most crushing defeat
One summer I defied my father and secretly went out job searching. He advised me to keep working for him and I hated it...plus it was a bad idea for many other reasons. He assumed he still had authority with me as my "Father" and he was shocked and outraged when I informed him I would be working in the snack bar of a local swimming pool. He predicted I would make less money and, at the end of the summer I would have no way to make money.
The job was hard. The girl in charge of the snack bar was a friend of the pool manager and she complained constantly about the way I cleaned up at the end of the day. I worked hard to improve my clean up but the grease stuck to the floor and to everything in the room. I scrubbed down with anomia every night but it was still stickey with old grease. I could not get it clean and I thought her complaints were unfair. I was well liked as far as my interactions with the people buying food and the other snack bar workers went...but never with that girl.
The following year I applied to work there again at that pool and the manager would not hire me back because he felt I had not done a good job. I felt a huge sense of failure and I was further upset because, if my father found out, he would feel I deserved it and try to make me come back to work for him. It felt so unfair and I was never sure if I could have cleaned that place up and just failed or if the task was impossible.
A few weeks later I walked downtown after school and got a job at a clothing store, Kay Howards. I worked there every summer and holiday through college.
I don't know if this is THE most crushing defeat. It is one that makes me feel bad every time I think about it...but there were others...like the time I got my first F and it was for credit hours that were required for graduation from University of Illinois and I would not be able to graduate without those credit hours and graduation was two weeks away. That has also stuck with me. I knew I was in over my head in that course but I just tried not to think about it. I began missin classes because they made me feel bad...still not thinking about the consequences. I thought I was smart enough to just barely figure it out by myself and answer just enough on the final to pass it. I was wrong.
The job was hard. The girl in charge of the snack bar was a friend of the pool manager and she complained constantly about the way I cleaned up at the end of the day. I worked hard to improve my clean up but the grease stuck to the floor and to everything in the room. I scrubbed down with anomia every night but it was still stickey with old grease. I could not get it clean and I thought her complaints were unfair. I was well liked as far as my interactions with the people buying food and the other snack bar workers went...but never with that girl.
The following year I applied to work there again at that pool and the manager would not hire me back because he felt I had not done a good job. I felt a huge sense of failure and I was further upset because, if my father found out, he would feel I deserved it and try to make me come back to work for him. It felt so unfair and I was never sure if I could have cleaned that place up and just failed or if the task was impossible.
A few weeks later I walked downtown after school and got a job at a clothing store, Kay Howards. I worked there every summer and holiday through college.
I don't know if this is THE most crushing defeat. It is one that makes me feel bad every time I think about it...but there were others...like the time I got my first F and it was for credit hours that were required for graduation from University of Illinois and I would not be able to graduate without those credit hours and graduation was two weeks away. That has also stuck with me. I knew I was in over my head in that course but I just tried not to think about it. I began missin classes because they made me feel bad...still not thinking about the consequences. I thought I was smart enough to just barely figure it out by myself and answer just enough on the final to pass it. I was wrong.