My First Job

It has been hammered into me repeatedly that the best way to land a job these days is put yourself in front  of decision makers. This is so you can become what is called,  the known candidate, when a job opening comes along.  This may seem  like a strange and foreign alternative to posting your resumes on job boards and sending out more to every company in your industry and sit back and wait for the interviews and job offers to start (not)  pouring in.  However, when I think back on many of my previous work experiences, they definitely followed the known candidate pattern than the post and see method that most people employ, when they are trying to be employed.

It has also been suggested to me that everyone should keep a resume that they will never use, one that has listed each work related experience that have ever had.  This will help the job seeker and future job seeker alike have a living document of all their abilities at their finger tips in case the perfect job comes knocking.  To that end, I have decided to write about each job I have ever had, both paid and voluntary.  I will talk about how I got it, what I did, and mostly what I learned from it.  Today we start at the beginning:   folding newspapers on my kitchen table.


My first job started with a murder and had property damage and grand theft auto in between.   In May of 1976, a grisly murder occurred in the the suburb I grew up in.  It actually occurred on the street where I lived.  A young woman and her boyfriend brutally killed her parents and brother.  One way the police became aware that some thing might be amiss was that the family's newspapers started piling up on their porch.

Shortly after the murders, my sister's friend, who delivered the papers on that route, offered her route to my sister.  I am not sure if the murder prompted her decision or not.  The route turned out to be a little more than my sister bargained for.  She lasted less than a week and sought to give the job to someone else.  That is how I became the known candidate.  I spent most of the next 4 years delivering papers.

LESSONS LEARNED

You have to walk before you can bike.

When I first started the route, there was quite a learning curve.  I would sometimes have to use 2 or 3 rubber bands before I could wrap a paper without snapping the rubber band.  I started out biking my route.  I found that I could usually not hit the porch while sitting on my bike and balance other newspapers in my bag.  So, I had to get off my bike at every house, (and almost every house on our 2 block route got a paper) deliver the paper, and then get back on my bike.  I quickly found I could do the route faster walking than I could on my bike.  This was especially easier in the hard winters of the mid to late seventies. Each spring I would try biking again and found with all the practice of delivering on foot, that I could now deliver from my bike with only the occasional missed porch.

Brothers make "interesting" business partners.

I have a brother who is 18 months younger than me.  Over the years we worked newspaper routes together and also separately. One fateful morning, my brother and I were quarreling up a storm.  I was chasing him around the house.  He said something, I threw a paper at him for what I think was the first and I'm sure was the last time.   You see he ducked, but my mom's glass plated curio cabinet didn't.  Ka-rash.  The new glass came from our earnings.

In the winter my dad would sometimes drive us on our route before heading off to work.  My dad was in a car pool so even though we only had 1 vehicle at the time it was usually parked in the garage.  One time my brother who was probably 11 at the time started taking the car on the route.  I wanted nothing to do with it and would rather just walk my route and leave him and his friends to their criminal activities. I did get bullied into going with him on occasion but never drove.  This went on for a few weeks and strangely enough, no one ever reported the activity to my parents.  I think this was because my dad was still driving us some days and people just assumed there was an adult in the station wagon.  One morning my brother got the car stuck in a snow drift and he had to wake my sleeping mother and make her aware of his activities.  The car keys were not readily accessible at our house for a long time after that.

 Reading is Fundamental

I earned quite a bit of money (at least from a pre-teen and early teen perspective)  on my newspaper routes and only had to spend a small percentage of paying for my outbursts of anger.  I  remember buying a fishing reel and a new bike with some of my earnings.  The biggest benefit from being a newsboy was that I became a newspaper man.  Not a newspaper man in the journalistic sense, although I have done that.  A newspaper reader and lover.  I had always been an avid reader.  But delivering turned me into a newspaper reader.  I delivered 3 different papers at one point and was allowed to keep the extras when there were some.  I ended  up reading almost every paper I delivered in that 4 year period from cover to cover.  I learned how to proofread just by spotting mistakes in the papers I delivered.

The traditional role of the youth delivering papers on his/her bike has all but vanished in the 30+ e years since I had my route.  It now seems to live on in only in t.v. and movies.  When I look back on my first job, I am glad I was paper trained.

Next Time: Status Update

The Most Important Job at the Food Bank

Last month we started volunteering as a family at the Northern Illinois Food Bank in Geneva, Illinois.  Technically speaking our youngest can't volunteer until she turns 8 at the end of the year.  Today we trekked over there, sans our 7 year old, and spent 3 hours working with a team of about 15 volunteers transferring cereal from a 1600 pound container to 20 oz bags.

After we put on the requisite hair nets, aprons and rubber gloves , our supervisor Don started handing out assignments.  It became readily apparent, at least to me, that I had been given the most important job.

