More tone deaf Millenials?

My first full-time daily newspaper job had a shirt and tie and no jeans dress code for the newsroom during normal office hours (before 5). I always loved how uncomfortable the copy editors seemed when they got there by 3 and had to look nice. In my young state I also hated carting off to a local high school where I'd talk to people who would be wearing athletic gear, adults included, and I was at least sort of spiffy looking (now in a more mature state, I don't know why that bothered me). It was more or less because the public could see us during those normal working hours as sort of silly as we thought it to be and as seldom as the public was ever in our newsroom.

I hated it too, but I never once thought to complain. Never. I don't know that that makes me any better than these interns, but maybe there's a new group mentality or something. Maybe if us sports writers and copy editors had gotten together it would be different. But then like I said, although we all hated it we never thought to say anything. Management didn't have to think hard to figure out we hated it anyway. Also, in total hindsight we all looked like absolute trash after we came back from dinner, so it probably wasn't a bad idea to have a dress code like that.

 

I'm a girl (but no one would go as far to describe me as "dainty") and I helped my dad lay irrigation on his golf course for a summer. I also mowed, picked range (by hand one year), worked the register. I had many extra-curriculars (musical, choir, drama, ME/ad manager of the newspaper), had another after school job that wasn't working for my parents and still maintained a good enough GPA for all of my colleges to throw scholarship money at me. I also volunteered at the community theatre and worked with the church youth choir.

I now look back and try to figure out how I didn't fall over and die my junior year of high school from exhaustion.

 

I worked from the time I was 14, but it didn't keep me from fucking around too much in school and dropping out of college after three semesters.

Working as night manager at a gas station for a year or two in my early 20s was what made me realize it was probably a good idea to go back to school and figure out a career path. It was going to be that or join the Navy.

My daughter's workload at prep school didn't allow for a part-time job. She was routinely studying and reading until midnight and beyond. She graduated college last year and is adjusting to the working world just fine now.

Count me as unconvinced there is a right or wrong way.

 

There was a really smart fuck-up at my high school who graduated (barely, I'm guessing) into a job driving trucks. Decided "fuck this" in his early 20s. JUCO. Indiana University. IU Med School. Now he's a doctor.

 

I just chose the wrong profession.

 

Would not have guessed you were a college dropout at one point.

Might like you more now.

I just know that not finishing school is going to haunt me when I stress the value of an education to my daughter.

 

How many credits short? I dicked around for more than two decades taking (and dropping) classes over multiple jobs and almost as many states before finally getting my degree. By the time I got it, it didn't make much difference professionally, but it was a point of pride to finish something after so many years.

 

Way too many.

If either of us go back to school, it will be my wife.

 

I recall doing my first 40-hour week in the 9th grade, when there had been a lot of snow days and I was jonesing for a 35mm camera. I manned the horizontal band saw at my father's tool-and-die shop that week and took home enough to buy a pretty nice Vivitar SLR. I ordered it from one of those New York stores that advertised in the back of the photography magazines. Kinda quaint thinking about it now.

I was a total fuck-off in college and barely graduated. I never once went on academic probation, but I was always right up on the edge of it. By the time I was halfway through, my father had pretty much washed his hands of me, but my mother felt it was important that I finish if at all possible. They paid for tuition (which was pretty cheap) and books, but anything else I had to cover (we lived close enough that I could have commuted if I'd wanted).

There was a funny pattern to my summers. School would let out in early May, so I'd head home and start working. After taxes I'd bring home, I don't know, something like $140 a week. My father would hold $100 of it (for the next year's room and board at school) and I'd pocket the rest for go money. That first week's go money would buy four re-caps for my old beater of a car (that had been sitting during the academic year). Usually the way it'd go is that with a couple of weeks to go my father would have held back enough to cover room/board, and those last two weeks would go toward my play money for the year ... which, naturally, I'd manage to blow the first two weeks. But I was always doing some piddly ass something (like stringing) to keep the (cheap) beer flowing.

 

I worked part-time starting my sophomore year in high school. But this was in the relatively flush late 80s, so I'm sure I learned a whole bunch of wrong lessons. Such as:


If you want a job, just go in for it. They'll give it to right away because, let's face it, these entry-level service jobs are strictly for teenagers. If you're not obviously stoned, you're the best they can get.

A job is a place where you and your friends can hang out, and maybe do a little work. It's like your buddy's basement except that - sigh, roll eyes - sometimes customers insist on bothering you.

If you're not on the phone talking with your friends, a customer might be able to get through and bother you. Do you really want to let this happen?

Finally, it's probably wrong to steal money right out of the register. (You have to draw the line somewhere.) But office supplies grow on trees and working at a restaurant means free food for the entire family.


So, in short, before I graduated from college, the line between capitalism and socialism was always pretty sketchy.

 

Before posting that, did you check the statute of limitations?

 

I did the same, but only for eight years until finishing my degree. It helped a little in advancing me through a dying industry.

It was a point of pride to finish it, but not as much as when I decided to leave journalism and was able to become successful in another field without a lot of formal training.