My first jobs were not great, yet the prospect when you are
a teenager of earning your onw money is very exciting!
To that end, I took a job as a waitress at the Richmond Bus Loop coffee
shop. This was a good business idea, counting on captured customers who had ten or fifteen minutes to waste between
city and suburban buses.
I ignored the fact that the place seemed to have a huge staff turn over.
I learned to make filter coffee from a famous company called Dickson's Coffee, and how to stick a small smile on my face on
a permanent basis.
I was a Working Person!
I had a hideous white uniform, which
buttoned over my sexier cute dresses worn to attract boys that I would never want to see me in my minimum wage labourer outfits.
Didn't women's magazines stress the need for mystery and romance and glamour?
At age 17, I looked like a frump and a Has Been.
Yet I was enough of a realist to know
that Canada then supplied hudreds of jobs like this, and this was just the beginning of my Work History, which would in a
few decades include:
keypunch operator
comptometer operator
school photographer's
assistant
dishwasher/waitress/cashier
film extra
charity fundraiser
English teacher
supermarket cashier
Tax Revenue BC manager
BC Highways Department
flag-girl
Steveston Fish Canneries fish cutter
And
much much more!
