The Fifth Column: No Cure for the Summertime Blues

One of the problems when you’re a teenager–and adults often forget that being a teenager is a never-ending laundry list of problems, with adults and adult-imposed inconveniences always high on that list–is that just about the time you’re old enough to get a driver’s licence and a little piece of grownup freedom, you’re expected to get a job. Nothing can take the fun out of driving quicker having to drive to work. And nothing can suck the life out of a beautiful summer more efficiently than a bad summer job.

I entered the workforce as an unskilled laborer. What else could you be at 16? A buddy of mine got us jobs with a construction company that had a lot in Manassas strewn with rusting heavy equipment and an odd assortment of jobs across Northern Virginia and the District. As I lay in bed on the eve of my first day of work I’m sure I was envisioning myself doing welding work on the 80th floor of some glamorous high rise. Imagine my chagrin when I found myself spreading a truckload of gravel across a primitive parking lot in Merrifield at 7 a.m. the next day. 

Looking back, I have to wonder just what kind of a company I was working for. The two of us spent an entire week up in a loft at the Manassas lot sorting industrial-sized nuts and bolts which were stored in hundreds of wooden baskets. On the main floor of the building a half-dozen machines were thunderously employed bending huge metal sheets to be used for corrugated roofing. The sound was incredible. There was no air conditioning. No ventilation of any kind, as a matter of fact. 

We spent another week at a Pepco plant in Washington, where we were told to dig eight holes, each five feet wide, five feet long and five feet deep. There may have been some actual soil there, but we appeared to be digging through a nearly equal mix of gravel and cigarette butts.

I worked as a fry cook in an all-you-can-eat seafood place one summer, and couldn’t stomach the sight of deep-fried anything again for several years. I was a cashier in a drug store for two weeks one December, and when the manager fired me and every other teenager in the place on New Year’s day – on New Year’s day! – I was the happiest 17-year-old on earth. 

After making minimum wage for several summers, I came up with a great plan to make some real money: I’d work two different jobs – both of them with the county recreation department and (here was the flaw in the plan) – both of them minimum wage jobs. At the end of what may have been the longest, hottest summer in human history, in which I worked 12 hours a day, never saw any friends, never did anything but sleep on the weekends and never got to spend a nickel of my hard-earned cash, because I never had the time to spend it. I had earned just enough to keep me in deli sandwiches for a single semester of college.

The best jobs I’ve had have all been for little or no pay, or in dead or dying industries. I was a DJ at a couple of fledgling radio stations, one of them at George Mason University. It was fun; I loved it and I was good at it (I won and award, y’know), but it paid nothing – literally nothing – and now, most radio stations have few, if any, live jocks on the air. It is an occupation that barely exists; a phantom of the past. 

I worked in a Kemp Mill Record store. For those of you under age 35, these were places which sold albums. They were like CDs, only big and made of vinyl and you played them on turntables. What was a turntable? Well, it was a stereo component that...never mind. Record stores were dinosaurs that were a big deal in their day. Every shopping center had at least one. But they are all dead now. 

That’s the way it works. My grandfather was a telegraph operator for the railroad in a West Virginia boom town that was flooded with dollars generated by the coal industry. It wasn’t so long ago, really, that being an expert with a telegraph key was all it took to begin a solid career. Today, nobody needs telegraph operators. Who sends telegrams? The railroad system is a mere shadow of its former self, as is American coal mining.

And so it goes. When I got out of college my first real job was with AT&T, a company which had once defined the telecommunications industry, but was then going through divestiture. The Justice Department-induced process broke up AT&T, and allows us all to pay $150 a month to text behind the wheel and update our Facebook status from the men’s room.

At some point, a lot of traditionally teen-dominated summer jobs were gobbled up by adults. Jobs at gas stations, convenience stores, movie theaters, car washes – all of those places where we all used to go for work before we had resumes – started going to people who wanted to work there year-round. Some were retirees who needed to supplement their fixed incomes, but more and more, those "unskilled laborer" jobs weren’t filled by the kid next door looking for some extra pocket money. The jobs were taken by somebody looking for a way to feed their family. And if you think it’s hard to stock shelves every day for eight weeks while you wait for varsity football practices to start, imagine how hard it is to do it for the rest of your life. 

Imagine how hard it is to hold a "Going Out of Business" sign on a street corner, hour after hour, day after day.

When I started working all those summers ago, I had learned nothing about the dignity of work. Dignity is both a product of working, of making enough money to provide for yourself and your family, and a quality of some work that can transform employment from a mind-numbing drudgery to one of life’s most fulfilling experiences. One has to wonder how much different we would all be if there more Feziwigs to welcome us into the world of work.