My First Job

I started working “officially” at around age 14 or 15.Before that, I had briefly been a child actor at around age 8 or 9 in a few local commercials in the American Southwest, as well as performing in the pilot for a show that was to be produced by an Italian film company, based on the old school children’s cartoon, Lucky Luke (check the ballad out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Gm3acD0V4). I had also been an altar server in the local Byzantine Catholic church and had worked with my mother “off the books” in a janitorial capacity for the company that she started very briefly.

However, my first, official paid gig, was working in a privately owned dog kennel/animal rescue shelter in Naperville, Illinois. I went in the business in the evenings, after hours and worked from around 5pm to around 11pm.I worked with a team to clean up after the animals, move them from indoor kennels to outdoor kennels, feed them and make sure the place was locked up at the end of the night and that things were prepped for in the morning.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of dog and cat poop as well as bird and reptile poop to clean up on a nightly basis. I once cleaned up after a Kimono dragon. Some of the animals were well behaved; others not so much.  One of the dogs there (who was classified as a “long-term” boarder because she was so neurotic that no family would adopt her) was consistently filthy and borderline dangerous.

And, after all of this, my first paycheck was a robust $68.55, based off of the old $4.25 minimum wage.

This first job taught me three valuable lessons that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else and that I have kept throughout the years that I have worked other jobs and other entrepreneurial ventures:

Rolling up my sleeves and getting involved in cleaning up in the arena of peace, talking and writing about new approaches to doing the “same old things,” and pushing to be compensated accordingly, all began at a dog kennel/animal rescue shelter.What was your first job?