There’s no such thing as a bad job or internship. I earnestly believe you learn valuable lessons from every job you have- paid or unpaid. In other words, don’t think that just because something seems like it’s not a big deal, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take everything you can get from that experience. There are things to be learned about yourself, other people or jobs in general. Never take any experience or moment, big or small, for granted. God uses every detail of our life and our experience to teach and shape us into the people we are.
When I was a freshman in high school, I was approached by a family friend’s dad to be a cashier at his hobby shop. Being fifteen, the only other jobs I’d had was babysitting and plant sitting. I was too shy to talk to customers, answer the phone, take a phone order; for a while all I wanted to do was vacuum and dust.
There were slow days, and let’s just say the clientele wasn’t a bunch of other fifteen year olds. I started working only a couple hours throughout the week and all day on Saturdays. When I started, all I could think about was how much fun my family was having while I was stuck at work.
Including our boss, there were usually six of us working there- and I was the only gen-zer, and the only girl. We sold 90% model trains, and the rest were model cars and airplanes- things I had no interest in and knew nothing about...
You know the saying, ‘don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone’? It’s a true saying my friends- you really don’t know what you have until it’s gone. I worked at this hobby shop from the time I was fifteen, until I was twenty. I worked all through high school, and during breaks when I came home from college. Last summer was the first summer I didn’t work there, and just this past October, I received a call from my mom at college that my dear hobby shop boss suddenly passed away.
I was devastated.
After processing his passing, I thought about all the things I learned and grew to love at the hobby shop. I thought about all the things that seemed so little at the time, in the long run grew me into the person I am today. I gained confidence by answering the phone and helping answer customer’s questions. I gained independence when my boss asked me to walk to the post office to mail an order. I gained small-talk skills through talking to a co-worker who became a good friend. And I grew in maturity as responsibility over the years of being forced out of my comfort zone to complete the job I had to do.
My boss should have fired me two weeks after I started, but people say he saw something in me that made it his mission to get me out of my comfort zone-and he did. When I was home for his funeral, I walked into the shop and was overwhelmed with all the memories and areas of growth I had at the shop. I believe a huge piece of me grew up there, and the employees who turned into fatherly/grandfatherly figures watched me grow up, too.
What I thought was a silly high school job, ended up being a huge component to who I am today. I have Des Plaines Hobbies, and most importantly, Ron Sebastian, the greatest boss in the world, to thank for that.
Don’t take any job for granted. There is something valuable to be learned in everything you do. What jobs have you had that impacted who you are?
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