Greetings. This week, our friends at Silverblogger invite us to remember our experiences with our first jobs. Let me tell you...
Before I turned sixteen, I had never worked outside my home. During my childhood and adolescence, we always had to help with the housework. We often helped clean the yard, feed the rabbits and chickens, weed the lemon and tangerine bushes, and do other similar tasks. But none of those activities were considered by my parents to be work that deserved payment; rather, they were understood as the contribution that each member of the family had to make.
When I was in my last year of high school, I had the idea of looking for a job for the first time. I remember it was during the December school vacation season. At that time, it was common for businesses to hire extra staff to meet the increased customer demand during the Christmas season. I would walk through the streets of downtown Caracas and often see signs posted in store windows advertising for employees. The offers were plentiful and varied, and it was easy to find a job as a store clerk or assistant in a food business.
One afternoon, while walking, I decided to go into a large shoe store that was advertising for employees. I spoke to the manager and told him I wanted to work there. The first thing he asked me was if I was of legal age. I told him no, I was sixteen. He explained that because of my age, I could only apply for the position of stockroom assistant, which involved finding the items requested by the salespeople. To work as a salesperson, you had to be eighteen. I told the person interviewing me that it was fine, that I would take the job as a stockroom assistant. He asked me to come back the next day at eight in the morning.
When I got home, the first thing I did was tell my mom. She was surprised. She asked me why I wanted to look for a job during the holidays when everyone else was having fun. I replied that I wanted to experience having a job and see what it was like to earn money for the first time. She thought that was a reasonable answer and agreed to let me go ahead with my plan to get a job.
The next day, I got up very early, a little before six in the morning. The distance from my house to the city center, where my workplace was located, was about ten kilometers, and I had to take two different forms of transportation. The trip took me between forty minutes and an hour, depending on how long I had to wait for public transportation, which was quite scarce at that time.
At 6:30 a.m., I left my house, and it took me about fifteen minutes for the bus to arrive. At around 7:40 a.m., I arrived at the store, where the manager was opening the doors for the staff to come in. The man signaled for me to wait for him at the entrance of the store. After about ten minutes, he told me to accompany him. We went up some stairs to the second floor of the store where the warehouses were located. It was a large space with many shelves.
He left me in charge of one of the warehouse workers and told him to show me how everything worked. I spent that morning and part of the afternoon learning all the procedures: using a small telephone, one of the salespeople would place their order, leaving a code and the number corresponding to the shoe size. With that information, the warehouse workers would search the shelves for what the salesperson had requested, remove the box, check that both shoes were there, and send it up via a small elevator attached to some ropes.
It was common for each salesperson to make several requests before making a sale. The boxes went up and down through the small elevator, piling up on the floor, and we warehouse workers had to put them back on the corresponding shelf.
By the afternoon, I had learned the mechanics of the job quite well. From searching for and putting away boxes so many times, I had memorized the location of the codes. I tried as much as possible to put the boxes away as the salespeople returned them, trying to keep them from piling up on the floor, but there were times when orders multiplied, and then it was inevitable that they would pile up for a while.
For three weeks I worked that job from Monday to Saturday, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. At midday, I had a half-hour break for lunch, which my mother prepared for me. In the last week of December, I received my pay. It wasn't much, considering what I spent on transportation and food, but it was enough to buy myself a very nice pair of leather boots from the same shoe store, with a 30% discount offered to all employees.
After that job, other jobs followed, until I found my permanent position after finishing my teaching degree. I remained a teacher for over 40 years.
Thank you for your time.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version).
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