Mostly cloudy skies early will become partly cloudy later in the day. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 87F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..
Partly cloudy in the evening followed by scattered thunderstorms after midnight. Low near 70F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
“Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They are about to announce the lottery numbers!”
I remember decades ago reading a New Yorker magazine cartoon. In the first panel a young person reports on the first day of a new job. The boss hands him a broom. The new employee gasps, “Bur sir, I am a college graduate!” The boss then replies, “Here, let me show you how to use it.”
Good help in the retail or service world is harder to find than Rudy Giuliani’s dignity. First of all, you cannot find anyone working in what we once called it but now seems almost jokingly today, customer service.
When there are five customers throughout a large building supply store’s 105,000 square feet and the customers still outnumber the number of floor service folks you know you are not in Heuser Hardware. When I go to Heuser’s I talk to two employees while the other finds me what I need. And he knows what I need even when I only know it by vague description. He also can tell me how to install it and the tools that I might need.
Usually, the conversation goes something like this. “Do you have any of those kind of squiggly metal things that fasten that big knotty end together to the wall to hold up my autographed picture of Bob Villa?”
Tom Densford has already left my side as I am speaking and comes right back with a thing-a-ma-jig in his hand and says, “That will be $1.12 with tax. You will need a Phillips head and a soft mallet.”
Then Sam Walton created the retail superstore. It will be a miracle if Home Depot or Lowe’s is still in business after 100 years.
I hate to stereotype people based on physical appearance or age. However, when I run across that rare once retired and now second career retail worker who is in their 70’s I almost know instinctively they will be able to help me.
If I get a young man or lady in their late teens or early 20s I first of all will probably be interrupting their Facebook posts with my annoying need, and secondly, they will be the only person in the place that knows less about doing any home repair job than I do. The real annoying response is, “Sorry, I don’t work in hardware.” Dude (or dudette, or non-binary person), you work at a super-sized hardware store!”
I read on the Internet (and if it’s on the Internet it has to be true and accurate) that there were 10.2 million jobs open in the country as of June 2022. Also, as of March of this year there were just under 6 million people who were unemployed. If you ignore all the zeroes that really boils down to elementary mathematics; 10.2 – 6 equals 4.2 meaning if they all took the jobs available there would only be 4.2 million job openings.
So why does my favorite restaurant have to close before dinnertime because they have no employees?
I get it. Some jobs are very hard work. Some jobs have evening and weekend hours. Some positions don’t pay all that well. Some jobs nobody would want to do their entire life.
Advice for the new job market entrants. Your first job does not have to be your career!
My first real tax-paying job was as a laborer for a construction company. I swept floors in houses under construction. I loaded and hauled away scrap lumber. I once was given a sledgehammer to break up an errantly poured garage footer. By the way, after swinging that sledgehammer all day long on an August day the foreman figured at my pace, they could build a new subdivision before I could sledgehammer away that footer. The next day I got to use a torture device known as a jackhammer.
I got about five minutes of jackhammer training and then I was a jackhammer specialist. That was when I was 16 years old or 50 years ago. I can still feel my hands and arms vibrating. I wonder if the statute has run out on OSHA violations yet. What, what did you say? No, I wasn’t given earplugs either.
Between my junior and senior year of college I loaded 50-pound bags of chemical fertilizer onto a moving conveyor belt for 8 to 10 hours per day for the summer. And I had to know somebody to get the job!
Perhaps people are just plain smarter today than we were back then. Like the Randy Quaid character in the National Lampoon Vacation movie possibly they are holding out for a management position.
I have always thought that the worse the job a young person had in the first few years of working made them appreciate getting extra training or furthering their education. I know it made me want to graduate from college even worse than I already wanted to graduate.
The funny thing about some of the hardest jobs I ever worked in the beginning is that some of my fondest memories are from those times. I met some really good, honest, hard-working people.
And back then, if I went to McDonald’s for a hamburger — three young people were smiling and cheerfully requesting, “Can I help you?”
Lindon Dodd is a freelance writer who can be reached at lindon.dodd@hotmail.com
The Clarksville Challengers team is made up of players living with disabilities from across Southern Indiana.
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