Jen tagged me for a meme about our work history a while back and I am just now getting to it. (Sorry, Jen! 🙂 )

Well, let’s see. Since I was the oldest of six and the oldest among my mom’s friends’ children, most of my early work was baby-sitting.

I worked for one whole week in a fast food place when I was a teenager. Couldn’t stand it. A while later I worked in the bakery department of a grocery store. I just sold things: I have no skill at cake decorating. I was afraid I would really gain weight with all the donuts and cookies, but they had the opposite effect: I got kind of sick of the overly-sweet smell (maybe I should go back to work there…….)

At college I worked in the university library for four years. I enjoyed it. It was more involved than I would have thought. One fringe benefit was that I met my husband there. 🙂

A couple of summers during my college years I baby-sat my siblings again. My folks paid me the same amount they would have paid day care, but it helped everyone not to have to get all the kids up and out early in the morning during the summer. One summer I worked in the office at my church: the church secretary was diagnosed with encephalitis right at the beginning of the summer. First I just answered phones but gradually took over the bookkeeping, Sunday bulletins, letters. That was before computers and copying machines (boy that makes me sound so old!!) but we had those old mimeograph machines that turned out copies in purplish ink. It caught fire one day while I was there — thankfully it was noticed before it got too far. That was a very enjoyable summer. It was fun, too, to help visiting missionaries and speakers with any office needs they might have. The secretary was out the whole summer and was able to come back to the office just as I needed to go back to school. Another summer I worked with my mom. She was the assistant head bookkeeper at a local bank and I worked in the bookkeeping department with her and a room full of other ladies. Each of us had what they called a “drawer” of accounts we checked every day. I don’t know if they still do it this way, but we would take out the drawer, look at the checks that came in, check dates, compare the signatures to the signature card they filled out when they first opened the account, and pull out anything that looked “off” for someone over us to check out. You got to know somewhat the handwriting of the people in your drawer and could tell the difference between when they were paying bills at their table or desk or when they were writing hurriedly at a store. I think my worst mistake was that I didn’t know then that the British way of writing dates was different than ours, so when one customer always wrote his dates with the month and day reversed, I thought they were post-dated and pulled them. 😳 We also had to answer phone calls. Sometimes it was very easy to help a customer with whatever they had a a question about, but sometimes they could be irate.

A few months before getting married I worked in the home of a lady in town doing various chores around her home. I continued that for some time after we got married, plus my husband and I worked together cleaning five banks five nights a week. That was a great job for students because it was flexible: we could do it any time from the time the bank closed til the time it opened again. Plus all the cleaning equipment was in a van that we could use for ourselves in-between cleaning jobs, so it gave us access to an extra vehicle. The only problem with so many cleaning jobs was that then I got tired of cleaning and didn’t want to do all the same things at my own place. We didn’t have any mishaps at the banks (except that the people at one of them kept missing food and accusing us of taking it. Somebody was making out like a bandit there), but the people who took the job after us found a bunch of money somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be (seems like it was a trash can) and another time found a man hiding in a trash can. I’m glad our time there was relatively uneventful!!

Then for a few years I worked at a fabric store. The fun side of that was seeing all the new things, being stimulated creatively by the other people who worked there and the things they would sew or make, and the fact that we’d take turns making items for display at the store, and then we were able to bring them home and keep them after they were taken down. The down side of working retail sales is that you end up working when other people are off, so you miss out on some family times, plus the general public can be very….not nice at times. One of my worst experiences was my first night in charge after being promoted to third assistant manager when a lady got irate when the fabric that she thought was on sale wasn’t, and she followed me back to the stock room and swung open the door and started yelling at me. I really don’t handle that kind of thing well — I crumple and cry. And she called me stupid for crying.

I also tried my hand at sales and discovered that is definitely not my talent. I sold Avon for about six months and worked with a home party system that sold craft kits and taught craft stitches at the parties. I enjoyed teaching the crafts: I didn’t enjoy selling. I don’t like salespeople pressuring me, so I wasn’t about to do that to anyone else. And even though they tell you when they’re recruiting you that you can work as many or as few hours as you want and make as much or as little as you want, you always have a manager and sales meetings pressuring you to do more.

Then I worked for several months as an inventory counter in a department store at the mall. This is probably all done by computer now, but a few of us would count stock items in the different departments every month — not the seasonal things, but the regular items that they stocked year round. We weren’t supposed to help customers because we weren’t trained on the registers and we’d never get our work done if we did, but we had to wear name tags, so the poor customers would see us and ask questions and then get frustrated when we couldn’t help. We tried to point them to one of the associates who worked in that department if one was in sight, but sometimes the easiest thing was just to go ahead and help them if we could. I had to quit that job after I became pregnant with Jeremy because my doctor didn’t want me climbing ladders and the department wasn’t willing to work around that.

The stint with Avon occurred when Jeremy was a toddler, but other than that I’ve been privileged to be a stay at home mom ever since — both the hardest and most rewarding job I’ve experienced. 🙂

I’ve also done a lot of unpaid volunteer work at church or my kids’ school.

As my boys have gotten older I have considered working again to help with their college expenses. I think our home life would be a lot less peaceful if I worked outside the home, but I’d love to find something I could do from home. I have sold a few magazine articles and have thought about expanding on that, and I have a couple of ideas of things I could make and sell on ebay or Etsy. I keep thinking after this project or that event or deadline, I’ll look into that more.

Whew! That ended up being longer than I thought it would. If you’d like to share your work history, please feel free to do so in the comments or let me know if you do a post on it on your blog.