My First Job

Call me lazy, or just call me resourceful, but I just went to a website where you can get automatic blog prompts. The first prompt that came up for me was this :

suggested by Spelling Search

"Describe your very first job and what you learned from it."

It's a good prompt I think. It made me think back to my very first working experience and all of the crazy jobs that have followed since.

My first job ever was at Blenzers in Downtown Pleasanton. It was a smoothie place competing with Jamba Juice when smoothies were all the rage. I'm pretty sure it was the summer before my sophomore year of high school, which means I was about 15 years old. Everyone that worked there was 15-16 years old and female, including my best friend Monica who got me the job. I remember that we had a lot of fun concocting weird and revolting smoothies when there were no customers and I also remember that there were boys coming in to visit one or all of us all the time. I also recall that the managers of the place were basically never around. Seems weird when I think back on it now that they would leave their place of business in the hands of a bunch of teenage girls but back then we had no problem with it. It was a pretty sweet deal: no real supervision, friends to gossip with, free smoothies and plenty of gentleman callers.

What did I learn from that job? I learned even then, that the working world has a lot to do with who you know. I knew Monica who knew one of the managers, and so I got the job without even so much as an interview. I learned how to handle money and use a register, which I would use again later. I discovered that I definitely did need to go to college so as not to have a job where I had to do dishes and mop the floors at the end of every shift for the rest of my life. And I learned that kiwi, pineapple and peanut butter are not as tasty of a combination as you might think. All important lessons that I would take with me in some way or another.