I’ve spent a lot of time the last few months thinking about previous jobs and it left me pondering, what have I learned from all these places I’ve worked?

I’ve been really lucky to make my career in theater, but there were even a few jobs I worked before graduating that taught me useful life lessons. It left me wondering what life lessons I had pulled from those jobs.

Walgreens Cashier

This was my first job. I learned that I like making my own money. I also learned that I didn’t want to become a lifer in a job like cashier. I remember being surprised that only two other people who worked there with me were high school students.

I also learned that in some jobs, managers just treat you like garbage and make you do nonsense tasks just because they can. I learned that sometimes you just have to make projects to look busy.

I also learned that there are silly games you have to play and life can be easier if you just shut up and play them.

I did not last long at this job.

Waitress

I finished out high school working as a waitress at a little Italian restaurant owned by a family from my church.

I learned that I liked autonomy there, because there was a lot less nonsense at that job. I knew I had to wait on my tables. I knew I had to check like three things (if there were enough sliced eggs, if there was enough backup butter, and to ask the kitchen ladies if they needed anything) when things were slow. If I did those things, then I could just sit and wait until a customer came in.

This made way more sense to me than creating nonsense projects to look busy.

The owners were very loud Italians who often yelled at each other. My best friend worked with me there (bonus) and she was also Italian, so there was much yelling between everyone. I think this was useful as I got older because I realized different cultures communicate differently.

My BFF got “fired” almost every shift. She would yell at the owners, they would yell at her. The next shift, she wouldn’t show up. They would ask where she was. I would remind them they fired her. They would yell that of course she wasn’t fired. I would call her. She would come in for her shift. This cycle would repeat every few days.

It was kind of nuts. In retrospect, it prepared me for some disagreements with feistier performers.

Hostess

In college, I worked at the Rainforest Café as a hostess during the summers. At that job, I learned how to start organized and calm while angry parents are yelling at me about a two-three hour wait.

Part of being a hostess at the Rainforest Café is that you also have to wear the mascot costume. Every hour, one of the hosts/hostesses has to get in one of those costumes for 10 minutes, while another host/hostess leads the person in the mascot costume through the café.

If you’ve ever been in one, you know that places is a ridiculous labyrinth with a bunch of trees and roots and ponds and birds and wild children running everywhere.  They are also very dark.

You can’t see anything in the mascot costume. The hostess in the costume is entirely reliant on the host or hostess guiding them around the café. So I learned to trust my team. I also learned to not piss off my team right before I put that costume on because your partner will absolutely walk you right into a tree and laugh when you fall over.

Substitute Teacher

I learned an interesting thing about preparing people in this job. My first substitute teaching job was in my hometown in NJ. On the first day, I showed up, they handed me a booklet about how to substitute teach and sent me right into homeroom.

Not even five minutes in, one kid picked up a desk and threw it at another kid and a fight broke out. As I yelled at them to stop, I frantically paged through the useless booklet and wound up running across the hall to grab a real teacher who helped me.

In that particular school district, subs were always set up to fail and provided with zero guidance.

A few years later, I moved to Virginia. On my first day subbing there, there was a full day orientation on how things worked and what to do and where everyone could be found and who to call in emergencies.

I never had an issue I couldn’t handle in that school district despite the fact that the kids there were actually rougher than the kids in NJ most of the time.

Providing clear guidance on what needs to be done is key to success.

Insurance Customer Service Agent

In my last year of grad school, I wound up working at a large insurance company as a customer service rep and the main thing I think I learned there was that if a job makes you absolutely miserable, quit.

I am not cut out to be a customer service agent. I was so depressed going into every shift. If you tried to be genuinely helpful, you’d get in trouble because your metrics would be off – the call would be too long, you wouldn’t answer enough calls in an hour, etc.

It was really like being a robot instead of a human.

I also really hate talking on the telephone.

But I’m not a quitter, so I figured I should just suck it up. I sucked it up for six miserable months and the GTFOed. I did have to make a plan and figure out where to go and what to do next, but I should’ve started planning my escape sooner.

Don’t stay at jobs that give you stress stomach aches. There are other jobs.

I can’t say a lot of the things I learned from those first few jobs were a lot of fun. It was often more about learning what I didn’t want in life. Though sometimes that’s really useful to know too.

What lessons did you learn from your first few jobs?