Summer jobs can open up a world of possibilities
Lessons learned on long days can help shape young minds, Terry O’Shaughnessy writes.
Our summer students began their internships this week and I was, as usual, struck by how much smarter and savvier they are than I ever was at their age. But even for them, their first summer job will be a formative learning experience, I suspect.
When I was applying for my first summer job, it was the West Island of the 1970s and there wasn’t a whole lot to choose from. As with so many things in that era, Fairview Shopping Centre was the hub of possibility.
My first job was in the storeroom of Birks Jewellers, where I had to keep their famous blue boxes clean and gift wrap any item brought to us by wonderful salesladies who were never called by their first names.
Mrs. Neilsen, Mrs. McVitie or Mme. Casgrain would bring tea cups, pieces of silver, china figurines or dishes, each requiring one of the specifically sized boxes which would mysteriously arrive once a week from the big store downtown. Working a hectic Saturday at Birks could mean a sea of blue. There were blue boxes, royal blue ribbon and rolls of silvery indigo paper on enormous wheels, which were kept spinning all day. But I also learned something important. Mr. Church, who was in charge of the storeroom, had fought in the Second World War. During slow patches we would chat and gradually, over the summer, I learned there could be experiences so enormous you couldn’t speak of them for longer than a moment. At 16 and living the sheltered suburban life, that was a pretty formative lesson for me.
The next summer I worked in another part of the mall in a specialty food store that smelled of coffee, cheese and all sorts of exotic things that had never been part of my West Island world. I’d slice great wheels of cheese with a wire and measure out deliciously scented coffee beans from woven sacks. Shockingly, I learned that there were more, in fact many more, spices than I had ever dreamed of. Our spice rack at home held all you could possibly need, after all: salt, pepper, cinnamon and an ancient plastic baggie of poultry dressing which was taken out twice a year at Thanksgiving and Christmas. So the knowledge that there could be a whole other world of tastes, in fact a whole other world, was another formative lesson for me.
Finally, there was my dream summer job — working at Fairview’s old W.H. Smith’s book store. But I never made it up out of the children’s floor and into the book stacks upstairs where I longed to be, and that was another formative lesson. Because as Mick Jagger used to sing in those same ’70s: “You can’t always get what you want.” And so it is for all students heading to work for the first time this summer. But if you’re lucky, there are other perks along the way.