Author Archives: wendywelch

“Can I work at your Bookstore?”

Posted on by
11

easy teen jobsJack and I have hired our fair share of students at the bookstore. And I cannot help but make an observation. (Yes, I’m turning into one of Those Adults.)

Lots of kids enter college wanting to be important, expecting to graduate into a cool job where they wear a suit and have Big Responsibilities. Except they kinda don’t get what that means, so they’re not planning well.

You can see it written on their foreheads when they show up at our door because they need a little spending money, or think a bookstore will look cool on their resume, or – God Forbid – their guidance counselor called and asked us to call them for an interview (for a job they haven’t applied to).

They’re thinking, What I do now doesn’t matter because I’m waiting for my life to start. I don’t have to care about this, because it isn’t related to my REAL life plans.

Helpful life hint: the bosses looking for people who can handle Big Responsibilities are not looking at the people who already do the job they want done; they’re looking for those one level below, hungry to get into the next layer of hierarchy. If you want big things to do, show you’re good at the small ones.

Putting books on a shelf may seem annoying and mindless to you, particularly if you roll your eyes. It isn’t, and if you also dust and straighten as you alphabetize, believe me, the boss notices. You have proved you understand the correlation between good looking product and sales. You get it; you problem-solve; you’re not an automaton.You also have the emotional intelligence to understand that insulting a job your boss does daily is unhelpful to your career advancement. That’s not just smart; it’s wise.

Wasting energy on small stuff can feel counterproductive to you at your young age, but it marks you as a good hire. Do it right, do it well, do it thoroughly, and you won’t be doing it long.

Case in point: I love the story a school librarian told about a kid she had in middle school, who was kinda ADHD and annoying other kids in the class because he got his work done early and then became disruptive. He got sent to the library to help out.

The librarian, recognizing bored intelligence when she saw it, asked him to alphabetize the early readers – a task equivalent to Sisyphus and his famous rock. But the kid started in, slowed by the fact that he kept going back to the first shelf every day and repairing the damage before moving on. Two months in, he was 3/4 done.

And then his family moved and he changed schools. So the librarian was astonished, about a week later, to see him after school. He’d asked for and received permission to ride his bike over “and finish those shelves. I can’t leave that undone. It will bug me.”

Call it ADHD/OCD gone wild; call it a work ethic; call it charming. The librarian called it when she saw it: this kid is gonna make something of himself someday.

And he did. The only reason we know about this episode from Bill Gates’s middle school career is because he went on to do a lot of other good work.

Pay attention to the jobs in front of you, kids. Other people are paying attention to how well you do them.

The Monday Book – The Romance of the Match – Herbert Manchester (The Diamond Match Co. 1926)

Posted on by
2

Jack’s unusual guest book review – if you want a copy we have one for sale – – –

“How many thousand or hundred thousand years man lived on earth before learning to use fire is unknown.”

How could anyone resist such an opening sentence as that? Well, I certainly couldn’t!

This booklet was published in the era of art deco and Agatha Christie’s introduction of Hercule Poirot. Its amazing cover is a product of those times. Inside one finds a mixture of 1920’s writing style and world-view. This non-fiction book is unashamedly a corporate promotion for the Diamond Match Company, and yet it tells a fascinating story of the use of fire over millennia and the evolvement of the match industry, including many terrible health hazards along the way. It rather surprisingly doesn’t shy away from the economic pressures on the match industry to continue with dangerous chemicals and chemical processes when others were available, despite the toll on the workers.

DSCN0696

Once it has covered the history of the use and harnessing of fire and the development of the match, however, it becomes much more of an outright promotion of the company and a panegyric for the founder W. A. Fairburn.

I found this booklet a complete delight, particularly for its amazingly bizarre mixture of history, art deco design, choice of font and the final page, comprised of a series of statements by the founder of the company, Mr. W. A. Fairburn, including what I assure you is a complete sentence –

“Diamond men have for years led the world in the art of match making; today they lead in the science of progressive invention, in the art of efficient production and distribution, in the inestimable virtues of brotherhood, equity and undying good fellowship, and in the courage and energy that knows no failure and acknowledges no defeat.”

Please note the semi-colon and the Oxford comma.