PICKING COTTON CANDY
The National Post invites readers to share their stories about summer jobs past. Email your stories — no more than 400 words — to summerjobs@nationalpost.com. This week, Carol Vincent of Victoria shares hers:
A big Kmart had just opened in Bell’s Corners, an Ottawa suburb, and my friend had already landed a summer job there in the men’s wear department. She was hanging shirts, folding pants, flirting with young men and generally making herself indispensable for $1.27 an hour. I applied and was also hired — my first real job if you didn’t count babysitting, which I didn’t.
Dressed smartly, I reported to HR and was given my assignment: candy floss. Huh?
I followed the woman to an area just this side of the cash registers, where a brightly humming circus machine flavoured the air with the unmistakable scent of cotton candy.
A girl stood beside it, deftly twirling a paper cone around the inside of the tub, and moments later, pulling out a gossamer confection of spun sugar. Well, this looked like fun.
I stepped up, watched as she did it again, nodded briskly and prepared to do it myself. The girl and the HR woman wandered off, apparently falling for my air of confidence and professionalism. A young boy approached and ordered a cotton candy.
I twirled a paper cone around the inside of the perforated tub, as a fan blew tiny filaments of hot sugar into the air. Ah. Not as easy as it looked. The filaments were accumulating unevenly, and the vents were blowing as much hot sugar — very hot sugar — onto my arm as onto the paper cone. I persisted and in a few moments withdrew a lopsided layer cake of molten blue stuff. The boy eyed it doubtfully.
That’s just for the display, I chirped, and made another — a towering blue beehive — a Marge Simpson hairdo, before there was such a character. This one made up in size for what it lacked in style, and the boy nodded and carried it off.
In no time at all, or rather in exactly three hours and 50 hot and dishevelled minutes, I finished my shift — with blue sugar crystals spackling my hair, my arms, my fingers, my eyelashes, my nostrils and my smart outfit. I had acquired a handy job skill that I would never use again — and an abiding aversion to cotton candy.
National Post