Jobs I Have Known

The first job I ever had of course, being a female who came of age in the 1970s, was as a babysitter.  In those days, the going rate was a buck an hour regardless of how many kids you were saddled with; discussing this once with my sister-in-law, we agreed that maybe if the couple was generous, they threw in an extra quarter on New Year’s Eve. Twenty years later, I was astonished to discover that a good babysitter was a treasure to be hoarded at the rate of ten dollars an hour. I have four children, and let me tell you, I was grateful to pony up the dough every single time. Today my youngest daughter babysits for two kids and she makes fifteen dollars an hour. That is more money than I am making now, with a B.A. in History (and let’s not forget the minor in Middle Eastern Studies) as a part-time law firm receptionist, where I answer the occasional phone call, copy endless legal documents, and get giddy with joy when I have to use 21^st century technology like the scanner.

In my late teens I worked at McDonald’s, wearing the obligatory polyester uniform, but that was fun, because it was a snowy winter that year, and my boyfriend would wait for my shift to end out in the parking lot, car heater on full blast, chilling a 6 pack of beer in a snowbank. We later moved to North Carolina, where I was a very bad waitress – indeed, I still suffer from the occasional waitress nightmare wherein the joint gets slammed and I am all alone in a packed restaurant and everyone is yelling at me. 

So I realized a restaurant career was not in my stars and turned towards yet another typically pink-collar way to earn a living and became a secretary, and excelled at this, because I was much better at typing and organizing and wearing cute outfits sitting in a cushy office than I was at slinging hash wearing a knee length navy blue dress and a pair of sturdy white shoes.  But as I moved up the corporate ladder to ultimately become a partner’s secretary at what was then called a Big-8 accounting firm, my soul shrank at this altar of the worship of Ronald Reagan, and when I got pregnant I happily fled salaried employment for the joys of raising children in suburbia. Supported by a husband who made a comfortable salary and was quite happy to come home every night to a house full of screaming children and a hot meal, I joked that I now worked for room and board and an occasional topaz necklace.

But I was uneasy. Didn’t feminists warn against the trap of a career in homemaking, from which so many women couldn’t extricate themselves when marriages turned sour? Luckily my husband is a good guy, and proved it by putting me through college, one class a semester, starting when my youngest entered kindergarten. Ten years later the economy imploded.  Of course it was then that I graduated.

People complain all the time about how hard it is to find a good job.  They are not lying. I’ve researched companies both profit and non, corporate and government, tailored enough cover letters and sent off enough resumes and writing samples to line the walls of a small house, which, for all I know is where they remain, for it is very seldom that I hear anything again from these places, and your guess is as good as mine as to how - or if - once discarded, they are used. Perhaps they are downloaded and printed, and serve as entertainment at holiday parties, or used as decorative displays in the offices of Human Resources all over New York City, or are folded into paper airplanes and flown across cubicles during those stressful times before the end of the third quarter, when a demand for levity becomes a necessity. I’d like to think they are put to some good use, instead of floating endlessly in a virtual trash bin in the netherworld of the Cloud. I suspect, though, that I think this in vain.

So I soldier on, beating against the tide, in the hope that one day I will have the ability to amend this amusing little diatribe with a footnote stating that yes, I managed at last to find ennobling employment. I can only hope that this happens before my husband decides to retire.