the one with the pubic library

Like Kat, my first job was babysitting, from the time I took a Red Cross Babysitting Course (yeah, that’s right) up until all of the kids I babysat got too old for sitting. But my first real job, the first job I got an actual paycheck minus taxes for, was at the public library.

I don’t remember interviewing, although I’m sure I did, and I was hired, along with several other high school students (and one woman in her twenties we called "Obegone" due to her love of Star Wars and her habit of cornering you with conversation forever and ever and ever) as a library aide. My responsibilities? Um, yeah, pretty much putting books away? And making sure the rest of the books were in order? But after a while, I was allowed to check out books for the patrons, which mean playing with the sonic-screwdrivery scanny pen thing. That’s the technical name, by the way.

I met some of my best friends at this job and, being 16-year-olds, we didn’t have the greatest work ethic. I mean, sure, we did what we were supposed to but there was a lot of downtime, especially if you worked during the day. And especially especially in the summer. We were supposed to do “shelf-reading” if we had downtime, which meant checking to see where the last person had stopped, and then going to that section of the library to make sure each shelf was in order. WHOOHOO. Actually, this wasn’t so bad if you were in the right section. Shelf-reading is how I ran across books called Be Your Own Dick and Mommy Laid an Egg.

Here are some things we/I did, however, instead of working:

1. Hid in the corner, “organizing” newspapers, but really just talking.

2. Raced shelving carts down the aisles.

3. Read books (duh, we were in a library)

4. Avoided a coworker I nicknamed Scary Larry because of his proclivity to talk to me like Forrest Gump, tell me I reminded him of The Virgin Mary, ask me if I liked snake handling, and ask if I liked to, and I quote, "do it like they do on the Discovery Channel"

It wasn’t all fun, I mean, it was still WORK. Once it rained so much that the roof started leaking and a soggy tile from the ceiling fell on my head. We had a patron that smelled like dirty feet, another who would wear only boxer shorts and a wife beater in the summer, a man who FREAKED OUT on me because the library’s copy of Fantasia was checked out, and one day, a sweet old man came to the counter and told me that someone had pooped on the bathroom floor.

Luckily it was the men’s room, so I didn’t have to deal with it, but that wasn’t the first poop incident the Dayton Library chain had ever dealt with. Before I worked there, someone had been going into another library branch, pooping in books he thought were inappropriate, and placing them carefully back on the shelves. It was on The Daily Show, back when Craig Kilborn hosted it, but I can’t find a clip, even though I’ve been Googling things like, “ohio poop in books” and “craig kilborn library poop,” for like half an hour.

Anyway, I left the job when I went to college but before I did, I took a souvenir:

The Public ibrary

I felt kind of bad afterward but at least I never pooped on the floor.

#humblebrag

Three-fifths of my day is spent in contemplating my many, many flaws, the full list of which I've yet to come anywhere near finishing. I am moody and high-strung, quick to anger and slow to forgive. I'm too weak to lift heavy objects and too slow to be an effective running partner. I can't reach cans perched on high shelves. I am a light sleeper. But I think the very worst of my shortcomings is my remarkable capability. I can pretty much do anything, which leaves me particularly bereft of amusing anecdotes about past foibles. In short, I am FAIL Blog's worst nightmare.


deal with it

I was born with impeccable taste and an innate savoir-faire. A natural athlete, I was the youngest person to ever compete in the Tour de France, finishing a respectable sixth place at the age of three.


deal with it

In fact, as a child I was so witty and pretty and bright that I inspired all of my parents' many friends to go forth and procreate in hopes that their own offspring may one day emulate my many successes.


deal with it

It should therefore come as no surprise that I was (and this is really the only way to describe it) a RAGING SUCCESS at my first job: Babysitter Extraordinaire. Parents across South Florida had such faith in my abilities that they placed me in charge of their precious cargoes long before I could even drive a car. In later years I transitioned into full-time nanny for a rag-tag group of well-to-do moppets, ages ranging from three months to eight years, and for five years I single-handedly raised those four kids (on winter, spring, and summer vacations). In fact, when people ask why I don't have any children of my own (so good I am at motherhood) I tell them I ALREADY DONE DID THAT SHIT. And how could one possibly improve upon perfection?

I achieved equal success in subsequent jobs. In college I consistently navigated Tulane University's enormous grocery shuttle through narrow, bumpy New Orleans streets, perfectly parking the behemoth every time. The summer before law school I was George Stephanopoulos's favorite barista. The United States of America has awarded me THREE medals for my outstanding lawyering. But nothing will ever top my first triumph, which has now morphed into my latest failure. So I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to you, our dear readers. If I'd only fucked up more during my first job, I'd actually have something to write about today.

The first (sticky) paycheck I ever received smelled liked apples and cinnamon

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a secret.

A long time ago, I was illegally employed by a little shoppe called the Long Grove Apple Haus under the table because I wasn't of working age yet. They hired me for a weekend to assist for the Annual Long Grove Apple Fest, a tradition "as American as apple pie."

