My First Real Job | Teen Ink

My First Real Job

January 13, 2009
By Jamie! GOLD, Hartland, Wisconsin
Jamie! GOLD, Hartland, Wisconsin
18 articles 0 photos 1 comment

Favorite Quote:
Tough times don't last... Tough people do.


Clash of Personality

I entered my freshman year of high school working at Our Savior's Lutheran Church. My title was "office assistant" and my job was anything that the rest of the employees didn't want to do. I was a timorous 14-year-old and hadn't worked a real job before, so it was a new and glorious thing to me, until I got to know the people I was working with.
My office assistant job was given to me by my mom; she is the office secretary at the church and when they needed the office assistant, she threw my name in for consideration. I had no problem with working with my mom. It was more the people that accompanied my mom in bossing me around. I wanted to expunge them all off the face of the Earth. First and worst, there were Joice and Edgar Phillips, ancient old crones who've been married for eons. Upon meeting them, it was easy to see why they were attracted to each other; they were fractious, annoying, picky people. Edgar was the volunteer tech man. It was his job to make sure the tech desk (where the slide shows with song lyrics for services were made and projected) was run smoothly. Unfortunately, it was my job to make the slideshows in a pain-in-the-butt computer program. I had to type up the lyrics and choose a picture to use as a background with no given guidelines. Every Tuesday when I would return to work after my slideshow was shown to the Sunday church-goers who loved and complemented it, I would get yelled at by Edgar for using overly flamboyant pictures for backgrounds. The man was an anathema and made it impossible to enjoy anything about making these slideshows (which was supposed to be the "fun" part of my job).
Edgar's wife Kate: a stuck-up, snobby, music lady who thinks she knows everything there is to know about everything. She thought of herself as utterly infallible in the utopia inside that numb skull of hers. Her expectations of me were to read her mind and know exactly what she wanted without her having to tell me. This put an unbreakable schism between us, and it didn't take long for us to despise each other completely. I felt that her brain must be truncated with age or something, luckily my mom was always there to convince me that strangling her was not the solution to the problem.
To this day when I walk into Our Savior's Lutheran Church, I cannot stand to look at those two. There is an advantage now though, that I didn't have before. I can simply say, "I don't work here anymore." in a jaunty tone and anger as much as I please.


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