My Best Job Ever – Part II
Welcome to Part II of a series that I started earlier in which I recalled my jobs prior to owning my own Internet business. You can read about my exploits at the food court from ages 14 to 16 here.
Once I turned sixteen, opportunity opened up before me. My brother had secured a job at Venture, a wal-mart-like discount store. I got hired to work in the Health and Beauty department under a manager named Dave Herlihy (sp?). Dave was a good guy and easy to work for. The job was basically stocking shelves with shampoo, toothpaste, toilet paper and make-up. The rest of the time was spent helping customers.
I made a number of friends at Venture and even referred a family member and a friend to work there as well. Whether getting carts from the parking lot or staying late for inventory, I learned about dealing with customers, preparing for the big weekly sale and relating to co-workers.
There are many memories from my time wearing the orange vest, but one particular episode really stands out.
As is common in the big box stores, many items can be displayed too high for a customer to reach. Rolling staircases are used so employees can ascend and descend with merchandise in hand.
One day while strolling through the domestics department, a lady asked me if I would get something down from the high shelf for her. I’m not sure if I was upset or just being a cocky teenager, but I retorted with “get it yourself.”
Needless to say, she wasn’t happy with me. She contacted the store manager on duty, who I recall was named Frank Giardina, and I was summarily paged to his location over the store intercom. I knew I was in trouble. In the customers presence, Frank asked if I had wisecracked to her as she said. I told him that I did and he proceeded to fire me.
Now I wasn’t happy!
After the customer left, I went up to Frank in a huff. He was smiling and told me I wasn’t really fired, but that I shouldn’t do that again. He was just putting on a show to satisfy the customer who to this day probably remembers the story of the snide teenage punk who she got fired from Venture. More proof that perception is reality, huh?
By the time I had turned seventeen, I was growing weary of working at Venture. However, I wouldn’t leave my secure position until something better turned up.
And it did. Or you might say that I sought out a better opportunity.
From the time that I was a young teenager, my favorite store in the area was called Video, Etc. Owned by Sonny Cohen of Chicago, the store was on the cutting edge of electronics. Big-screen televisions, Apple Computers, Sony Betamax recorders, Laserdiscs, video tape rentals and the earliest video game systems were all sold there.
I LOVED visiting the store and remember when the Fairchild Channel-F video game system first showed up in the store. I was twelve-years old and I knew I had to have one.
Not only did my parents buy me the game unit from the store, but I also talked my father into purchasing a large-screen television set. It was one of those units where you had to unfold the front for the three color tubes to reflect off a mirror and create the picture on the screen.
I knew if I could ever have a dream job, it would be to work at Video, Etc.
Sure enough, Sonny hired me to be the store “grunt” when I was seventeen. Having a driver’s license, a love for electronics and a history with the owner as a customer made me a shoe-in. From delivering big screen televisions to homes throughout the Chicagoland area and picking up merchandise from wholesalers to helping customers through the mad rush of Pac-Man releasing for the Atari 2600 and catching up with the latest Apple II software, I found my dream job. To this day, I look upon my time at Video, Etc. with great fondness. Those were the days…
I worked at Video, Etc. through my senior year of high school, and then again over holiday break from my first year at college.
It was then I was to enter the next phase of life and was to discover talents that I didn’t know I had. Stay tuned for part III.
What about you? What do you look back upon as your “best job ever”? Please let me know in the comments field below!
My best job ever is my latest job! Seriously. I went from a solder tech, to a data aide, to a research aide with MRI machines, to an Infrared System Engineer, to working for myself. I choose what I work on and when I work on it. How much better can it get?
Hey Brad, I don’t see working for myself as a “job”. And you are correct, it doesn’t get any better!
my best job ever was working as the part time webmaster for http://www.arnova.org while getting my master’s degree in music composition at Butler University — a bit over a decade ago.
the people were great. my boss was understanding, kind, efficient, gracious and intelligent — and we got cool stuff done that was right on the cutting edge of the internet at the time (cc payments online were not anywhere near as common back in 2000 and 2001 as they are now).
the co-workers were bright and the office was a wonderful place to go to & focus on the goals of the organization.
really, that was my best job ever — besides working landscaping for a summer — but that was a different kind of great.
cheers Joel, let’s get in touch and see about working together sometime 🙂
best,
dainis
Joel,
I would have to say that my best job ever was a year I worked on a horse farm. I have loved horses as long as I can remember. When I got the opportunity to actually work with them, it was a dream come true. It was probably the hardest, dirtiest job I ever had but also the most emotionally rewarding. Getting up at 4 am to feed, exercising (read: riding whenever I wanted to!), watching new babies coming into the world and taking their first steps, staying up all night with a colic-y horse, cleaning stalls. I could not do all that at my age now but it was one of the best times of my life and a memory that will last forever.
