Antick Musing's Fridays, Black and Otherwise

[james_davis_nicoll]

[...] [M]odern Westerners can be separated by the work they did when they were young and unskilled. One great mass worked in retail, selling goods of one kind or another. A second cohort worked in food service, waiting tables or working a grill. And the third group, seemingly the luck ones, were those rich or privileged enough not to have to work at all -- the ones who were children, then entirely students, and then set off on their careers, without ever having had "just a job."

Comments

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

oh how times have changed. antick doesn't even mention another cohort -- those whose job path when young and unskilled began with agricultural labor. otherwise accurate though.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Or the significant cohort whose first job is selling drugs.

[ms-danson.livejournal.com]

I'd like to complain about this poll.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I had just-a-jobs but they were sort of scattered and random and seasonal, like working in a greenhouse that supplied veggies to a local gourmet restaurant, or being Santa's Helper at the mall before Christmas.

Before that I worked for my dad at the family business, selling gas and fishing licenses and bailing boats and answering the phone.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

My first job for pay was cataloging several years worth of potentially hazardous chemicals (This would be what led to the "James knocks over a bottle labeled 'picric acid'" incident). The great thing about that job as a starter is that pretty much everything I've done since has been much less likely to end with me scattered over a wide area or reduced to a slurry.

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

How about the ones whose high school employment was white collar paid internships and so forth? I was employed, but it wasn't precisely unskilled labor.

[ccw71266.livejournal.com]

Unexamined assumptions:
1. Retail and food service are inherently unskilled.
2. Such work is automatically what you do before you start your career: it's never a career in and of itself.
3. Those "rich or privileged enough not to have to work at all" never decide to get "just a job" anyway.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

1. Retail and food service are inherently unskilled.

The people who get those jobs are not lacking in skills, they're just very good at picking up new skill sets quickly.

[geekosaur]

Hm. Does freelance system administration (self-taught) leading to a job fit into any of this?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes. It makes you one of the people who gets accused of never having had a real job. (Like me.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The group of entry-level IT/data entry peons, IME, is not trivial, and does not really fit into any of those categories.

[rosefox]

Ditto customer service.

[rosefox]

Comment posted there:

Your division of humanity seems to leave out a lot of people. Farmers, for example, and those who didn't have jobs in high school but did a lot of volunteer work, and those whose "careers" involved customer service or data entry jobs as mindless as any retail shift (we are distinguished from the rest by our unfailing politeness to call center staff even when we are furious, the equivalent of being an ex-waitress who routinely tips 25%), and those who like working in food service or retail and are happy to consider it a career, and those who took apprenticeships, and those who dealt drugs on street corners, and those who were groomed for the clergy, and those who served in the military from the day they turned 18...

What else did I miss?

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

those who had children when they were still in high school.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

My first summer job was TA for Advanced Placement Computer Science. My second was writing database queries for a law firm. Then I went to college.

I've never had a job not involving computers, apart from some freelance math tutoring.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

I think it would be classified as service--my first for-pay job was working as a pinboy in a bowling alley, setting up pins. (It was the last bowling alley in town to need pinboys, and only six of twenty lanes needed them; the others were automatic. I learned about the casual cruelty of adults there--the casual cruelty of kids I already knew about.)

Later were jobs in farming and retail and construction, but that was the first one.

[realinterrobang.livejournal.com]

I never had a job until I was in university, and I don't feel I personally was either rich* or particularly privileged -- I grew up in a quasi-rural area three miles from the nearest bus stop, am disabled, and generally had no reliable access to a car. That pretty much meant I couldn't get a job until I was living on my own in the city...

(* Frexample, my parents were fairly wealthy but I had to beg to get new pairs of shoes when the old ones wore out; my dad's favourite tactic was to glue the soles back on the uppers with lumpy hot glue instead.)

[(Anonymous)]

I know the manufacturing sector is in decline, but some of us actually *made* the goods sold by the first group.

Assuming any of them sold toxic resins or transformer housings, that is.