Long Grove is a Historical District, founded in 1838, with over 80 shops with names like Charlotte's Chapeaux (selling hats for all ages!) and Paddy's On The Square (Irish music, art, and sportwear!) and about a gazillion antique stores that my grandmother frequented often. This place had to be the prototype for Stars' Hollow.

My grandmother had secured me the position. When antiquing she would stop at the Haus and get some apple goods for the way home. After discovering that one of the owners had a grandson my age she immediately offered my apple services.

Being only 15, I had no apple services. I really had no services aside from the quadratic equation and AOL instant messaging but, hey, everyone likes money. Especially secret government-free money.

The thing about being paid under the table is that you don't get things like overtime. Overtime would have come in handy since we worked the entire festival. I'm talking 14-hour days working at an Apple Haus. Haus, people!

It was so sticky. My first duty was boxing the fresh-out-of-the-oven pies. The kitchen of the establishment was in the basement. It was a cellar really. An I-cannot-believe-it-passed-fire-code cellar. They put my fifteen-year-old self down there with the big scary oven with a stack of brown bags. I boxed 30 pies in a row. Then I boxed another 30 pies 15 minutes later when the first 30 had already sold.

The spring Chicago weekend was filled with dreary, damp weather and after I caught up with the oven I was sent outside (in the rain!) to give away free samples of the famous Apple Cinnamon Donuts.

I met the grandson there, under a soggy tent distributing mini sticky donuts. We chatted a bit and I fell in love. I wondered what he thought I might look like not covered in sugar. I wondered what it would be like to be dry again. I never saw him again. I turned 16 before the next fest and moved on to a real-deal, government-approved, timecard-punching job.

At the end of the fest they let me bring home tons of apple pies. I couldn't stand the smell of them. They fed us for almost a week. My mom says she knows they survived that long because it's so memorable that there was actually enough dessert to last that long.

I can't remember what was worse: standing outside in the pouring raining distributing hot cider and donuts for six hours straight, being in cellar hell with no promise of survival, or having to smell all those Apple Haus smells for days after. Or, you know, the unrequited love I forced upon myself.

I was going to quote High School Musical 2, but you're already going to judge me hard enough after reading this post.

When I was just a teenager I used to get so mad when adults said things like “You’re just a teenager.” Like I was too dumb to understand the world or something. But looking back on it now: Jeepers H. Christmas, was I ever too dumb to understand the world or something. I mean, a) Science (your skull is still soft when you’re a teenager and also your brain isn’t finished growing), and b) Tesseract (teenagers have exactly zero frame of reference outside their tiny square on the space-time continuum). Maybe that second thing isn’t true for every teenager (Hermione Granger, for example), but it was true for me in my one-horse town.

I got my first job when I was 17 at Lake Lanier Islands Resort like every other 17-year-old that attended every school in my county. I’m not even kidding. Practically every kid I knew worked for LLI. It was like when the Saved By The Bell gang got jobs at Mr. Carosi’s beach resort. Or like the second High School Musical.

There were about a gazillion jobs at LLI. You could be a cater-waiter at the hotel or an errand-runner at the Harbor Office or a caddy at the Legacy on Lanier golf course. You could sell ice creams inside the water park or work at the tube rental station. Or you could be a lifeguard. It paid the least of any LLI job — $5.15 an hour for shallow-water guards, $5.35 an hour for deep-water guards — but it was at the tip-top of the social hierarchy and you got to sit in the sun in a swimsuit all day. And so a deep-water lifeguard I became.

About 150 lifeguards worked at the water park, and 130 of us were under 18. I don’t know how to over-emphasize how catastrophically insane that was. Our supervisors were all college kids, which meant one thing: access to booze. I worked at LLI for two summers and never did I ever make it through a whole water slide or wave pool rotation that didn’t include at least one lifeguard who was still drunk from the night before. Even the guards like me, who were absolute teetotalers, were skilled in the art of not giving a fuck. We were teenagers; it’s who we were.

Adults who couldn’t swim felt perfectly safe riding the slides all day long. Or riding an inflatable tube in the ten-foot-deep wave pool. Parents would drop off their elementary school-aged kids on the way to work and pick them up on the way home. Once a week, this inner-city camp would bring us four busloads of kids who couldn’t swim. Their counselors would just strap life jackets on them and then abandon them for the shade.

Did this misplaced trust make me and my fellow lifeguards worry? Did we think maybe we should take things a little more seriously, like CPR lessons and, you know, staying awake? No. No, we did not. We saw those buses of sinking kids and giggled to each other about, “The rocks are here!” before getting back to our primary concern of sunscreen application.

It seems impossible that no one has ever died at that water park.

I’m ashamed to know that an actual grown-up with an actual fully-formed skull was either dumb enough or greedy enough to hire a gaggle of teenagers to keep people alive. I’m also ashamed to know that if I had a time machine to take me back to those summers, the first thing I’d say to my young, dumb self is, “Oh my God, look at your tan!”

Bitch, please.

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