My First Job

First of a Series

The week marks the second anniversary of first professional level job. In honor of that I have decided to look back on all of the crap jobs that proceeded it. Low paying crap, I got my social security statement in the mail yesterday, which lists out what I have made in every year I worked. I made more in 2006 than I did in 1994 to 2005 combined.

When I tuned 14 back in 1994 my mother deiced that it would be a valuable life lesson if I got a small part time job. In Colorado the only entity that can hire people hire people under the age of 16 is the State. So I got a job at Colorado State University working in the dorm kitchens washing dishes, in the summer the dorms were rented out by youth conferences.

I would ride my bike over to campus and for two or three hours a day I would unload dishes from the end of conveyor-belt style dishwasher. For my efforts that summer I made the princely sum of $700, which at the time actually seemed like a lot. In the summer of 1995 I once again worked the same job, this time with my brother.

One of things that sticks most in my mind about this job was the site of food being prepared in bulk. Later on when I was in school eating in cafeteria the memory of food being prepared in bulk would be unsettling. Eggs did not come from eggshells but rather from half gallon cartons labeled "Frozen Egg Product With Citric Acid." Food just is not pretty when prepared in bulk.

The other thing that sticks out in my mind is obsession that they had with trash can cleanliness. So great was the concern with this issue that there was a special machine whose sole function was clean and sterilize trash cans. They were quite insistent that every trash can was sanitized everyday. In regards to hand washing, management, adopted a much more laissez faire attitude.

Next Job: The Golden Corral-A Study in Gluttony