Beyond Selidor

There aren't many Fridays left in the year, and I feel as if 2024 is rushing even faster at this point in December. There's still time for some open thread prompts, however, and this is what I came up with today:

When you were growing up, was it common for teenagers in secondary/high school to have part-time paid jobs? If you had a job at this age, what was it?



In the context in which I was a teenager (a state secondary school in Canberra in Australia, where most people came from middle class families, in the 1990s/early 2000s), having an after-school/weekend job was incredibly common, to the point that I'd almost say it was expected. It was legal to work from the age of 14-and-nine-months (I'm not sure how this specific age was arrived at; it might have been a holdover from earlier times when people often left school for full-time skilled work around that age, like my grandfather, who left school at 14 and became a civil engineer), and because hourly minimum wage went up by age in increments until a worker turned 21, teenagers were desirable as employees because they didn't have to be paid as much (the hourly rate was something like $5.50 for a fifteen-year-old if I recall correctly).

Certainly most people at my school had jobs either right from the earliest age they were allowed, or at least by the time they turned 15 or 16. It was seen as very childish not to work, even though most of us came from families where there was no real need — essentially the pay we got from working replaced pocket money (and it was a lot more — I went from being given $10 a week by my mum to earning $55 a week at my job, which at the time seemed like a massive sum). Most people I know worked at restaurants or cafes, supermarket checkouts, or for fast food outlets, although a couple of my friends worked as tutors, piano teachers, gymnastics coaches and horse-riding instructors, and there was one girl I knew who earned a living doing freelance anime-style art commissions for people online, which was seen as very left-field in the late 1990s/early-2000s dial-up internet days.

I had my first high school job in the winter when I was fifteen, but it was just two weeks filling in for another girl at my school who had gone to Europe with her family for a holiday. I worked full-time for the weekdays of those two weeks at a health food store (the sort of place run as a collective by a bunch of hippies, selling dried fruit, nuts, grains and pulses by weight from jars, plus a lot of vegan skincare, hair/body care and cleaning products). It generally went fine, although to this day I can remember a woman who shouted at me and made me cry due to a misunderstanding about pearl barley!

My main high school job, however, was something I started doing in the lead-up to Christmas when I was fifteen (every day for three weeks), and then carried on doing every Saturday plus the Christmas and Easter lead-up for the following two years. This was working as a sales assistant at a bakery/hand-made chocolate truffle shop, run by an absolutely awful Swiss guy who had a public persona as a hardworking, good family man and upstanding member of the local community. In spite of his odiousness, I really enjoyed this job, because: a) as well as owning the business, this guy was the baker, and if you know anything about bakers, they bake overnight and leave for home early in the morning (so we sales assistants usually only had to deal with him for a couple of hours in the morning, after which point we — a changing cast of teenage girls and one teenage boy — had the place to ourselves until closing time), b) I really got on well with the aforementioned fellow teenage sales assistants, so work just became another arm of my social life, c) we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted in the shop whenever we wanted, without paying, and got to take leftovers home at the end of the day, d) after about 12 noon, everything calmed down and we barely had to serve any customers, and e) the newsagent next door used to dump unsold magazines in the lane behind our two shops, and we'd just spend the whole afternoon reading the old magazines, eating handmade truffles, and chatting.

The Christmas and Easter lead-ups were always hellishly busy (I can still hear my boss's voice in my head yelling at me to 'push the half-eggs,' which were giant half Easter eggs, filled with truffles, which we had to load up in a production line behind the shop at breakneck speed, for two weeks non-stop; I can also still visualise coming into the bakery on Good Friday and having to walk across a carpet of pre-ordered hot cross buns, because so many people ordered them that we ran out of storage space and had to load them in stacks all over the floor — they remain the best hot cross buns I've ever eaten), but every other part of the job (apart from dealing with the boss) was so enjoyable that I didn't consider looking anywhere else.

The owner was awful for two reasons — he had a short temper and yelled at everyone, and he was a sexual harasser. Mostly, this involved his choice of decoration for the chocolate-making and bakery (i.e. the workshop areas which the public couldn't see), which were plastered with posters of semi-naked women torn out from Playboy and similar types of magazine, which I didn't realise was a form of sexual harassment (and wouldn't have done anything about even if I had; the early 2000s was ... let's just say it was very different to now). I remember just thinking how pathetic these posters made this guy seem, and remember another girl I worked with telling me that at one point a little toddler became enthused about becoming a baker when she grew up, and her mother asked the owner if the toddler could see the baking equipment, and the owner made all his workers take all the posters down — and then put them all back up again once the little kid had gone. (This, again, just seemed pathetic to me at the time.) He sexually harassed some of my co-workers in other ways, but never did anything (beyond subjecting me to the posters) to me, which I always suspected at the time was because he knew my parents were journalists and was afraid of them telling colleagues in the press about his behaviour. We all complained to each other behind his back about all this, but I cannot emphasise enough how different the world was at the time, and this atmosphere just felt like part of the fabric of the universe — unpleasant, but expected, just part of the daily experience of being a teenage girl. It also, weirdly, just felt like such a small part of the job, whereas the part we liked — the food, the freedom, being left on our own to run the shop and gossip — felt like the main part of the job.

I don't regret doing this job, or having a job aged 15-18 while still a full-time student — at all. My confidence, my mental arithmetic (since there were always four of us in the shop and only one cash register, we mostly just added up prices in our heads), and my ability to deal with unpleasant people in a customer service environment massively improved, and although I would never recommend teenage girls work for a sexual harasser (or remain working for one after he reveals himself as such), I do think in general that paid work is a good thing to do as a teenager, and that customer service work is a good thing for everyone to have to experience at some point in their lives!