My First Job

I began The Drozdal Company 15 years ago. In reflecting on the many things that have happened since then, for some reason, I also recalled my very first job out of high school.

I was within days of my high school graduation. I had a college admissions letter in hand along with a tuition scholarship. And I needed a summer job to help defray those extra expenses that I knew would be there. At the end of this school day, I happened to run into the principal. He told me that one of the members of his Rotary Club who worked for the water utility in town expressed a need for a graduating senior to help them with a “filing project. He asked me if I were interested, I said yes, went to the job interview and got hired on the spot for the princely sum of $2.85 per hour for forty hours a week for the duration of the summer.

The Monday after graduation I showed up at the “Water Works as it was known around town, clean shaven and wearing a coat and tie. (My Mother and Father believed there was a right way to show up for your first day of work.) I was told to report to Mr. S. He was in his sixties and looked remarkably like an emaciated Boris Karloff. His gray hair was slicked straight back with the aid of a little dab of Brylcream and his eyes were sunken into his skull. He wore a white shirt, the collar of which was way too large for his thin neck. He smoked Pall Malls , Kurt Vonnegut’s cigarette of choice , all the time. He would inhale by wrapping his lips around the cigarette and sucking as hard as he could the way others would use a straw to get every last bit of that chocolate malt at Zwicker’s soda fountain.

He said, “Come with me, young man to the Kasbah in an affected way that sounded like Tallulah Bankhead with a bad Russian accent , and he laughed nervously in a way that sounded like a sputtering machine gun.

He took me downstairs to a place called the “vault which was to become my hangout for the next eight weeks. It turned out to be a large windowless room in the basement of the Water Works building where all the files were to be stored. What seemed like hundreds of five-drawer file cabinets lined the walls and about six rows of floor to ceiling steel shelves stretched from one end of the room to the other.

My new boss explained my mission. “We just moved into this building six months ago. When we moved in we told the guys to just dump the files in the vault and that we’d organize everything later. Well, now is later. Your job is to go through all these files and organize things so we can find what we need when we need it. The hours are 8:30 to 5. You get 45 minutes for lunch and two 15 minute breaks , one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And by the way, you might want to wear old clothes because it’s really dusty down here. Then he left.

There I stood in the middle of the vault. It was at that moment when I had a realization: I hate clutter and I hate messes, and here I stood in the middle of the mother of all messes! Somebody had stuffed the file cabinets to overflowing so that you could hardly shut the drawers. The rows of shelves were mostly empty except for a few randomly scattered file boxes. However, in the open spaces of the vault, the movers had just stacked the boxes without rhyme or reason and in some cases just dumped individual files in heaps. I felt like the walls were closing in. Then I had a blinding glimpse of the obvious. I had absolutely no clue about what I was asked to organize. I pulled up a chair and started to wonder if maybe painting fire hydrants for the Public Works Department might have been a better option for the summer.

Then Ray showed up. He was looking for a file he knew he would never find. His main motivation was to escape the boring accounting work and his ledger sheets. Mostly he wanted to escape his boss Mr. S.. Ray was a writer. He wrote children’s books and as soon as his first one was published he was history. Of course, he had been telling everyone of this plan for most of the twenty-five years he was with the company.

“Hi, said Ray. “You must be the kid Mr. S. was talking about. I just came down to find a work order. You look like you just lost your best friend.

I explained to Ray that Mr. S. had just brought me down here, ordered me to organize the files, but never really told me what he expected.

“You need to know that when he is rushed he’s not good at directions! Besides that he’s a moron! Maybe I can help.

Ray then explained that the files consisted of four types of documents: purchase orders, work orders, invoices for the work orders, and correspondence related to each job. Each job required a work order for the labor, a purchase order for the parts, and an invoice for billing the parts and labor. What linked everything together was the job number. I then learned that the company I worked for, was the parent company of about thirty smaller utilities. So the key was to organize the files by company and then by work order. In just fifteen short minutes Ray had taught me what I needed to know – most managers forget this step because they think it is micro-managing – and he had given me hope.

He was also my link to the rest of the employees in the accounting department. There was a lunch room on the top floor of the building and he made sure I was always invited to eat with the guys.

Over the next eight weeks, I managed to organize those files. I also learned some things that have stayed with me ever since that hot summer of 1968: First, I can work alone when needed , that knowledge certainly helped me when I had to write my doctoral dissertation. Second, for what ever reason, people tell me their stories. During that summer I learned more about the frailties of the human condition than I had up to that point in my life simply by listening to the stories of Ray, his co-workers, and even Mr. S. Finally, I learned that no matter how big of mess you are in, there will always be a way out. The way out often requires patience and the ability to measure progress only from the perspective of months, years, or even decades later and that sometimes one’s boss is not very helpful but others are.

So what was your first job and what learnings have stuck with you?