I loved the formative years of my working life

Starter jobs, student jobs, teenager jobs, call them what you will, they all have something to offer that is even more valuable than money.

As a teenager I worked as a gardener for an old lady, cutting hedges and mowing lawns.

As a teenager and well into my twenties, I did part-time jobs – initially for pocket money, and later as a way to survive while I was studying. I can’t recall how much I earned, but I felt rich whenever I was paid.

As a 15-year old I worked in a fruit shop bagging potatoes, cleaning the storeroom, burning cardboard boxes in an incinerator and polishing the brass mullions in the shopfront window. I liked the boss, the fruiterer; he was kind, thoughtful. Personalities can leave a presence, an impression, for years.

As a teenager I worked as a gardener for an old lady, cutting hedges and mowing lawns. She would bring me morning tea on a silver platter with homemade biscuits and scones. Her husband (or brother, I was never sure) served at Gallipoli. He didn’t say much; I often wonder what he’d experienced.

Like every other young male in country Victoria in the 1970s, I also worked carting and stacking hay bales. Before the invention of round bales, hay was cut and tied into square bales which were then collected by truck and stacked in a shed. It was back-breaking work, but there was a reprieve within this process that I still think about. When the truck was stacked it would rumble across the paddock making its way to the shed, and for about 15 minutes it was possible to lie on your back on top of the bales and look up at the sky while being gently rocked around. It’s an experience, a memory, made potent by the heady fragrance of freshly cut hay.

Later, in my university years, I worked as a barman at the Imperial hotel in Bourke Street in Melbourne’s CBD. I think I could still pour a beer from a tap if I had to. I remember that a glass of beer in 1976 cost 27 cents.

From the hotel I worked as a waiter at the Melbourne Home Show, and at a dining venue at the Melbourne Show. For three years I also loaded bundles of newspapers onto delivery trucks, working through Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. It was hard physical work, but well paid.

My older brother also got me a job washing dishes at Rob’s Carousel restaurant beside Albert Park Lake. A perk of the job was being provided with a meal, off the menu, which I would eat while standing at my dishwashing station. I’d never had, and would never otherwise have ordered at any restaurant, anything like oysters Kilpatrick until that experience. I remember the waitresses, the bosses, the chefs; it was a fun place to work.

These part-time jobs lasted for a period of 10 years, until the age of 25. I enjoyed it all. I liked earning money. I liked being independent. I even liked the process of interviewing for jobs.

Looking back, I have to say that every experience delivered something: a skill, an insight, an observation about human behaviour, both good and bad. What I find surprising is the clarity of the faces, the people, the personalities that litter our lives and that live on, in memories, for years – decades, even.

Starter jobs, student jobs, teenager jobs, call them what you will, they all have something to offer that is even more valuable than money: it is exposure to customers, to colleague workers, to bosses that create life experiences and memories that can and do last a lifetime.