Teenage jobs

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Here's a column from 2006. Maybe it will remind some folks of work they've done or conversations they've had with parents or children. 

My daughter and I are having a running debate over whether she should have a job while in high school.

I say “running” because when I bring up the subject, she runs.

An after-school job is just the thing to teach responsibility, I believe. Athletics instill valuable lessons in teamwork, but they are also one huge money pit. The hand is always out – for shoes, warm-ups, donuts before the car wash fundraiser, gifts for the coach, money for dinner on the way home from a game or meet.

Then there are the assorted costs of the teenage years that have nothing to do with sports. Dances, movies, trips to the store for supplies to complete school projects, retainers mangled beyond recognition by the dog – all keep a parent’s finances on life support, with a weak pulse and a dicey prognosis.

I don’t begrudge my daughter any of this. Like most parents, I wail and gnash my teeth over the vacancy sign in my wallet, but I still pay and pay and pay. (A friend once said that Dad comes last when the money train pulls into the family station, and that the boxcars are often empty when it comes time for him to take his fill. Boy, do I believe it.)

But as my daughter approaches the magical age of 16, I have begun to talk about the bonding experience of driving together from one fast food joint to the next, collecting applications the way a baseball fan collects autographed cards, and bringing them home to fill out, one after another.

Except she doesn’t want to.

Doesn’t want to drive from place to place, doesn’t want to get a job, doesn’t want to compromise her teenage years.

Suddenly, she wants to focus on academics.

This is a laudable goal. The only problem is that the words “focus” and “academics” have never before issued from her mouth in the same sentence. It doesn’t help that she utters them while staring vacantly at the television, a pastime where her mother and I must periodically remind her to blink and breathe. Maybe MTV is teaching her geometry, but I doubt it.

I think back to the succession of odd jobs I held during high school and I wonder how I could have fathered a child so alien to my own work ethic.

At age 14, my mom sent me to work on a mink farm. It was nasty, filthy work, and my only option was to do it. I waded through muck up to my knees and filled the animals’ water dishes. A co-worker once pulled an esophagus from a barrel of tripe and pretended a dead cow was speaking. I could never have learned that in school.

By age 16, I graduated to washing dishes at a restaurant, learning the ropes from a certified psychotic who relieved boredom by juggling steak knives and sucking his own blood when he nicked a finger or thumb. “Renfield” would often refer disparagingly to his “old lady,” who in my innocence I thought was his mother, until he referenced doing things to her and with her that weren’t part of normal mother/son relationships. Again, where else could I have picked up valuable street slang and smarts?

I thought of all the late nights spent hosing grease off various restaurant equipment, how dishwater would back up on the floor and seep into my shoes, leaving my feet smelling distinctly of shrimp or sirloin or whatever the day’s special might be.

I remembered the manager who tried to get me to smuggle steaks in the trashcan out of the building, the customer who hit me in the temple with a T-bone steak that he said wasn’t cooked properly, and on and on.

I thought I had learned a lot from all those experiences, but in reality, I only learned two things: respect for people who made careers of such work, and the knowledge that I didn’t want to be one of them.

The more I think about the weird assemblage of people with whom I came into contact, the less likely I am to want to expose my child to them. Because those people are still out there – juggling knives, hurling steaks, practicing ventriloquism with cow parts.

And I’m starting to think that “focusing on academics” isn’t such a bad idea, after all. Maybe she can get a job in an office, answering a phone or filing papers.

Maybe if I’d been smart enough to think of that, I might have avoided the squishy sound one’s shoes make when filled with dirty dishwater.

A sound which, incidentally, still haunts my dreams.