booming year of 1946, there were better jobs to be had, better companies to work for? Evidently not.
The company had about 50 employees. It was owned by a lawyer whom we never met, and was run by a formidable woman of middle years who herself would not come in more than three times a week.
Most of the employees worked in the laboratory, making the teeth. I was among a handful of clerks who selected form letters to respond to inquiries or selected different letters to respond to complaints.
The company advertised its money-back guaranteed teeth in pulp magazines that I had no idea existed. A small one-column ad would invite inquiries and requests for the molds that we would send with specific instructions as to how to take an impression. The customer would return the impression and our laboratory would make the teeth. The price was vastly less than a dentist would charge. Amazingly, we'd occasionally get testimonial letters.
The company reflected what may have been routine practices of the depression. We began work precisely at 9:00 a.m. with the ringing of a bell. It was my job to pull the chord that clanged the bell. At 10:15, I'd ring the bell for a 15-minute coffee break, then ring it to signal that the break was over. And so on throughout the day.
It took me only a few months to realize that this work was not for me, so I gave a few weeks notice that fall. The general manager asked me to write her a memo making any suggestions for improvements in operations. I did so, though I have no idea what I said. I'm sure it must have been embarrassingly naive. She never said a word after I gave it to her.
But a few months later, when I was already working for Gaylord Products Co., I learned that she responded to Gaylord's employment inquiry that she wouldn't rehire me because I didn't agree with the company's policies. So it goes.
Triangular building at the
intersection of North Ave., Damen and Milwuakee
June to Sept. 1946
This company sold false teeth by mail. I worked as a sales correspondent. There is no other way to put it: I was dumb.
What blindness prevents us from avoiding such dumb decisions? Was there nobody to tell me that surely, int he post-war booming year of 1946, there were better jobs to be had, better companies to work for? Evidently not.
The company had about 50 employees. It was owned by a lawyer whom we never met, and was run by a formidable woman of middle years who herself would not come in more than three times a week.
Most of the employees worked in the laboratory, making the teeth. I was among a handful of clerks who selected form letters to respond to inquiries or selected different letters to respond to complaints.
The company advertised its money-back guaranteed teeth in pulp magazines that I had no idea existed. A small one-column ad would invite inquiries and requests for the molds that we would send with specific instructions as to how to take an impression. The customer would return the impression and our laboratory would make the teeth. The price was vastly less than a dentist would charge. Amazingly, we'd occasionally get testimonial letters.
The company reflected what may have been routine practices of the depression. We began work precisely at 9:00 a.m. with the ringing of a bell. It was my job to pull the chord that clanged the bell. At 10:15, I'd ring the bell for a 15-minute coffee break, then ring it to signal that the break was over. And so on throughout the day.
It took me only a few months to realize that this work was not for me, so I gave a few weeks notice that fall. The general manager asked me to write her a memo making any suggestions for improvements in operations. I did so, though I have no idea what I said. I'm sure it must have been embarrassingly naive. She never said a word after I gave it to her.
But a few months later, when I was already working for Gaylord Products Co., I learned that she responded to Gaylord's employment inquiry that she wouldn't rehire me because I didn't agree with the company's policies. So it goes.
And how did it go for you? Tell the sordid story here!
I lasted 3 months at a Burger King when I was 15. We had to buy the orange and brown polyester uniforms–the price came out of your first paycheck–and we were told to buy those orthopedic-type shoes.
So I bought nurse shoes. White ones, because nurse shoes did not come in brown in 1977. And turned up on my first day to find (a) that the guy who had been my best friend in fifth grade and the prettier Wendy whom he suddenly preferred to hang out with in sixth grade were both working there, and (b) nobody else had obeyed the orthopedic-shoe diktat.
When it was slow, we threw pickles on the ceiling to see whose stuck the longest. When we were busy, we would race each other on the line to see who could slap a burger together the fastest. Once a new person (after a month, I was an old hand) didn’t clean the milkshake machine correctly and we nearly poisoned people with bleach in their drinks.
I lasted 3 months, until my next bad job, at a department store. I have also been a banquet and restaurant waitress, a bartender, and for one Christmas, an order taker in the bowels of Selfridges’ Food Hall.
My degrees? A B.A. in European studies & linguistics, and a master’s in French & English poetry.
My first full-time job after university (that’s what we in Canada call “college”) was working for lawyers as a paralegal in a lawfirm that specialized in personal injury cases – you know motor vehicle accidents, slip-and-fall, etc.
Do I need to say anything more??!! I’m thinking not.
Well, maybe one more thing – I lasted all of about 10 months before I quit. Ugh! Thank you SO much for dredging up THAT memory David!!
Wendi, you remind me of the hardware store where I worked as a troubled teen. My daily choice was, “Steal a dollar out of the till to buy some smokes at the grocery store next door … or steal the smokes from the store.”
I was fired after three months, not for stealing but because I still didn’t know where we kept the paint.
We grow in integrity and competence.
@Kristen: aside from it not being a communication job, what was the day-to-day agony involved in working for ambulance chasers?
Where to begin?
The lawyers were not nice people – not that there aren’t lawyers who ARE nice people. I’m sure there are – but the ones I worked for did not fit that description. They treated the paralegals like crap (pick up my dry-cleaning, order flowers for my wife, etc.) despite the fact that we were doing the bulk of the client interaction work, plus a bunch of the legal document preparation and dealing with doctors, insurance companies, and law enforcement.
The job itself required us to open as many cases each day as physically possible in what was essentially an assembly line format of grilling each client on the gory details of their accident and probing for as many sneaky little details as possible to allow the lawyer to strong-arm the “liable” party’s insurance company into settling.
We also had the fun of reviewing the technicolor photographs of the injuries sustained by our clients in graphic detail to write reports for the lawyers. And while I am not at all squeamish, I am here to tell you that I STILL remember some of those photos vividly more than 20 years later!
When I took the job I’d hoped to be able to actually use my degree (My B.A. was a major in Law). Instead I got to wade mercilessly into other people’s misery in return for a relatively paltry salary and to pad the coffers of greedy lawyers. Pretty much the worst of everything.
I’ve just GOTTA be a maverick, so my first 3 jobs were amazing and still inform my decisions and thinking today. I started at a university instructional television station marketing department, went to a business daily from there, and ended up with a major corporation doing newsletters (speeches, brochures, testimony, proposal executive summaries, and anything else that needed to be written). I can’t think of a better foundation for a corp communicator.
Lest I sound smug, I’ve had much worse jobs since then…
Ooh, Kristen, that does sound nasty. Probably made every job since seem reasonable by comparison.
And Amy, I too had a great early job—for five years before and during college I worked as a greenskeeper on a golf course. It got to be a pretty responsible job, as the superintendent trusted a friend and me with a lot.
There, a lazy teenager learned how good it is to work hard, and learned that even repetitive work can be satisfying.