here's to breaking the poverty line

Good news: this weekend I received my first real paycheck from my first real job out of school. Historic, isn't it?

Does this mean Shay and I will no longer be eating cereal and toast for approximately 65% of all our meals at home? No! Because we really like cereal! But it does mean that we could probably upgrade from generic Honey Bunches of Oats to the real thing if we wanted to.

In honor of this historic paycheck, let us revisit a few of the many employment stints that have led us to this point:

Babysitter: I still marvel that people trusted me with their children when I was still a kid myself. Were they desperate? Was I just astoundingly mature and trustworthy? Or were these parents simply looking for cheap child labor? I remember making an average of like $2 an hour. They must have just been cheap.

Cleaner of Bathrooms: Spic-and-Span Bathroom Cleaning is one childhood entrepreneurial effort that never quite took off. How is this possible, when Jen and I even printed our own marketing literature with the slogan, “We Do a Crappy Job”? As far as I remember, we got paid to clean all bathrooms at Jen’s house for about two months until we realized that it was indeed a crappy job. The fact that we ever thought it would be otherwise still cracks me up.

Grunt worker: When I needed extra cash in middle school, I would put in a few hours at a nursery owned by a couple in my neighborhood. I planted plants, transplanted plants, watered plants, and sometimes just to mix it up, moved plants from one place to another. You’d think that with all this exposure, I’d have learned something about plants. Sadly, to this day I cannot manage to keep a house plant alive for more than a few months.

Cashier: Many of my after-school and summer hours during high school were spent at Graff Mercantile, a little grocery store owned by a super nice local family. The place was losing the battle against the big bad chain stores when I signed on, and business only got slower over my three-year tenure. A large chunk of my time was spent coming up with ways to entertain myself and my coworker(s) (usually only one other employee at a time in the entire store) when there was nothing else to be done. You probably have no idea how many things can be created with those twisty ties found in the bulk foods section. I do.

Sales associate: Do I strike anyone as the type of person who might enjoy walking around Old Navy wearing a headset, trying to convince people they wanted to buy clothes that they probably didn't need? Let’s just say that after about a year of employment with The Gap Corporation, we parted amicably, and all I missed was the employee discount.

Registrar’s office gopher/storeroom clerk/proofreader/staff assistant: If retail wasn’t for me, I had to find some source of income to put me through college. This is when I discovered on-campus jobs. In some cases the pay was less than stellar, but overall I’d say on-campus jobs rock.

Busser/hostess/waitress: I spent three summers working in a couple of different restaurants in Springdale, near Zion National Park. Waiting tables was hard work, but pretty good money for a summer job, and the after-hours jaunts through the Park with co-workers on fast motorcycles were a definite perk!

Poetry judge: I nearly forgot that I did this for a few months, and that that was my actual title! So there was a publishing company in Logan that put together anthologies of poems written by kids; they received stacks of submissions every day, and my job was to separate the terrible ones and the plagiarized ones from the okay ones and the really good ones. I remember one day having to leave work early because my coworkers and I could not go on in any seriousness after coming upon a poem, written by Carlos, age 10, entitled, “Mom, Light My Fire.”

Research assistant: This was a great job, mostly because I would have been working on my thesis anyway, and with a research grant I got paid to do a lot of it. It also helped me decide that research is pretty cool… possibly cool enough to convince me to go back to school at some point for a Ph.D. For now, though, I am perfectly content being gainfully employed, and getting a real paycheck!