Yep, call me Scoop Roller.  It was my job to take the cereal from the big box and scoop it into those grey bins on the table.  Don chose me first for the prestigious assignment.  In the three hours that we worked I  scooped cereal from that box until, I could scoop from the second step and then from the lowest step until I finally eschewed the step stool altogether and just scooped from the floor until I had to finally kneel down to get to the level of cereal left behind from my labors.By the end of the day we had packaged enough cereal for almost 1,000 meals.  And each flake of cereal used was scooped out of it's conveyance by yours truly.  

Yes, I thought I had the most important job.  That is until that young man on the left of me, took a short break.  You see his job was to take my bins brimming with flaky goodness and provide me with a new bin.  In the beginning this meant I could stay on my perch and concentrate on the task at hand.  He was also responsible to take the full bins and give them to the 2 tables of volunteers responsible for placing them in bags and weighing them to assure they reached their 20 oz. capacity.  He would take their empty bins and bring them back to me so I could refill them.

When he was there, I was able to keep up pace with the 8 baggers and sometimes run out of empty bins to fill which would allow me to cut down the plastic surrounding the box, which greatly eased my ability to scoop.  When he left, I did his job and mine for a few minutes and it quickly became evident that he was the drumbeat of the process and that without his support the whole enterprise would quickly break down.

So when he came back, I told him that I thought he had the most important job, and he quickly agreed.  You see, people like to be valued.  Even if they are just volunteers, they like to be valued.  After he came back I got to thinking about it more.  I started on concentrating on what job was most important.  Was it those two tables of cereal baggers?  Three of my favorite relatives helped man those tables.  Without  them my scooping and Nathan's tempo would just leave 16 filled tubs and a box mostly full.

But even with those 8 bagging and weighing away, the whole operation would come to a halt with out the bag sealer.  Yes just as I scooped all the cereal into bins, the four people seated sealed every bag. the person standing took the sealed bags and prepared them to be distributed to the food pantries, soup kitchens, and summer feeding programs that the food bank supplies.  And let's not forget about Don, who went from station to station informing and encouraging each group of workers; perhaps he had the most important job.

Sometimes the most important jobs are the ones behind the scenes.  We were able to volunteer today because a friend watched our 7 year old while we were there.  We volunteered with a group of employees from Capital One.  I am not sure exactly what had to conspire for them to come.  But I imagine that compensation and covering of duties was involved.  It seems the more you break it down, the harder it becomes to determine the most important job.


So what is the most important job? To steal from City Slickers, it is one thing.  It is the one thing that you were assigned to do.  The most important task in a project is the task you were given.  That task is your chance to shine.  You have been given that task for a reason.  Do the best you can at that task and the project has a better chance at success, than if you just did it 1/2 way because you wanted to be the one to scoop cereal out of a big box.

Volunteering is an important job.  Feeding the hungry  is an important job.  If that includes digging up a ton of cereal, then I can dig that.







If you thought  this post was a departure of sorts, you were right.  It was a departure from writing nothing or next to nothing for months at a time.  It is also a departure from my usual homeschooly things I had been writing about until I slipped out of internet existence. 

As the new title suggests, I am no longer just a home school dad.  I am a home schooling dad transitioning back to the business world.  My most important job, to ride that horse one more time, is to land a job.  This blog will reflect on my past jobs and my current search.  

Next Time: My very first job.

Bunny Girl Graduates from 8th Grade

Bunny Girl graduated from 8th grade two weeks ago.  4 middle school and 4 high school children from our co-op had a joint ceremony.  After the ceremony, the graduates all sent up balloons in to the air.  Post cards with the a graduation announcement and a favorite bible verse of the graduate were tied to the balloons.  

Bunny Girl's post card was returned to us a few days later.  

Bunny Girl's completion of 8th grade and her beginning her high school studies in the Fall are just two of many endings and beginnings to our family.  In the blog business, this is what we call a tease.  I will be telling you about some more of those changes in posts to come. 

Congratulations Bunny on your accomplishments and God's blessings in your adventures yet to come.

In the neighborhood.

Since I am posting anyway,.  Here is a quick story and picture.  My BIL came to visit last night.  While many uncles may be content telling their nieces and nephews to get lost, he is the opposite, he brings them maps!

I went over a month . . .

. . .Without posting and some people are beginning to wonder what's up.  I had put blogging on the backburner for a while, and now it seems to be on no burner at all.  This is because all is in flux right now.  Depending on who you ask and when you ask us we will be putting 1 to 3 of our children in public school in the fall. I have not been blogging and trying to focus on employability and Homeschooling instead.

I don't plan on this being my last post or anything, it's just not a priority at present.