It’s the spring of my junior year of high school, and I realize that I need to start looking for a summer job so I can make money to buy things that I don’t need.
One of my friends tells me she works at our local zoo and that we should work together. I eagerly and naively agree to apply for the job.
A few days later, I get offered an interview. It was going to be a group interview, which I thought was a little strange.
I was right.
As I am looking around trying to find which zoo building the interview was held in, I almost walk right into a group of angry geese. I stumble back and run away as they hiss at me, all the while zoo customers are walking by witnessing this happen.
I walk into the interview, still thinking about the geese incident, with about 10 other potential employees. All is well — until the interviewers make us physically show everyone a talent we have. A girl next to me made animal noises and another kid could bend his fingers really far back.
As I sit there thinking about how weird this whole thing has been so far, I think of my talent.
I did fencing in high school, so I decided to show everyone a few basic moves. Turns out nobody really knew what fencing was — so that ended up just being awkward — and I sat back down to a silent room.
Fast forward, and I get the job.
At the zoo, I had many different tasks. I worked as a cashier at the gift shop, stocked products, face-painted children, applied glitter tattoos, rented strollers and sold items at various carts around the zoo.
After five hours of face paint training, I was finally put at the face painting station. I knew I wasn’t very good at this, so I tried to fake it till I made it.
This strategy did not work.
One day, my boss came over to observe as I was painting a tiger on this little girl’s face. I knew it was bad. She knew it was bad. We all knew it was bad. I basically made her look like an orange with black squiggles on her face.
Nervously sweating in my chair as my boss looked over my shoulder, I tried to finish the poor job I had started. Needless to say, after that day, I was never put back at face painting.
I remember another time when I was put at the stroller station. Here, we had to rent out stroller carts. All of the strollers were stacked on top of each other in a shed that clearly did not fit all of them.
On this particular early morning shift, it was pouring rain. I struggled to get all of the strollers out of the shed, (which were way heavier than one would think) soaking my clothes completely while setting up the stand.
After a little while, standing miserably in the rain with absolutely zero customers, my boss came out and told me I could go home. Defeated and soaked, I left and went back to bed.
I spent a lot of time at the glitter tattoo station. One time, this old man wearing a Hawaiian shirt that you’d wear as a joke if you were going as a tourist for Halloween, came up to the stand.
He asked for a glitter tattoo. I asked where he would like it, and he ripped open his tacky shirt and pointed to his chest. I reluctantly tried to stick on a glitter tattoo to this sweaty old man’s chest while glitter was falling everywhere.
I was standing in the 90-degree weather, trying to stick glitter on this guy’s hairy chest, wondering what I was doing with my life. Finally, I finished an almost average job of applying it.
I could spend days talking about all of the weird things that happened to me at the zoo, but I’ll end with this last one.
At the cash register, I was checking out a woman who was buying a stuffed animal. I accidentally clicked something wrong in the cash register system and only charged her four cents instead of 20 dollars.
I didn’t even realize until she left. After that blunder, I played with the display bubble gun to keep myself entertained at the rest of my nine-hour shift while standing in the beating sun, selling stuffed penguins that nobody ever buys.
The zoo is a great place to visit as a customer. Working there… not so much.
Although I’ve conjured up many funny stories from it, I am glad I no longer work there. I do have to say, however, that I learned a lot about the animals from taking very long, unnecessary detours through the exhibits to get to my shift at carts located around the zoo.
The one takeaway I hope everyone gets from this is to find a normal indoor job.
