For what it's worth, here's the story of my working life.
I started working when I was 6 years old. Back then we were pretty poor, so extra money was useful to help improve quality of life. I got a paper route and delivered newspapers twice a week after school, beginning with one area and eventually building up over the years until I had an area covering four times the normal amount. I didn't do it alone; my younger sister and mother helped with delivery and driving me out to the areas I covered, respectively. This job lasted for eight years.
At fourteen, I gave up the newspaper job in favour of pamphlet distribution (a.k.a. junk mail). I did that for another two years, mainly because the pay was better and the workload was pretty much the same. This entire experience gave me a solid foundation in handling work and money from an early age.
After I reached senior levels in high school, I knew I wanted a job that required a university bachelor degree. I'd spent my life watching my blue collar father work his ass off for minimum wage and knew I had the brains to do better than that. So I quit my job and focused full time on my studies. I graduated high school in the top 2% of my state and took out a government funded loan to cover the tuition fees for university.
After two years of university I knew I wanted more independence, and fortunately I saw the means to gain it. I'd been working at various businesses during my university course as a part of the placement program to gain working experience, and I made sure that the places I worked were close to home. One of them paid off, and I got my foot in the door with a job offer to do part time work after university in a field that matched my chosen area of study. I took the job, and the pay was enough to afford to rent a place of my own.
Now, I should mention that this place was, to be generous, a roach motel. The building was a duplex apartment in one of the highest crime areas in town, and my next door neighbour was the local fence. His full time job was sitting on his ass in front of his house, chain smoking while he sold whatever his friends had stolen in his permanent yard sale, and every fortnight collecting his disability pension and pissing it away on beer. Still, it was my own place, and I could afford it (barely). The biggest features it had was that it was cheap, and it was walking distance to the train station. I had to make sacrifices to stretch my cash, sure. I lived on $30 of food per week, and I had no internet or transport aside from public buses and trains. The only luxury I gave myself was a 10 year old prepaid Nokia phone. I mostly lived in the university computer labs and library when I wasn't on the train. Given that it took two hours to travel by train between home and university, I devoted this time to studying, and it's pretty impressive how much you can learn during four hours every weekday without any distractions.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I graduated university. There was a lot of stuff I could have done afterwards if I'd wanted, but finances and one additional hiccup made my choice for me. See, during my time at university I'd met an amazing woman, and we were dating a decent while. Then, one day, she tells me she's pregnant!
So, time to man up. The part time job I got during university becomes full time after I graduate. I take whatever I can get, overtime, graveyard shift, I don't care. I get as much experience as I can, even though by this point I'm thoroughly sick of the owner and his shitty treatment of his staff. Just to clarify, this business goes through employees like tissues. It's almost legendary to last longer than a year working in that place, and I've been there for almost four. However, the owner also has a second business, and the guy he has managing the place is closing in on retirement. Guess who the owner wants to take over? That's right, yours truly.
But, there's a problem. See, I met my girlfriend at university. Sorry, did I say girlfriend? I mean wife, since we tied the knot soon after I learned the big news. So my wife still has one year left of her own degree, and she needs to take a year off from university at least in order to raise our child. And I'm sorry, but she's pretty clear she's not doing this in my roach motel of an apartment, nor is she prepared to spend two hours travelling on the train to university after she's ready to continue her course.
So I have a choice. I can take the management job that will mean I barely see my new family, or I can quit and roll the dice.
I quit.
Mind you, I've not done this straight away. Prior to the big decision, I've moved out of my roach motel, packed up everything worth keeping into a friend's trailer and taken out a lease on a one bedroom shoebox apartment close to university. Anything I couldn't take I either threw in the trash or sold to my ex-neighbour, the fence, for five bucks apiece. Hooray, first house for me and my wife! Biggest feature? A five minute walk to the local train station, because again I wasn't prepared to invest in a car when I could save money with public transport. I would typically take a 4AM train back down to my old home town to my job, which on weekends meant I'd have the joy of sharing my train car with all the human trash that missed the last train out of the city on the weekend. The smell of vomit and urine was pretty much a given every trip.
So I handed my two week's notice to my boss, got my references and took anything and everything I could find for work. With my degree under my belt, I papered everywhere local and along the train line with my resume, looking for full time, part time or casual positions. I worked a variety of odd jobs, catching whatever I could find, making connections and learning new systems and business models. It was honestly a great time for me, terrifying as hell not to know where my next paycheck was coming from, but still great to grow my professional skills and add a bunch of bullet points on my resume. I had enough money saved that I wasn't too desperate, and even though my wife wasn't working I could still feed us and keep a roof over our heads, even if she insisted that "no, we are not eating beans and rice for five nights a week!"
I eventually landed steady work, two part time jobs that paid enough that money was good for us. I finally bought a (ten year old, second hand) car, and then put away whatever money I could spare. My wife had a beautiful healthy baby girl, and we began the saga of the yearly move.
See, after a two and a half year break, my wife went back and completed the last part of her university degree. With this done, she still needed to perform a year's work as an intern to complete her requirements for professional registration. The place she found available was a good four hours travel from where we lived.
Well, after only being in the spacious apartment for a year, we moved closer to my wife's job, and I quit one of my two part time jobs. The other job was just a single full day's work, and I had a good friend that lived nearby. So my routine for a year was to travel down to my friend's house, sleep there overnight, work for twelve hours and then drive home again. I cannot express how much I hate driving that highway at night. Those two days I worked were my wife's weekend, during which she would care for our daughter. The other days were daddy days.
Well, after a year of this, two things happened. First, my wife finished her intern year, and completed her full requirements for professional registration. Second, I found full-time work closer to home. I'd been monitoring all job advertisements for the local area and applying to anything suitable, and eventually got a win.
Also, around this time the owner of the apartment we were renting decided to renovate, kicking us out and forcing us to find a new place to live. We even had to go to court over the bond for some impossibly stupid reasoning, but of course I won by virtue of following the rental agreement to the letter. So welcome to family home number three! This happened to be an actual house instead of an apartment, an incredibly retro place with a honest-to-god sunken living room and shag-pile mustard carpet.
The full time job I found didn't work out, but I found another without too much trouble since I had a pretty decent resume by this point. It was finally a Monday to Friday job, meaning I could actually spend my weekends with my family like a normal person. In retrospect, spending more time with my wife probably wasn't the smartest decision, since guess what? Baby number two was born!
Well, by this stage I was had a full time job, a decent house and a happy life with a wife and two kids, but this wasn't getting us anywhere financially. I sat down and talked it over with my wife, and through friends I'd made within my industry I learned about a new business that was opening in the nearby area. They'd been advertising for a manager, but recently the online ad was gone. So I got the name and email of the owner and sent my resume to him directly instead. I got an interview, convinced him I was the right guy for the job, and he gave me control of his new business. I negotiated a decent pay package, used the money I'd saved to take a mortgage out on my own house, and that's where I am today.
To summarize, you should expect to work the shitty jobs to begin with, but never lose sight of the long term goals. Take what you have now, milk whatever skills and contacts you can gain from it, and plan for where you want to be in five years. You can still take time off for your own life, but don't neglect to keep hungry for something better and work towards it.
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Topic: How to work? (Read 4735 times)