My official title was "The Kid". My job description was to do whatever Herb wanted me to do. One of my main duties was keeping the place clean. I had to dust all the guitars, clean the kitchen, bathroom, and lesson rooms, vacuum everywhere. I also had to move stock from the basement, take repairs to and from the shop, and run all kinds of errands. Whether it be shopping for bathroom supplies, getting things from the hardware store for the shop, or taking the deposit to the bank, I kind of did it all. I also helped customers with questions about guitars when the sale people were busy.
In 1982, Herb bought a house at the corner of Liberty and 5th avenue, and we moved the business into there. The basement was where we stored the new stock guitars, the first floor was the sales area, the second floor was where the lesson rooms were and Herbs office, and the third floor was the repair shop. It was really a nice layout for the shop.
I really enjoyed the job and working with all the people there. Herb was really a tough employer though. He would do a white glove test on all the rooms, and he always found a piece of molding above a door or window that I had missed. Getting paid was always a challenge. Pay day would come and I would go to his office to get my check, and he would decide that was the best time to do an inspection, or he would have an errand he needed run, pretty much anything to delay giving me my check. Inevitably, I would get my check and run up the street to the bank and get there a few minutes after 4, and they would be closed which would mean I didn't have any money to do things on a Friday night.
It's funny, but getting paid has been a problem that has recurred throughout my professional life. I have had a number of managers who will sit on time sheets or invoices without signing them for weeks delaying my paycheck over and over. I remember one manager taking almost three months to sign and an invoice. Situations like that have made it feast of famine over all my years as a consultant. I have been really fortunate in the past few years to have good managers who really put a priority on people getting paid for their work.
While working at Herb David's I also had a couple of other jobs too. There was the paper route in the beginning, but then a pet store opened in the mall near my house called Scamp Pets, and I got a job there for a while. Tom was the name of the owner, and he worked around my schedule at Herb Davids. He was really a nice guy and it was quite a contrast working for him verses Herb. I did stocking, cleaning the fish tanks and other cages, and sales. He had one of the old manual cash registers, which weren't all that old at the time. Credit cards were still swiped manually, and we had to call in for authorizations if it was over $20. Checks were still the most common way to pay for things, so it really was a different time.
I am not sure how long I worked at Scamps, but I think it was less than a year. Tom's son started working there in the evenings to help out, and he ended up hiring another girl to run the cash register. It was hard to him to keep working around my schedule at Herb Davids, and since I was going to school downtown for high school, I decided to keep working at Herb's and leave Scamps. Shortly after that, Tom got really sick and ended up having to sell the business. My friend Ben Lewis' mom bought the store, and ran it for a number of years. Tom died very shortly after selling the store.
Prior to turning sixteen, I had one other job that I only held for a couple of weeks. My friend Brad had gotten a job at SEMCA which stood for Southeast Michigan Consumer Alliance. it was telemarketing job selling a discount card that was accepted in quite a few businesses in Ann Arbor. Since I was only fifteen, I had to get a work permit which is really the only reason I mention this job since I didn't work there long enough for it to matter.
Getting a work permit meant going to the Ann Arbor Public Schools administration building. I talked to a woman and she started filling out the permit, but at some point she said she couldn't give me the permit because the company didn't carry workman's comp insurance. I really didn't understand why that was a problem since all I was going to do was use a telephone, but the woman wouldn't budge. As she was walking away from the counter, I looked around and reached over and grabbed the work permit pad that she had left half filled out, and I took it. At school the next day, I had one of my friends who had good handwriting fill out the work permit and sign it with a fictitious name.
It took less than two weeks to realize that commissioned telemarketing was not the job for me. I learned very quickly that I had a phobia of talking to strangers on the phone. I had a script that I was supposed to read from, but I typically started stuttering and rarely made it through the script. I also didn't know in advance how much people hate telemarketers. Being hung up on was actually very polite compared to some of the responses I got. I can't remember if I actually quite or just never went back, but I do remember worrying about the work permit. The form stated that once an employee quit, it was supposed to be returned to the Ann Arbor Public Schools. I am pretty sure that never happened, at least I never heard from them.
I have always enjoyed working, and even when I had crappy bosses, I still learned something from the situation. Every experience, especially those in my younger years, molded me into the person I am today. My work ethic and tolerance were shaped by these early jobs, and with each subsequent job I became more skilled in one way or another. All experience is learning, and even if it doesn't seem like it at the time, everything learned helps you in the future.
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