A short essay
Employment
Everyone gets to that point in their life when they start worrying about finding a real job, a career. Halfway through my Masters degree and one year into a two-year commitment to the Peace Corps in Belize, I started thinking about what it might be like to have a real job. My first job was working at a candy and caramel corn shop at the largest mall between Seattle and Minneapolis. Standing behind a glass counter lined with by-the-pound sweets, I sweated over a copper kettle, perfected my own caramel corn technique, and weighed candy into decorative bags for the guilt-ridden with a sweet tooth. I learned about the mania caused by Vermont Maple Sugar delicacies in the fall and a perfectly fluffy spool of cotton candy in the summer. I was also fired from this job, another first, but I’ll get to that later.
I was told that I was hired for my wholesome good looks. The two women that owned the mall candy store together were honest in their hiring practices; only girls, preferably under 18, that possessed an innocent charm. This helped attract the cigarette and Coca-Cola craving male mall employees on their way outside for a 15-minute break. As it was my first job, and my parents knew nothing of me scouring the mall for paid employment, that sort of ethic worked just fine. At $4.90 an hour I would have that mint-green 4-door 1980 Volkswagon Rabbit in just 150 hours (taking taxes into account). Working 12-hour weeks, I could buy that car in about 3 months, just in time for my sixteenth birthday. So I started my journey into the world of adulthood, as I would begin most things in my life, with a calculated analysis of the costs and benefits and a wildly optimistic attitude.
I kept that job for about 6-months before I learned the hard lesson of having to choose between going to work and going on a weekend ski getaway with friends. I chose the ski weekend, but my bosses found it hard to believe that I had a sudden flu that resulted in a goggle tan. Getting fired hit me hard, I had never failed at anything, and now I was an unemployed candy girl. I eventually moved past the rejection and realized it was for the best. Sampling with a 16-year-old’s metabolism was no problem, but I fear had I kept the job throughout high school, my average yet acceptable figure would have suffered from years of cheese corn and chocolate covered gummy bears.
My next job as a bank teller would last me 5 years, an impressive feat for a failed mall employee. Once again I found myself standing behind a counter, using my girlish charms to convince customers to purchase products they knew they didn’t need, and would in fact regret buying. Licorice bridge mix and credit cards have the same power of immediate gratification with a stomach souring digestive process. The same idealism and optimism that won me first job caused me to quit the second. Convincing people to put their hard-earned home equity on the line so that they could buy a new mini-van was not as rewarding as tempting people to indulge in some sour apple drops (just a taste, you don’t have to tell your wife, smile, wink).
Going into detail about my various employments between the ages of 21 and 25 would be tedious and pointless. I made money (sometimes enough), learned a thing or two, and did not get fired. Eventually my focus, or was it my lack of, led me to join the Peace Corps - the ultimate job for those who have become disenchanted with working. You mean to say that someone will hand me a plane ticket to some exotic local, take care of my loans while I am gone for two years, give me enough to money to buy all the rice and beans I could possibly desire and two thirds of my job description could be roughly translated as “hanging out?” And I thought pilfering chocolate turtles behind the bosses back and eating soft serve direct from the machine was fun.
The 1/3 of my non-hanging out work hasn’t been all lollipop and lemon drop happiness. My girlish charms don’t work in quite the same way when trying to convince the village council to stop arguing about who’s pig ate who’s garden, and I am a long ways from instant gratification, or instant anything. My enthusiasm for the simple serves me well (a light bulb for the library!) and my cost-benefit calculations have never led me astray (one more tortilla: does cost of stomach pain outweigh benefit of happy host-mom). Occasionally, between integrating, eating and meetings, I imagine employment after the Peace Corps. With a couple of degrees, a couple of years abroad, and some fine candy making skills, what sort of work awaits me? Will it involve standing behind a counter somewhere, smiling? Or will my cost-benefit analyses put me into a position where I can upgrade from store-brand to name-brand cereal? Wildly idealistic and all, I am not worried about it, so I put this thought off for another day as I swing in my hammock, imagining the feasibility of opening a caramel corn stand in my village.
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