A haiku commemorating minimum-wage teenage jobs:
_Wait, this check is all?
It’s borderline slave labor.
Tacky uniform._
I think I have potential to make it big in the poetry world after this glorious masterpiece.
**Part-time jobs:** Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without mooching off your parents without ’em. I’m one of those people who has had a job since the very beginning of my high school career. And it hasn’t just been one job, no — it’s been around seven jobs. And not all of them have been a cake made of sunshine and rainbows.
You know how most people swim with the dolphins? Yeah, at my job, I swim with the cockroaches. And one of the 16-year-old girls who I work with loudly complains all the time because her parents won’t let her get her nipples pierced.
Try to contain your jealousy.
These are definitely not the weirdest experiences I’ve had with jobs, however.
Once, my best friend Katy, who enjoys pulling pranks on me, asked to borrow my phone to call her mom my senior year. Not really thinking about it, I handed her my phone and resumed my homework. When she gave the phone back to me, I looked at the time, and realized I was running late to a job interview.
The interview was pretty casual, so the employer told me to text him if there was a possibility of being late. Quickly, without even thinking about it, I typed up a text and sent it to the potential employer.
Bad choice.
Wondering why he hadn’t texted me back, I checked my messages again. In one horrible second, I realized what I had just texted to the employer.
_“Penis! Penis just wanted to let you know that penis was running penis little late! Penis will be there as soon as penis can!”_
Apparently, Katy had gone into my phone and changed the auto-correct settings so the words “hey,” “I” and “a” would automatically change to the word “penis.” Which would have been pretty funny if I hadn’t just texted my potential future employer a terribly offensive message letting her know my penis would soon be arriving.
The worst part? This was a job that involved working with small children.
Awkward.
I stayed mad at Katy for a pretty long time for that one (approximately a week, but that really seems like an eternity in high school), which she promptly responded to by laughing her ass off at me. But Katy was the one who got me my next job, working at a paint-your-own pottery place, so I guess I couldn’t be too mad.
This pottery place was probably the best place I have ever worked. The staff was awesome, and my manager was literally the nicest woman ever. It was a lot of work during the day when it got busy, but when it got closer to closing time, everyone would just goof off and do stupid shit.
One day, my friend and fellow employee Caitlyn and I took a bunch of discarded PacSun mannequins from the mall’s communal trash room. We trumped back to the pottery store, holding heads and torsos, while dragging random limbs behind us. I can only imagine what the people passing us thought. We decided it would be hilarious if we dressed one of the mannequins up in a hoodie and jeans and left it facing away from the door to freak out whoever was opening the store the next day.
Harmless, right?
Little did we know the faulty burglar alarm would go off twice at 3 a.m. Little did we know our manager would have to go check on the store. Little did we know she would open the door to the back room only to see this realistic looking mannequin, or that she would run out of the store screaming her head off only to go into hysterics.
After she ran out, I guess she called the police. Luckily, though, she put two and two together and realized it would be rather strange of an intruder to be sporting an employee’s uniform. That’s when Caitlyn received the panicked phone call and quickly explained the unfortunately-timed prank. Our manager had to call the police and let them know there was not an intruder, just her employees being dumbasses.
The fact that I was not fired from that job still baffles me today.
From the experience I’ve had with part-time jobs, the only advice I can really give is to make the best out of an unavoidably sucky situation. Try to make friends with the employees and find ways to make the time go by faster.
But above all, don’t forget to reread your texts, and don’t make fake intruders. Because either way, you’ll probably give someone a heart attack.