Archive

The First Job(s) I Ever Loved- Part 1

posted 21st December 2009    Written by: Robyn    CATEGORY: All Posts, Job/Career/Work, Quarterlife Crisis, Robyn, Season 1

When I was 14 years old I was sick of babysitting, and I was eager to earn a real paycheck. I started working at a neighborhood pizza joint to make some extra money, and that was the beginning of the rollercoaster romance I would have with the restaurant industry.

At the pizza place, I immediately felt at home. The people I worked with became my closest friends. I found myself stopping by even when I didn’t have the work. I found myself hanging out with my coworkers on the weekends when we all had the day off.

And even more strangely, when I did have to work, it never seemed like work. I just had fun with my friends while we made pizzas and served customers. I loved the fast-paced yet laid back work environment, so I continued working at the pizza place for four years until I had to leave for college. Leaving my first job felt like I was closing a huge chapter in my life, and I knew I would be coming home for the summers to get back into the restaurant industry.

Sure enough, each summer I came home to work. This time I started serving and bartending at a busy bar close to my home. Once again, I loved the work. I loved the people I saw every day—my coworkers and my customers.

Each summer when I had to leave to go back to school, I was sad to leave. Something about working at a restaurant/bar makes you feel like you are part of a team. The people you work with see you have good days and bad days. They see you get angry, stressed, sad, frustrated. Then they see you get an awesome tip, have a great shift, get hit on by that regular customer over and over again.

You help each other out when things get busy or customers get difficult. You exchange stories about what you are saving your tips for. You exchange stories about your tables and your drunken customers. You bond over the whole shared experience of working in the same restaurant or bar. You share the same feelings about your job—you complain about it, but deep down you care and love every second of it.

Eventually you become much more than coworkers and much more than a team—you become family.

Even after graduating from college and starting a “real” job, I missed the restaurant industry so much that I started working one weekend night a week at a restaurant close to my apartment in the city. There I found the same close-knit team and fulfilled that personal need while doing the whole 9-to-5.

My younger sister, Holly, just graduated from college and is preparing to move back home until she finds a job. With my new flexible work schedule, I was able to spend last week in Iowa City helping her pack and move out of her apartment. In between jamming boxes full of clothes and giving resume advice and job interview tips, we took a break to grab a beer at the bar she has been bartending at for the past year.

Holly talked about how much she was going to miss the bar, her coworkers, and the regular customers. While she had started bartending for the money, the bar had turned into much more than her workplace. It had become her second home and the people she worked with became her second family.

It made me remember my days in the restaurant industry. I’m not sure how many readers have worked as servers or bartenders, but it’s something I would definitely recommend. There is no other job like it, and I am a firm believer that people who have worked in this industry are all-around better workers, better communicators, and better people.

I started in the restaurant industry more than 10 years ago. The person I am now is completely different from that person who first walked into that pizza place.

The industry shaped me and forced me to open up to people and new relationships and, ultimately, changed me for the better.

photo credit : star3112

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When I Grow Up, I’ll Be Happy

posted 18th August 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Job/Career/Work, Kendra, Life Lesson, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

nogrownups(This week I posed a question to Andrea, Kendra, Robyn & Marisa- When you were small, what did you want to be when you grew up?  How has this played into your life?  And perhaps the more appropriate question for a Quarterlife Crisis: What do you want to be when you grow up? xoxo  Molly)

Adults love to ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up.

It is a strange tendency, if you think about it. Small children can’t even come close to being able to express a clear answer based on skills, interests, temperament and professional knowledge.  Heck, even most adults can’t.

Adults, I think, ask this question for one of two reasons.

The first, and the more insidious, is because in our “success” oriented culture we want kids to start thinking about their futures early. While this has its benefits, it’s also a form of social conditioning that trains us to be still more future focused. We forget early how to embrace the moment and instead keep our eyes on the carrots held by society’s sticks.

The second reason I think adults enjoy asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up is because children often respond with some of the cleverest, funniest, most interesting answers to what we as adults often find a weighted question. 

littlekendraWhen I was a kid I wanted to be (in order from youngest to oldest): a doctor, a lawyer, president of the United States and a superhero. The older I got, oddly enough, the more fantastical my career aspirations became.

I remember fervently praying to god in French class, my sophomore year of high school, for super powers, or at the very least, the ability to create my own bat cave with the necessary technologies. I was a bizarrely spiritual kid with a strong attraction to the mystical side of the Catholic faith in which I was raised.

This is my explanation, fifteen years later, as to how I could possibly believe that God would give me super powers.Faced with transubstantiation and the dead rising, how hard could a little thing like super powers be? I promised to keep them a secret.

I wanted super powers because for as far back as I can remember I was aware of human suffering and desperately wanted to end it. Given the vastness of the situation- environmental degradation, hunger, poverty, war- I quickly realized that it would take super human efforts to fix the problem. And while fifteen years later, I no longer pray to God for superpowers to help me fix the problem, this strong desire to make the world better has played a role in both my career and personal life.

Beyond my graduate school studies in sustainable development and my decision to pursue a career, in part, in environmental policy, I’ve found that I have a difficult time relating to people who don’t seem to recognize the connections between their life choices and the larger problems of the world. My friends and “special friends” all tend to be motivated by more than money or interests, but also by a larger sense of connection to people and the planet.

What does that mean as I face once again the question of who I want to be when I grow up?

Beyond helping to color the kinds of activities I’m willing to engage in, not much. I’m more motivated these days by the sentiment represented in this quote:

“When I was in grade school, they told me to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down happy. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life.”

More than anything, what I want to be when I grow up is happy.

Not the kind of happiness that’s represented in television commercials by an endless parade of smiles, and writhing hips, set to a kicking soundtrack…  Rather, a deeper sense of contentment based on strong connections to loved ones, to my work, and to society as a whole.

This is why I am actively seeking work that I find personally meaningful that also contributes to society and why I am moving home to be closer to family and friends.

kendra-bio1

photocredit: eatbitter

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