Summertime and the living is easy. Unless, of course, you have a summer job in which case you should prepare to work harder than you ever knew was humanly possible. From one week to the next, I was plucked from the cloistered comfort zone of school and cast into the adult world of actual, real work. To say that it seemed confronting at the time would be an understatement of some magnitude. Suffice to say, I found the real world something of a shock.
Summertime and the living is easy. Unless, of course, you have a summer job in which case you should prepare to work harder than you ever knew was humanly possible. From one week to the next, I was plucked from the cloistered comfort zone of school and cast into the adult world of actual, real work. To say that it seemed confronting at the time would be an understatement of some magnitude. Suffice to say, I found the real world something of a shock.
I had just finished year 12. Nowadays, this achievement would be marked by borrowing money from my parents, skedaddling to the Gold Coast before blowing the lot on a cover charge for an empty disco and a blue cocktail comprised entirely of the least popular spirits known to bartending and left-over bathroom disinfectant. But, back then, I decided to celebrate the completion twelve years of schooling by immediately starting a summer job doing data entry for Safeway.
It was my first office job. At the time, my wardrobe comprised my school uniform, a pair of jeans, a Hang-10 windcheater and a flannel tracksuit. It would be fair to say that I had little in the way of suitable business attire. Somewhat tragically, I don’t recall an emergency trip to the menswear section at Myer, which means I was probably forced to improvise. Not since the grade six pool party when I decided to take an over-sized pair of my father’s shorts to avoid the embarrassment of wearing lolly-bags in front of my class mates, only to see them dislodged by the force of my first dive into the pool at float away before being swallowed by the filter, had the potential for outright humiliation been so great.
They would not have been suit pants. Frankly, the trousers I wore simply wouldn’t qualify. They were slacks. There’s every chance that I might have worn a short-sleeved shirt. In a botched attempt to appear sophisticated, the shirt was a shade of gelato green. That was my best shirt. After that, it was downhill and the descent was steep. And as for the tie, beggars cannot be choosers. The tie I wore was one handed down from previous generations. If you were being polite, you might describe it was ‘busy’. A whirling mess of paisley, my necktie was not so much ‘eye catching’ as it was something that could induce blindness instantly.
The job of data entry clerk was located at head office in Mulgrave and, each morning, I got a lift to work. It was a new world of peak hour traffic and radio reports. At the office, I had a desk and a computer terminal. I would then be handed a swathe of computer printouts and it was then my task to input the prices. Until that time, I’d ever sat in front of a computer to play ‘Frogger’. This was not quite as much fun. Indeed, I’d previously thought that getting run over as I tried to cross the street was as stressful and the world of computers got. I was wrong.
The stakes were high. If I messed up, it would mean that the price for a tub of ice cream in Hoppers Crossing would be completely out of whack. Although making an error as to the price of a tub of ice cream might seem like a small thing, I can assure you that such catastrophes have very real consequences. I thought of it as the ‘chocolate ripple affect’. I had seen the film ‘War Games’ with Matthew Broderick in which a computer has the power to destroy humanity by launching a nuclear missile attack. The impact of a data entry error seemed to me then to be far worse.
Out of fear that a casual data entry error might bring the entire retail sector crashing to my knees, my next summer job was in an orchard. Not only did this mean I could avoid the awesome responsibility of data entry, I could spend time with my brother and our friend, Marcus. The dress code was casual. It was outdoors. It was, in fact, as different to study as could possibly be imagined. Our job was not to pick fruit but to thin it, so that it could grow properly and be picked by others.
Over those weeks each summer, I would thin fruit until I was doing it in my dreams. Getting up each morning, it was like Bill Murray in ‘Groundhog Day’ except that instead of ‘I Got You’ by Sonny and Cher, commercial FM radio deemed ‘I Touch Myself’ by The Divinyls as appropriate audio fare for six o’clock in the morning. We thinned, we fell off our ladders when we occasionally lost our balance and we talked. It was the kind of work that conducive to casual chatter and we talked up hill and down dale. From a distance, we must have sounded like cockatoos, squawking as we worked.
These were my first forays into the world of work. Back then it seemed a somewhat alien experience. But, for better or for worse, that was summer for me. Although I didn’t realise it then, those months between school years were the most carefree days of my life. Other than not inadvertently giving away tubs of ice cream or falling off my ladder too often, I had nothing in the way of responsibility. Incidentally, I no longer dream of thinning fruit. But take me to an orchard and put a ladder in front of me, and I’ve no doubt that it would all come flooding back to me. Welcome back summer.