After I turned 18, my parents came up with a new rule for me: no more sitting around the house during the summer, it’s time to get a job. I applied mostly to clothing retail stores because I knew one thing, I did not want to work in food. After a couple of weeks with no calls back, I finally applied to the local pizza restaurant five minutes from my house. My family and I ate there all the time and we liked it. We liked that it was local, we liked that the man who owned the restaurant worked there, and we liked that we knew almost all the servers and that they knew us. So I applied and got an interview less than a week later.
The interview went smoothly and, at the very end, my future boss told me the most important thing he would tell me: “If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t working hard enough." Now, I am not the type of person that is fine with making mistakes; I will make one mistake and think about it a year later and be just as embarrassed as when it first happened. Boy did I make mistakes at that job. I’ve put in orders incorrectly, sent pizza to the wrong address (literally across town from the real address), dumped an entire container of eggs from the salad bar on the floor, dropped clean plates, and was an overall safety hazard to all those around me because of general clumsiness. So while I’m still not perfect (maybe one day) and while I still get embarrassed by the many mistakes I make, I’ve learned to take it more in-stride than I used to. I’ve learned that when you drop a stack of 30 newly washed, clean plates on the floor, you laugh at how dumb you feel for trying to carry 30 plates, rewash them, and be more careful about putting them up.
For this job, I worked as a host and a server. I was not the best people-person and I definitely was not good at following certain directions—I had my way of doing things and I was going to do them that way no matter what the rules were. For this job, I had to learn that I wasn’t the boss ever. If a customer was rude, I couldn’t be rude back and if a customer wanted shrimp on their pizza, I wasn’t allowed to tell them it would stink up the entire kitchen and make my clothes smell like shrimp for the rest of my shift; I had to say “okay” with a smile on my face and prance off to the computer without complaint to put in the order. My first summer, a man called and ordered a large pizza with everything in the store on it, I questioned what he meant by “everything” and made sure he knew we had cucumber, broccoli, and other odd vegetables that typically wouldn’t go on a pizza and he just repeated himself; he wanted everything. An eleven dollar pizza became fifty dollars, but I wasn’t the boss of what people could put on their pizza no matter how weird it sounded and how badly it would taste, in my opinion.
Speaking of being the boss, my boss was the best boss. When I said he worked in the store, I don’t mean he sat in his office all day doing paperwork and not talking to anyone, he literally worked in the store. He made pizzas, took phone orders when people were busy, and worked wherever was needed. He was and is always there from before open all the way to close and he truly enjoys owning this restaurant even though I’m sure it stresses him to the edge of sanity on probably a weekly basis. He helped me realize that I was never above doing any task. Anything I was asked to do, I did because I knew that no one was above doing a task at the restaurant.
Working for minimum wage really taught me to appreciate a college education. I was good at school, but I never worked hard. I made good grades and had a few extracurricular activities, but I never appreciated what I was working toward. Working for minimum wage helped me realize that I did not and could not make a living off it. My first paycheck felt so wonderful; I worked so hard for that paycheck and then I looked at how much taxes were taken out and I realized I wasn’t actually making minimum wage after taxes. Then I decided to treat myself and blew through the entire paycheck in one shopping trip. So, to some extent, it also taught me to appreciate the value of a dollar because once the money is gone, it’s gone and not coming back. I did the math in my head too later that day and realized I probably couldn’t pay for even two of the bills my parents pay each month with that money. I quickly realized that I was going to college for, if nothing else, the ability to help my future family live a comfortable life. My education became my top priority from then on out.
This job has taught me a work ethic that can only be taught from a minimum-wage job. It’s not particularly fun standing all day, or dealing with customers who yell at you about their pizza being a few minutes late, or cleaning up after someone’s kid spilled soda all over the table, but I love my job. The people I work with are generally great people who work hard and who have been there longer than I have and I’m always happy to come home for breaks to see them and to work there. Internships are wonderful and working in an office is fine, but I don’t think I would have ever become as humble about doing work that I didn’t always want to do (i.e. cleaning bathrooms) as I would have at an internship. My minimum wage job helped me appreciate what the education currently working toward and made my well-rounded overall; that’s an experience I won’t get from any other job I take.
