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NYT: "Just Graduated, and Fumbling..."

Pleasant reminiscing for people of a certain level of experience

NYT: “Just Graduated, and Fumbling…”

By In Blog, News On April 8, 2014


Alina Tugend’s “Just Graduated, and Fumbling Through a First Job” is a well written article and has some helpful insights about first jobs.  Better though, I am smiling  because reading it made me think about my real first job out of college. In the book, my “first job” is when I was an insurance agent selling health insurance to small businesses in southeast Georgia. I refer to that as my “first job” because it was the first job in which I worked normal hours, earned enough to get an apartment and stayed with for over a year. However, technically, there was a job before that.

As may be obvious to some, I always wanted to be a writer (this story takes place before I knew that writers just write). So, logically, my first job was at a newspaper. Savannah is not a large city but there’s a newspaper here and there are writers, photographers, editors, a publishing staff, operations and printing staff, and distribution. Over some period of time while “networking” I managed to meet with all of them. Eventually the fruit of my labor appeared in the form of an offer to become a “Distribution Manager” for the evening edition of the paper. Those of us who have worked in distribution know that the people on evening edition distribution team are the chosen ones. Work didn’t start until around noon and was supposed to end around 8:00 PM.

I took the offer because I had nothing else going and was generally clueless. The job was exhausting and, as I would realize later, couldn’t help me satisfy any of my primary goals – the first of which was decamping my parent’s house for my own apartment, let alone “becoming a writer.”

Maybe I’m different, maybe it is because my father was in the military and there were expectations, I don’t know what, but I worked the hell out of that job for three months. I showed up on-time every day, six days a week. Yes, six – we were responsible for half of the big Sunday paper too which meant being up and going at 3:00 AM on Sunday morning and working until lunch time or so. I can’t say I liked it but I didn’t hate it either. Most of my “work” entailed driving around my assigned network of newspaper distribution hubs, ensuring my carriers picked up their papers and delivered them, and dealing with customer service issues. I carried around a few hundred newspapers myself, ran routes for missing carriers, covered skipped houses, and replaced wet papers. Basically, I drove a lot, met people and made sure things got done. I haven’t thought about it in a while.  It was a tough gig then but now it’s a nice memory.

Going back to the article, I think I was a lot like Alina’s last example, Megan Hall. I did what was asked, no matter what it was, I did it fast and well, and I came back looking for more. Even then I knew why I did it, part of it was my upbringing, sure. However, more importantly, I liked my boss. Robin was a genuinely good guy who had a tough job. He looked out for me and I knew he paid me as much as he could. I also knew that if I didn’t do something, he’d have to do it.

In the end, the salary level for the job (not to mention the hours) was simply never going to be enough for me to move out so three months later, when I got the chance to sell insurance I took it.

Anyways, there’s some good advice for recent graduates and twenty-somethings in this article. No doubt it has been sent around quite a bit already by parents around my age or older – that is, after they’ve reminisced a little about their own first jobs.

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