Someone stopped by our shop yesterday that I worked with 15 years ago and have seen at least once a year since my CP days. It was pretty funny actually to watch them run their memory bank for a few seconds as they tried to connect my face with my name. Usually this is someone that I see when I’m in a store not when I am the store so she was having a bit of trouble with my new polyester version. Once she made the connection we had a few minutes to play catch up like we do every year. The difference this year is that I’m working. It’s been a running joke between us since I left the CP that someone would have to pay me big bucks to get me to go out to work again. Truth be told it wasn’t much of a joke from my perspective. If someone wanted me to work for them they would indeed have to pay me, big bucks.
When I was 17 I was approached by a head hunting company who offered me a job with the carrot being “name your price”. That’s pretty heady stuff for a 17 year old and that was how my career went for the next bunch of years. I would go work for someone on a contract if they met my price which today would be good money but in the 70s it was obscene money. From that I developed a level of arrogance that still sticks to me 30 years later when it comes to being paid to work.
When Rose and I were wrapping up our conversation she threw in our standard joke, “someone must be paying you big bucks to work again”. Umm, not! Reality is, for the second time in my life I’m working for minimum wage. A whopping $7.50 an hour, everybody yell out a wooo hooo. Steve and I often joke about the fact that it takes me almost all day to make what he makes in an hour. And very soon I will be making $1.25 more a day when they raise the minimum wage in May. Yes I do indeed find both those facts very amusing.
Sometimes a job is not about the money and that certainly is the case in the job I have now. It’s NOT about the money, I would probably work there for the cost of parking and all the free coffee I can drink. The job itself, the work of my job is not the draw, honestly you could train a monkey to do the work and if I let it it can be rather monotonous. It’s the “people” part of my job that’s the draw, it’s living in the world of Jekyll and Hyde, it’s the customers and the quick glimpses into their lives. For me I am making plenty, it’s a painfully slow way towards that dumb truck but I get paid obscene money in the form of touching lives and having their lives touch mine and there is no monetary equivalent for that.
Come on May…….I’m getting really excited about that buck and a quarter.
The money you have gives you freedom; the money you pursue enslaves–Jean Jacques Rousseau–
