My First Job: Toolin' with Dixie

 It's gone.

I couldn't find anything on the interwebs about the first place I worked. I believe it was called Dixie Tool & Die. The picture above is generic and is from another company (I think).

This may be connected to them.  It hits what they did - a specialty machine shop custom-making tools. Those certainly look like the variety of tools that I saw.

My first job began in my Junior year of high school.  I don't remember any interview process.  It's something that my Dad arranged.  Yes, most of my early jobs were obtained by my Dad (our high school Principal) through networking.  White privilege!  Woohoo!

It was not far from the high school, down a road called Dixie Highway.  I think at one time, before interstates, it was a road that could be taken all the way to the South.  But that might be a false memory.

I got there after school and worked until my Dad picked me up coming out of his work sometime after 5. As the job progressed, I may have eventually used a family car to get there and back.  I did not have my own car until I was a Senior in college.

I was a shipping clerk.  I would prepare the tools for shipment.  That might involve dipping them in some sort of plastic goo that helped protect them from breakage in transit.  Some I had to stencil stuff on. There was quite a bit of diversity in what they made and what the tools needed to be safely packaged and shipped.

The individual orders would stack up, waiting for me to process them.  I was careful but very slow.  If I did something that would cause them to do the tools over again, that would cost them a lot of money.  I don't remember screwing up that badly, but I do remember being terribly slow.

I don't remember too many names.  My immediate boss was Lee (?) something.  He was a very nice man, and always patient and kind to me.  There was an older lady who was like a shipping secretary. And there was an older man who used to bring the tools up from the shop would sometimes joke with me. I don't remember ever seeing the owner.

The job fit a pattern that would be more true than not throughout my work career - I was good enough to survive but not good enough to thrive or survive.  I show up. I work as hard as I can.  Generally, I found the work world 80% tedious, 15% revealing my inadequacies, 4% social, and way less than 1% rewarding.

I'm guessing at wages, but my best estimate was starting at $0.90 an hour and maybe working my way up to $1.10 an hour after almost two years there. I could be wrong.  Maybe it was $1.90.  These were the early 70s.  What can I say?

When I left for college, we networked out the job to my neighbor, Randy Bloomfield, who was a year behind me in school.

He was more social than I was.  He was quicker than I was. In his time there, he more than doubled the hourly rate.

I tried to do my best.  I tried to be as responsible as I could be. I did as well as I could, given my limited coordination and muted social abilities.

It wasn't a great victory.  It wasn't a huge loss.

It was a sign of things to come, of my tenuous grip on the world of work.