I am always interested in hearing about people's first
jobs. Usually they were when they were kids; they were never glamorous and
usually taught some type of life lesson that we still call upon year after
year. I am sure many of you have already
heard me speak about this in our State of the State meetings, but my first job was
as a waitress.
Jim's Country Diner is now closed but was located on Rt
130 in Windsor, NJ. It was a real diner, diner. You know the one with 200 items
on the menu and the typical soup rotation (Monday Yankee Bean, Tuesday Lentil,
Wednesday Chicken & Rice, etc).
For $1.09 an hour, the lessons I learned about customer
service and immediate feedback were significant. I also learned how to pay
attention to non-verbal cues.
For example, when people weren't eating their food and
you just knew something didn’t taste right, even if they didn’t tell you. Or how
much people appreciated when you remembered what they ordered the last time and
asked if they wanted it again (the "regulars" always left bigger tips
when their drinks were waiting for them when they came to sit down).
Serving people their food, much like delivering their
health care, is a very personal interaction. You learn a lot about people—when
they are happy, when they are sad, when they are not feeling well.
And just like with us, they became our family. When a
regular didn’t show up, we would be concerned and often find a route to make
sure they were ok.
Working at Jim's Country Diner taught me about how hard
it is to do manual labor into your 60's. The women who had spent their lives
waitressing were exhausted but could not do anything else because they didn’t
have a college degree or other skills to fall back on. It was very difficult
for them when their bodies gave out; there were also no health benefits and the
physical demands of the job always took a toll.
I am convinced that working at Jim's Diner is what pushed
me to get my Master's Degree right away. So many of the people who worked there
had intended to do this work as an interim before they went to college, but they
liked the cash too much and never could find a way to afford to go back.
In the end working as a waitress taught me about hard
work, anticipating the customer's needs, how little it would take to
"make" someone's day with an act of kindness, and how disrespectful
people could be when they treated you as if you weren't valued. Each lesson I
hold today and carry with me to try and be a better person and leader.
How about you? Is there a first job lesson that you would
like to share?
