In order to answer that, let me explain how my work experience evolved. My very first job, a summer job as an au pair, was when I was 17. Before that I babysat for neighbors. The latter jobs were for extra money: my parents were generous in giving me a weekly allowance but my mother thought it would be good for me to get a sense of earning my own money. I grew up in a family where there was always ”enough” money for nice clothes, for books and movies and two week summer vacations. We had a car, a house, more than most of my school friends had. So I never had a driving need to want more ”money.”
It’s interesting though that my sister, who was 10 years older than I, did have a driving need to have more. I’m not sure where it came from; if she were still alive we’d certainly have interesting conversations because we were so, so different from one another. A true instance where nature seems to have been more powerful than nurture.
Still we were similar in one thing: neither of us were encouraged to think about having a lifelong career or to think that we might want a job outside of the home. We were brought up to have a job until we got married. The main focus was on marrying someone who would provide well for us and we came to our own ideas about “careers” almost by accident.
For my sister, the catalyst was moving to a middle-class New Jersey suburb in her mid 20s where, although all the wives she met around the swimming pool or shared coffee mornings with were happy to be homemakers, supporting their husbands‘ climbs up whatever corporate ladder they were on, they also had college degrees. And my sister felt embarrassed that she didn’t have one; she felt somehow inferior and if there was one thing my sister hated, it was feeling inferior. Hmmm…. As I wrote that, I realize that’s something I hate as well, feeling inferior. And that has often been MY catalyst for removing myself from a situation, including a work situation. Feeling inferior. Hmmm…. But back to my sister, her feelings were increased by the women’s movement of the time and, now that I look at the trajectory of her life, I believe that she realized she could do far more than she’d given herself credit for.
So, with her younger son in school, she started college part-time through a program at her local college that encouraged women to do this, despite her commercial high school degree that had contained no pre-university courses. She discovered she was far smarter at academics than she’d ever thought, she felt validated by her professors, praised by them for her “mind”, and graduated “summa” from her college with a business degree. She was snapped up by first, Nabisco, as a management trainee and, over the next 18 years, went from strength to strength until she died at aged 48 just as she was being considered for a vice-presidency at a major corporation in Denver.
But what about me? What influence did her experience have on my own career, my own succession of “jobs”? My sister was the one who pushed my father into agreeing to pay for me to go to college. At least for the first two years. Although my sister and I weren’t close, either physically or emotionally, every time she saw me or talked to me, she emphasized how important education was, and how important it was that I think about what I wanted to “do” with my life.
I did take the opportunity to go to college but I went without having any idea of what I might want to do in terms of “work”. I had wanted to be a dancer, or a writer or an actress when I was young; none of these careers were deemed realistic by my mother. So I settled for just doing well at school and originally thought that when I graduated from high school I would become a secretary as both my mother and my sister had been and then get married, get pregnant and stop working outside of the home.
And then when my mother died at the start of my senior year I just put one foot in front of the other and went along with whatever people suggested I do: I did well in my exams because my teachers encouraged me. I applied to universities because my sister told me to. I went out with boys but there was almost a cold center part in my heart that wouldn’t let them take me over. So no particular marriage ideas when I started university, no real ideas at all. I went to a large impersonal university that, in the boom of the early 70s, contained large impersonal classes. I got lost in the crowd. Just drifting and drifting until at the end of my second year my father said he wouldn’t pay for me to drift along and I needed to get a job and earn some money.
My first full-time job was as a telex operator for a fabric company in Montreal, in the garment district. It was mindless, boring and I knew I didn’t want to do THAT for very long. I applied, and was hired, for a job as a receptionist at a chartered accountancy firm in another part of Montreal. Another boring and mindless job. I was actually fired from that one after being rude to one of the partners; things weren’t going very well on the career front. So I signed on to a temporary secretarial agency and did that until I moved to Toronto to go back to school full-time. Still without any kind of plan for a career, I just wanted to get out of Montreal and going back to school seemed like a good idea.
That lasted a year. I hated Toronto, missed Montreal terribly, and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Back I came and returned to temporary secretarial work, which paid for a succession of small apartments. And then I saw an ad in the newspaper for secretaries for McGill University. I applied and was hired as a secretary in the Psychology Department. The work was still boring in a way, not much challenge to it: I type really well and am good at editing, but it was the ambience that was so much fun! There were 8 secretaries on my floor in the Psych building and it was a real community with the gossipy coffee breaks and lunch hours, the parties after work. The professors we worked for never minded if we chatted at our desks as long as their work was done. My life started being fun after years of being pretty well alone.
And that’s what made that job, and the succession of many of the jobs that followed: they were fun. If the work itself wasn’t that interesting—although some of the jobs WERE stimulating and challenging—it was what happened outside of work that cheered me up. “Fun” meant having enough money to live in a comfy, cozy apartment; didn’t have to be fashionable (I wasn’t into fashion) just be comfortable.
Fun in my McGill years meant having enough money (and time) to go to interesting restaurants, go to movies. It was at McGill that I took my first big vacation, three weeks traveling around Europe with a tour group composed of 18-35 year olds. What a blast that was! During those four years I worked at McGill I even completed my BA at night, at Concordia. McGill really didn’t have a night school for Arts students and I had started at Concordia anyway. That BA helped me get my first supervisory job in England which experience in turn meant that I obtained supervisory jobs later on when I returned to Canada, which led to managerial jobs.
As this essay is supposed to be focused on my feelings about “job”, I won’t go into why I left McGill. But the experience I had working at McGill became a touchstone for me as I went from job to job for the next 40 years. Although I worked in industry for a few years here and there, I really only felt comfortable working in universities. In the main, working at a university was much more relaxed than working in industry: better working hours, longer time off. More diverse in terms of the people who were there, the ideas and things that were going on. This was important during the years Laurie was small; being a single parent was a juggling act and the university I worked at during those early years, McMaster, was wonderful in allowing me to do that: to be mom but also to work in an atmosphere that was, again, fun.
Especially when I was a manager at the Bookstore there. I loved the busyness of the store: incredibly busy at Rush, then the day to day flow of a store that employed so many people, both ”regular” staff and students, and working for a manager who encouraged me to think about new ways we could improve services or totally off the wall ideas. Bob was a blue sky person like myself, always thinking about “what if…” And we fed each other that way. He was supportive to me and all the others in the store who were parents—as a parent himself he understood the push-pull. He also sent me off on interesting trips to various bookstore conferences around Canada and the US.
This is going on and on but I will leave it at this: my “best” job I ever had was when I was a manager at the McMaster Bookstore. It was fun, I was respected by my co-workers, every day there was some new problem to be solved or to be celebrated, I earned enough money to live comfortably with Laurie. Part of me wishes I had stayed there but there were other good times ahead (as well as not-so-good) and, as I always (now) say, I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t moved on. I am happy I had those thirteen years at Mac and if I were giving any advice to my younger friends and family it’s this: While you are young, look for the kind of work that makes you happy, investigate subjects and careers that you think might interest you, work at jobs to earn money so that you can pursue those interests. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t get into your dream career at first, keep planning and adjusting your life (and budget) but have fun, do good for yourself and others, in the meantime. Although the old mantra says “no one on their death bed ever wishes they’d spent more time in the office” I would also say that if on your death bed you can say “wow, that was a hell of a ride” to loved ones who are smiling and nodding their heads, glad that you’ve been around for them, you’ve done well.
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