My career path has been amazingly compressed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the average worker will have seven different careers in their lives. I’ve had three.
You see, I never held a job when I was in high school. My mom wouldn’t let me, saying that school was my job and that I shouldn’t be distracted by such silly things as earning or saving money.
As a result, outside of two work-study jobs (one paid $275/month in 1980), I never held a real job until after college.
Being a recent graduate of our educational system — go Dawgs — I figured the world would beat a path to my door. It didn’t. Worse, there was a bun in the oven and it was scheduled to be done seven weeks after graduation.
Not exactly a lot of time to find the career of my dreams. I gave it the old college try though, pouring through The Seattle Time classifieds every day, writing countless cover letters and sending out a ton of resumes.
For all my efforts I had a manila folder filled with rejection letters from some of the best companies in Western Washington. Thanks but no thanks, Robb. Good luck in your career search, we’re certain it will be successful.
It wasn’t by any stretch. Faced with said bun and its obligations, I shifted my strategy and began to apply for everything I could think of, figuring that at least I would get a foot in the door.
I can’t blame anyone for not hiring me. I didn’t have much to show them, except the promise that I was promising.
I finally got two nibbles. Kmart called me and asked me to come in for an interview to sell cameras in their Renton store. A grocery wholesaler also called me in, for a job I didn’t even remember applying for – Mail Clerk/Driver.
I guess the Driver part of the job appealed to me. At the appointed time on the appointed day, I arrived at the south end of Boeing field for what was just another in a long string of interviews. You’d think I’d be pretty good at it by now, but no one asked any of the questions I had prepared hours in advance to answer.
Long story short, I got the job. For $5 an hour, I would be a Mail Clerk/Driver I. If I was really ambitious, I could make Mail Clerk II and make $5.25 in no time.
I really liked the job. It wasn’t really much in the mental challenge department, but it is the only job I have had over the ensuing years where I could leave at the end of the day and never think about the job again until 8:30 a.m. the next day when I started all over again.
Even though I was a lowly mailroom clerk, I did the job really well. I quickly figured out how to do my four daily mail runs in half the time, allowing me to move an apartment once without anyone knowing it. I’ll leave you, gentle reader, to decide if that story’s apocryphal or not.
What was a daily mail run like? Let’s see. After getting to work I immediately headed, off to the postal distribution center at 4th and Lander to pick up the morning mail then head back, dump the mail in the mailroom for sorting. At 10, back to the post office, with stops at the credit union and bakery, meat/produce and general merchandise warehouses. Typically there would be two or three 60 pound bags of mail waiting on the loading dock for me on the first run to the post office and one or two on the second run. Thank God I was a stud back in those days and could hoist these bags around fairly easily.
In the afternoon, a 1:30 p.m. run to the same departments, with a slight detour to the bank to make the daily deposits. I think the most I ever took to the bank on a particular day was $22 million. Freaked me out.
Then the real work began. Back at the home office, it was time to prepare all the mailings. This was back in the day before the Internet so all the order guides for all the commodities were printed each day and then slotted in suspended file folders. Once all the books were in, they were packaged into envelopes that were dropped off at Transportation so they could go out on the daily store deliveries. Alaska mailings were sent First Class, so those went with me on the last run to the post office.
The routine rarely changed, except when their was something for the lawyers downtown at which point I turned into company courier and drove into Seattle. It was there that I learned to drive a clutch, climbing one of the hills by the Bank of California, a funny smell coming from the transmission as I learned how to ease my foot off a clutch without rolling back into the car tucked up right behind me.
Even though the pay wasn’t much, I loved that first job. I guess everyone looks fondly back on his or her first job eventually, but I thought it was fun then and I still remember it well.
It also did give me a stepping stone to my first public relations job. It took four long years in the mailroom and 14 different applications for jobs in the advertising department before I finally got my big break, going from a Grade 9 to a Grade 30 over a weekend.
Talk about a surreal event in your early work life. On Friday you’re in your jeans, slogging mail, and on Monday you’re in a suit being shown your new office.
Now I am on my third career and fifth job in the last 34 years. Somewhere I am an asterisk next to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics’ numbers. Everything is in perfect order – seven careers and 11.4 jobs in a lifetime – except for that damned Robb guy over in Washington State. Rebel.
In the Emerald City, thinking about what would have happened if I had taken that Kmart job,
– Robb