William Hyde

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I did three years in fast food and have been in retail for more than fifteen.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Retail isn't necessarily unskilled. I got my first Saturday job at 16 by door stepping the manager of the local Best Buy analog in 1984 and demonstrating I could work the computers.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Oops. I failed to work in food service or retail. My bad.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

My first job, in junior high, was marking targets at a rifle range.

A friend's first high school job was working part time at Revenue Canada checking people's tax returns.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I had lots of just-a-jobs (mostly office work, although I did work in a plant nursery for a while, too), but since my "career" petered out, too, I'm back in school (at age fifty) to train for another one.

Now if I could just make my real dreams support me...

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Hm, my first job was as the scorekeeper and statistician of the City Hall softball league, which led to my being hired to do the same job when they started up a hockey league. Where does that fit in?

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

My just-a-jobs as a kid were all musical: I played in a dance band and occasionally in a polka band, and taught clarinet and saxophone lessons. There was a brief and occasional stint as a banquet waitress, but the bulk of my pocket money/college savings as a teen came from playing standards of the '30s and '40s.

Oh, and babysitting! Babysitting was a big source of my youthful income, certainly more than food service but less than music.

Then library jobs and publishing jobs and teaching jobs and university administration jobs and writing jobs.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Never had "just a job".

40 years ago last month, I got my first job, writing assembler code to do stuff for the Carleton College admissions office. I got a phone call one day at home, asking if I would be interested; apparently the director of the computer center had run out of college students, and called the guy who ran the highschool computer center to ask if he had anybody he could suggest. He suggested me. So my first job came to me in a surprise phone call. I said yes, and they gave me the manuals for the IBM 1401 and I read them and taught myself my second assembly language.

The next thing they did is tell me to go talk to the director of the admissions office and find out what this new report he wants is, and write it. Was rather fun; required counting things up in a five-dimensional table (assembly language, remember) and then formatting the results and printing it (fixed-pitch font; no graphics). On a computer with 8000 characters of memory (not bytes). I have no idea why they thought they should send this junior high student who had never had a job before to get the specs from the user boss. It did, however, work out fine.

I've never actually been paid money for doing anything I learned in a school. Mostly I do software (I've worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Network Systems, and Sun Microsystems, among others); I've been paid for some photography (print sales, rights sales, assignments to make new images), and I've been paid for teaching carry permit courses (in Minnesota, you need a special permit to carry firearms; I've signed people off for permits from Minnesota, Utah, and Florida, and I co-wrote a course that other instructors have bought rights to teach).

[m-wesley.livejournal.com]

I didn't get my first job until college, not because I came from a wealthy family but because I was bullied all through high school and was afraid to leave the house unless I had to (school) or unless I was going to one of a few "safe" environments (i.e., the library).

When I did start working, I got jobs that had nothing to do with retail or food service. (At first I wound up in telemarketing, which I was both ashamed of and entirely unsuited for.)

[glamazonwarrior.livejournal.com]

My first jobs were office work for small-businesses. When I was a kid, my mom was an executive recruiter. I'd help her by making copies, doing filing, and typing resumes, both when she worked for a company and when she was self-employed. Then, I received referrals to her contacts. I spent a summer organizing the files for a legal recruiter, for minimum wage, under the table. I had single-day gigs doing data entry for others. That sort of thing. This was all before I was old enough to be legally employed.

When I *was* old enough to be legally employed, I applied for retail and food service, but they didn't hire me. So, my high school jobs were tutoring, babysitting, cleaning houses, and data entry, via the jobs board at the school.

After I was eighteen, my first job was selling perfume door-to-door. Then I spent a week making wreathes in an unheated barn. Then I stood outside, in the winter, getting leads for a computer training school. At some point I was selling Cutco. Then I got a job telemarketing.

The telemarketing job was heaven, at the time. Indoors. On the phone. More than minimum wage. No benefits, but still.

I worked for a year before college.

College jobs included telemarketing, more direct sales, food service, and a pawn shop.

And before I had permanent office work, I worked for temp agencies, which varied from food service, factory work (one day), to office work (most of it fell into this category).

I *also* had small businesses, and did tarot readings by phone.

I tell the intern at the office, who's worked with us since High School and is now in college, that he's incredibly lucky.