A friend and I hit the open road, hitch hiking to the coast, thought we’d just pick up whatever work we could along the way.
While we had several interesting jobs, including carnival hawker at one stop over, one day we found ourselves in a beautiful fruit filled valley in British Columbia.
Everyone suggested we stop and pick some fruit for a little cash.
I picked apples for one day, my companion worked for two days and then we called it quits. It was awful back breaking work, and we sang spirituals the whole time we were doing it, but it didn’t help.
Don’t feel bad, it happens to lots of people. I think you made the right choice and for the right reasons. Feel good about it.
Count yourself lucky you had the confidence and backbone to move on and the opportunity to find other work, there are many who do not have these things.
Personally, I love the feeling of it, few things in life are as freeing, in my opinion as walking a way from something you know isn’t right for you.
Embrace it, revel in it, count this as a lucky day. If I were you I’d be buying a lottery ticket about now.
Years ago, during a bout of unemployment, I had signed on at a Temp agency, who sent me to a publishing agency. The position was to set inserts into the middle of magazines, and there were some type of strip thing, and it had to be positioned just so… We took a break after 2 hours, and I simply picked up my purse and left. It was the longest 2 hours of my life.
I quit a job in less than an hour! I used to work out of a temp agency, and they sent me to a place where they were digging up the asphalt out of an underground parking lot, so it could be repaved. I was given a jackhammer and instructed to go to it. Well, at the time I was poor and underfed, and only weighed 150 pounds. That is apparently not enough weight to throw behind a jackhammer to make it do anything useful. It shook me around real good, but no asphalt was broken up. I’ll bet I wasn’t there 45 minutes when I explained my situation to the supervisor, and he agreed that I should just go home.
My first “job” out of college was at an advertising specialties place, where they make giveaway items like hats, pens, beer cozies, etc., with company logos on them. My job was to clean up customer-provided art to get it camera-ready. It was part time, something like three days a week, five hours a day, and about a buck over minimum wage. Not glamorous, but I figured it was good for my resume while I looked for something better.
I showed up for my orientation day in my best clean black jeans, a nice button-down shirt, and black shoes (not sneakers). I had previously worked part-time doing paste-up at a printing company, where this would have been appropriate dress. You were working with ink and wax and other nasties, after all. My supervisor (a young woman in skirt and heels) took me partway through the tour, then led me to a semi-deserted part of the building (it was being remodeled) and told me that my clothing did not meet the dress code. I would need to wear “business attire.”
Excuse me? I’m fresh out of college, working maybe 15 hours a week at barely over minimum wage, and you expect me to buy a business wardrobe for a messy job, half days three days a week, in which “the customers might see me” in my neat working clothes and somehow be offended?
I didn’t say anything and finished the orientation, but called back the next day and said I wouldn’t be coming back. And I told them why. Fuck that.
Got a full-time job about a week later and stayed for 5½ years. And wore jeans and T-shirts the whole time.
I worked at Toys R Us for one shift. They threw me out on the floor with no training at all. Told me to freshen up endcaps. Excuse me, what the freakin’ frack is an endcap. Well, now I know but only because a few years later I worked retail where thay at least gave you an overview.
Woah, you gave up $25/hr. plus a fat pension pension? Because you were worried about heat stroke, hearing loss, falling from heights, getting run over by construction equipment, overtime at your employer’s will, seasonal layoffs, etc.?
I split a carpet cleaning job after 1 shift. Five (REALLY) filthy carpets, and one illegal sewer dump job with the dirty chemical water, and the constant reminder that “dean hates figure eights” (meaning that when you roll up an extension cord on your arm, that it goes into a figure 8) forced me to beat feet, and fast.
I told the gatekeeper that this just wasn’t for me, and he handed me a check for the days wages, which were no where NEAR payment enough for the filth i waded through…
There was one thing about my one day pizza delivery job that’s still memorable. It was in Des Moines in the summer of 1987 and the day I was delivering one of the largest fires in the city in years broke out. A large building was destroyed and I could see the flames over the tops of other buildiings from several miles away. It was kind of cool in a tragic way.
$25 an hour?! I could only wish! Hell, for that much money I might have actually been more inclined to stay on and get used to the crappy conditions I wasn’t suited for working in. It was more like $7 an hour, which was about what I was making as a fast food manager at the time.
Well, now I know but only because a few years later I worked retail where thay at least gave you an overview.