Newspaper route. Ice cream scooper. Magician's assistant. McDonald's cashier.
Ask anybody what their first job was and you're probably going to get an answer like this. A low paying, no career-path job for minimum wage. It has to be like this for most of us, whose daddies aren't hotshot lawyers or famous rock stars (do you realize that Jack Osbourne's answer will be "talent scout"? That's just so weird...). These crappy jobs supposedly build character, and I guess they succeed for a lot of people, including me. This is, of course, assuming you define character as "the willingness to do just about anything else as long as it pays better and doesn't require interaction with the public."
Well, that's what I learned from my first job anyway. It was a while before I actually succeeded in making better money and getting away from people, but you have to start somewhere and in my quest for financial independence I definitely started somewhere. Unfortunately, that somewhere was on another planet.
My first job was at a toy store. I was a sophomore in high school at the time, and I thought it'd be a fun place to work, since I like kids and I like toys. I forgot that we were heading into the holiday season and things were going to get crazy. Not just normal run-of-the-mill Sunday-afternoon-at-the-mall crazy. I'm talking one-week-before-Christmas-and-Brittany-just-added-a-Baby-Wets-Um-to-her-Santa-list-and-we-have-to-get-to-the-toy-store-right-NOW-and-grab-the-last-one-in-the-state crazy. You know what I'm talking about here. I also didn't realize that the toy store was owned and run by a certifiably insane Asian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Lee, whose lack of management acumen was matched only by the heights of weirdness that their personality quirks hit on the wacko scale.
It's hard now to imagine a more character building job than this one, even if it did only last 3 weeks.
There were two toy stores at our mall. One was the big franchise Kay-Bee's, (which has since modernized and become "KB Toys") and the other was the small overpriced mom and pop place where I worked. Mrs. Lee had an inordinate fear of our answering her phone, "Hello, Kay-Bee's Toy Store". So intense was her dread that she drilled her admonishment into our heads constantly in a shrill, panicky voice. "You no answer phone Kay-Bee's! Never!" I don't know why she thought we would, since we didn't work at Kay-Bee's, but she was so terrified that we might that I wasn't allowed to answer the phone for my first two weeks on the job because I might screw up. Every time the phone rang during my training time, she made me watch another employee answer, then reminded me firmly, "No Kay-Bee!" She was a sharp, crabby, intimidating woman, and with no experience to fall back on I was scared to death of her.
As you might expect, the job wasn't that great. I hated the cash registers, froze when I had to run a credit card, and learned exactly how quickly kids become monsters when exposed to walls full of toys. We actually found a human feces on the carpet one evening - I guess some poor kid just couldn't take all the excitement. Mr. Lee tried to get me to clean it up since I was the most junior of the crew, but I argued that since it was his store, cleanliness of this sort really fell into his camp. I've always been eager to please my superiors, but that day I found that I had a line and cleaning poop off the carpets at minimum wage was my limit. At the very least I figured such a task should include some hazard pay and until Mr. Lee antied up I was having none of it. He wound up making another "associate" (read: teenager scared witless of him) scoop up the mess with a dustpan. That was the day I learned about delegation, which is a lesson I turned around and used to my advantage later in life. In case you haven't learned this yet, here you go (credit Mr. Lee and me): when you're the boss, it's often far more effective to take the occasional (excuse the pun) shit job yourself rather than trying to make a subordinate do it. When the employees see that you're willing to jump in the trenches too, it often results in their willingness to hop in even before you have to ask them the next time around. Mr. Lee clearly didn't know that.
Neither, I might add, have many of my subsequent managers.
The Lee's were easily agitated and as such were an easy mark for my co-workers and me. Each of us was subjected to constant haranguing from the pair in charge, who consistently put forth the idea that they could do any and every job better than we could do it, but then didn't actually do much at all except criticize. Any opportunity to push their buttons was fair game, and we capitalized on any cracks in their armor.
The toy store had a display of dollhouses along the right back wall. One afternoon, one of my high-school co-workers, Camie, wandered up to the front of the store snickering like mad. James, another young employee, soon followed, smirking all the way. Mrs. Lee arrived from the back room about 5 minutes later, her lips pursed and her face a bright, angry red. Mr. Lee was helping me at the register, and she conversed with him in rapid fire Chinese for a moment, after which they both stormed back to the dollhouse display. I turned to Camie and asked what the deal was.
Between snickers, she explained that she and James had found two dolls in a display house, undressed and in a... compromising position in the master bedroom. They had left them where they found them, the thought of the rigid Lee's reaction to this abomination having too much potential entertainment value to ignore. First a big crap on the carpet and now indecent figurine behavior. What was the world coming to?
When the Lee's returned they chastised us all for allowing such things to happen in their store, and then commanded us to watch the displays every time anyone approached them. The net result of this ridiculous request was that every employee in the store at one time or another ensured that a doll house couple was found by the Lee's en flagrante - sometimes on the roof, occasionally in the kitchen, several times on the dining room table. It got such a fantastic response from them that we started running into each other on the way to "set 'em up." No, it wasn't mature. But fifteen years later I'm not one bit sorry for arranging Barbie and Ken in the lotus position in the upstairs bathroom of her penthouse. The two-hour wait for Mrs. Lee's discovery was worth every stifled giggle.
Dollhouse affairs aside, after several weeks on the job I dreaded going to work, for I knew that my ability to lay low and stay out of trouble wouldn't last forever. One particularly loud Saturday afternoon, I had about 8 people in line, had gone through several returns in a row, the "experienced" cashier had gone for lunch, and the credit card machine kept spitting rejections back at me. I was working on overdrive, not really thinking, and just letting the rhythm of the work carry me until my shift was over when the phone rang. I reached for it, and smoothly answered, "Hello, Kay-Bee's Toy Store".
There was a brief moment when I did not register what I had just said. From the other end of the phone, Mrs. Lee screamed my name and began to have what I can only assume was a cerebral hemorrhage. My shock at myself could not have been higher. My own brain began to do somersaults, trying to figure out a way to explain this unbelievable behavior of mine but I didn't know about my subconscious at the time, nor about self-fulfilling prophecies, so I stayed silent. Mrs. Lee and I remained on the phone for a painfully long moment and then she screamed my name again and without answering, without thinking, I quietly placed the receiver back in the cradle. I figured I'd said enough.
I quit the next day. Mrs. Lee still probably thinks she fired me, but given the circumstances, she didn't. I went to a different high school than the other slav... err, employees at the toy store. Thus, our holiday schedules were different. The Lee's had planned a mandatory employee meeting at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, which was OK for the public school kids since they started their Christmas breaks on Wednesday, but the private school I attended didn't start vacation until Friday. At 1:30 p.m. on Thursday I was going to be in algebra class, and while I would have gone a long way to avoid equations, hanging with Mrs. Lee wasn't going to get me out of school. I tried to explain this several times but to no avail. If I wanted to keep my job I was simply going to have to find a way to be at the meeting.
I happily quit over the phone. It worked out OK all the way around since Mrs. Lee hated me for the Kay-Bee incident and Mr. Lee hated me because Mrs. Lee hated me. I never set foot in the toy store again, and they went out of business less than a year later. Interestingly, the Kay-Bee toy store is, over 15 years later, still in the exact same place, doing a thriving business. I've never been tempted to submit an application, though.
- KNP Sept 22, '02
