LJ Idol S11 Wk9 - Milkshake Duck
After the first few, I stopped telling my family when I had a new job. I was just opening the door to ridicule, and I was getting enough of that from myself.
I had a simple plan for my post-grad life: get a job in my field, be outstanding, receive promotions, live happily ever after. It didn't work out quite that way.
I got the job in my field, but that's where everything went off the rails. My dreams of working with children with severe autism* had been missing a few key features: housework, for one. I never considered who washed their clothes and scrubbed their bathrooms. Another is that beautiful, puzzling, challenging children with autism turn into *teenagers* with autism. Rebellious teens, emotional, dramatic teens...hormonal teens. I stuck it out for a year, but after that my supervisor and I agreed that it was time to part ways.
My mother rolled her eyes, and I moved back upstate near my college town to be near my friends and work in a different kind of residential facility. This one was for "troubled" youth, as they were euphemistically known. I have no idea why either I or the interviewer thought I was a good match for that position; following one of my first overnight shifts, during which one of the boys scratched up the varnish on the top of his dresser enough to set it on fire, I put in my notice and went in search of employment better suited to my temperament.
"You know what I want?" A friend and I were discussing my employment woes. "A job where I can just go, do the work, and leave at the end of the day. Something I don't take home with me every night and worry about all the time."
"Sounds like a waste of four years of college."
"Oh hell no. The college experience is never wasted. Neither is a good liberal arts education. But I'm learning what I want in a career and I know now that I don't want to be stressing about it 24/7. And it can't involve complicated budgets or calculations. Because math-ugh. That's a no-go."
I started working for a nonprofit startup with big plans to provide services to the homeless in our city. Unfortunately the board of directors turned out to be more interested in padding their CVs (and their bank accounts) than actually accomplishing anything, and I skedaddled quick.
There was a shop in the local co-op that I'd always loved - they created beautiful hand-bound blank books with covers wrapped in lush patterned cloth and paper. Their "Help Wanted" sign made my heart leap. The owner and I hit it off immediately and I started the next day-only to be let go a week later because I didn't have the "artistic eye" needed for the work.
This was followed up, over the next several years, by a variety of short-term gigs: a one-hour photo shop, tending bar, waiting tables (turns out I am the absolute worst server who ever lived), temp jobs at Kodak, Xerox, and Bauch & Lomb, printshop/bindery work, and a circuit-board production assembly line. They paid the bills, and met my "don't take the job home" and "no math" requirements, but none were destined to last.
And then I saw the sign in the window.
I don't know what I was thinking. I was a few years older and further removed from my academic experiences. The convictions I'd had about what I required in a job/career had grown dimmer as my credit card debt had grown larger. And sometimes...sometimes you just get a big fat nudge from the Universe that hurls logic out the window and you do something totally out of character that turns out to be the best thing ever.
The sign said "FREE TAX PREPARATION CLASSES!"
As if reeled in by an invisible fishing line, I walked into that storefront office and signed up for their course. I aced it, got a job, was generally outstanding, received promotions, and pretty much lived happily ever after.
It's funny how things work out. Sometimes a pretty wrapped box turns out to contain a slimy toad, but other times you find gifts in the most unexpected of places.
Turns out, there are worse things in life than math.
*This was 1986, and the term "spectrum" wasn't used yet. This was a residential school for kids who were disabled enough by their autism that their parents and school districts didn't have the knowledge or resources to meet their needs.