Winnetta
hmmm … what has been my best Job????
it’s Kind of Job i am still doing … i am a seller in the field Service and i like to be connected with many people
since my changing from sitting in the Office everyday and do the accounting for a Company until 1999, everyday the same to do … brrrr … it was good to learn for my future, but can’t imagine to do this work again.
i am still working for a Company, but i am able to contact a lot of People, everyday another work is waiting for me
i can feel and enjoy my success … and that is a great Feeling i will never miss!!!
You know the Feeling of your own Success i think 😉
thank you again
I’d have to say my “best job” ever was at CompSource (the State Ins. Fund), but a promotion landed me with a supvsr., who was always jealous of my looks & the job I did under her to the point I had to resign. I TRULY LOVED THAT JOB UNDER MY FAV., SUPVSR. HAL WILLIAMS. ♥♡♥♡♥♡♡♥♡
My best job ever was working at Outpost Natural Foods Cooperative in my early twenties. I was part of a six person collective that managed the coop. We were all coop owners and we managed ourselves as a team (long before self-directed teams became popular). It was ownership and team rolled up together and it set the stage for business ownership which was the next stage of my life. I have a lifetime membership in the co-op and curiously, without any prompting from me, my daughter at age 26 is working at Outpost, learning management and business skills, building her future (which will probably be a self-employed artist).
I loved the transition into being my own boss (there was no one “above” the collective, we were the “c-level” team) from the traditional corporate structure. Trust and accountability were at the core of our team. Thinking about it in retrospect, we were about forty years ahead of our time in how we handled our team and our tasks.
Thanks for the prompt to walk down memory lane!
My best job is what I’ve been doing since 2002 — Managing Google AdWords accounts for small businesses. I say “small” because I like interacting with the owners and getting into their minds about what they need from AdWords. Larger companies have to many barriers to this. It is my best job because it uses all the best of my life’s experiences and abilities…it is still fun for me.
My favorite job was writing for magazines, newspapers and other publication on a freelance or full-time situation. This led to meeting interesting people such as Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Wallace, Julian Bond, Chuck Yeager, Borden Deal, Hank Williams Jr., Merle Haggard, Fred Bear, Paul “Bear” Bryant, Bo Jackson, Pat Sullivan, Bobby and Davey Allison and many others. I wrote on many subjects from government to sports. writing about fishing was fun because I had to fish for “research” and did this in four countries. One fond memory was taking my newlywed “city girl” bride to a wilderness lake in Saskatchewan and watching her reel in walleyes to be netted by our Cree Indian guide.
My best job is yet to come. I just don’t know what it is yet.
Joel, I appreciated reading one of the stories during a job that helped form who you are today. Not only was it your best job, but the best job “for” you to go through to get experience that would pay off later. My best early job that did that for me was, like you, in retail at a place in CT called CalDor, a big dept store. I worked in receiving unloading trucks and signing-in inventory and packing t.v.’s into cars that had door openings half the size of the box (what were people thinking!). One day a temporary department manager gave me an order and I replied with, “you’re not my boss.” Similar situation as you where I was really ripped a new one by the store manager but given another chance. My takeaway from that experience is “always know who your boss REALLY is.”
My best job ever was actually a combination of jobs that had to do with performing, teaching and choreographing dance. My best job now is being a Mom 🙂
Best job ever?
Hmmmm
I would say working at The Great Western Boot Co. in Rolling Meadows, Il.
We were a tight-knit group that loved working hard and then playing hard after work. We had an open door policy with the owner and were rewarded for good ideas to help the company grow, and even compensated to a smaller degree for ideas that weren’t fully implemented.
I started on the sales floor and ended up creating my own position as merchandise manager. I was in charge of getting all the merchandise on the floor and displayed, that included “doing” the windows and rotating product.
One time I went to HR and challenged them to pay for me to learn Spanish at the community college as some of our customers spoke Spanish and if I received less than a “B” average then I would pay for the classes, otherwise they would. They saw the value in that and agreed. Another thing I always did (with many jobs) was at Christmastime I would offer 10 free hours of work if they would give me 20 hours’ overtime plus 50% off merchandise. Of course they took me up on that.
I learned everything I could about the job and took great pride in being the “go-to” person. At one time we were the largest retailer of cowboy boots and western wear in the country, I had great health insurance and a 401k plan out of this world- for every $1 I contributed they put in $2 so I put in the max at 12% of my pay and at that time (late 90s) we made out like bandits. Then came the .com craze and a falloff of everything “country” and sales dropped. Unfortunately we (the co.) had grown so fast the last 10 yrs out of 30+yrs in business that when this happened we ended up hurting ourselves. I tried to get them to sell online as the transition would have been pretty smooth- we had distribution centers already set up, but the owners decided not to 🙁 I would still be with this company to this day if they remained open.