My First Job

By Tom

My first job was the one my Mom gave me. It was part time, it was solitary, but it was important to me.

My Mom went back to work when my little brother David was old enough to be in school (most of) the time. As a librarian and expert in keeping things organized, she was in charge of writing synopses and indexing newspaper articles from around the country on a wide variety of topics so they could be indexed correctly on microfiche.

For all you young people, a microfiche is just like having a PDFs every newspaper article, but without the full text searching. And not on a computer, but stored in boxes on shelves in ...libraries.

In that pre-PDF era, they cut real newspaper articles out of real paper newspapers collected from all the major US cities, and pasted them onto white paper with glue. They then took photos of those pages, and shrunk the images down so they were microscopic - along with a synopsis and a grid number - and put hundreds of these images of articles on flexible thin plastic slides (microfiche!). To read the article, you could put the microfiche into a magnifying machine and move it around until it came into view. Very fancy in its time.

Anyway...she'd receive stacks of newspaper articles every week, and they needed to be alphabetized before they could be organized.

That's where I came in. I was her chief alphabetizer.

I remember working for hours in our basement, reading article titles and sorting them into a rack of sorts. I somehow procured a cassette deck in the process, and listened to music while working "under the table". I don't remember how much I made, but I do remember being proud to have a job and be making money on my own.

I was also really happy to help my Mom out. She appreciated being able to get to the more challenging work she had and not do menial sorting. And I appreciated her working so we could enjoy living in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Mom taught me a lot by having me figure things out for myself. She was really awesome that way.