Weekend Assignment #260: It's a Wonderful Job

Hi folks! This week, we turn to guest professor Florinda for a topic most adults can relate to:

Weekend Assignment #260: Maybe it wasn't the "best" job by objective standards, but of all the jobs you've ever had, which was your favorite, and why did you like it so much?

Extra Credit: What was the shortest time you ever held a job? What happened?

My office at Worldwide Travel, newly organized as I
prepared to leave the company.

My favorite job to date was at Worldwide Travel, where I was Operations Manager, Comptroller, and staff accountant. I did pretty much everything bookkeeping or accounting-related except the income taxes. I also designed a company website and maintained it for a year or so.

It wasn't the most lucrative job I've ever had, and I didn't always get along with every employee that came to work there. And I have to admit that toward the end of my twelve years there I was a bit bored, and less motivated than I had been to give the job all my attention and effort. But it was an important job for my for several reasons. First, it gave me a chance to learn a lot of basic accounting, a process that had started less than two years earlier at Travel Tree/Travel Network. Second, it gave me a decent wage compared to every job I'd had to that point, with raises along the way.

Third, and I can't stress this enough, this was the first job where I felt like a "treasured employee," as my boss called me occasionally. When I had worked in retail, and later as a travel agent, I had mostly worked for men who managed by intimidation and browbeating, who looked for deficiencies and overlooked successes. Mal and Sandy Potter, who owned Worldwide Travel, weren't like that at all. They made me and other employees feel appreciated. Early on we used to get a birthday check and other little perks, and even when those went away there was at least a birthday cake, and a supportive attitude. The business suffered many setbacks, including the cutting of airline commissions from 10% to 5% to eventually zero, the rise of online travel sites, the blow to the travel industry dealt by 9-11, and Sandy's declining health. But Mal and Sandy never tried to blame or pressure their staff to make up for such calamities. Instead Mal instituted sevice fees and negotiated deals with tour companies, and managed to keep the company going for years while other travel agencies folded. "It is what it is" was Mal's motto, and he used that philosophy to make the best of circumstances rather than complain too much about things not going his way. And I admire him for it.

As for the shortest job I ever held, my four days working in check cashing stores this past January are beaten handily by a job I quit after a single day. It involved going door to door in towns and cities around Ohio, canvassing for some kind of supposedly progressive tax reform proposal. We were given some minimal indoctrination and training, and driven to Marysville, where I accompanied someone who had been doing the job for a while. I had previously gone door to door as a Girl Scout (selling cookies), on behalf of a group fighting Multiple Sclorosis (also for just a day or two, as a volunteer) and as an enumerator for R.L Polk (compiling a City Directory), and all of those experiences had been fairly excruciating for me due to shyness. This one was worse. Beyond the social discomfort, I was deeply uncomfortable about the fact that I wasn't well-versed on the issues involved, and wasn't at all sure that if I did the research I would still agree with what I was being paid to espouse. So when they came to pick me up for a second day of work, I told them goodbye.

How about you? Did you ever have a job you loved, or at least one that sucked less than the others? Tell us about it in a blog entry, and please remember to link back to this entry. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll post a roundup of your responses a week from now. Meanwhile:

For Weekend Assignment #259: Mentors, I asked whether you ever had a mentor, or mentored someone else. Apparently this one was a bit of a stumper, but we did have two responses and a comment:

Laura said...

I had a couple of awesome mentors when I was in high school and interested in science. I participated in the American Heart Association's internship program, and was sent at first to a laboratory in which the researcher was working on elevated lipoprotein levels in various cell lines. She was really friendly and welcoming to me, and spent a lot of time explaining the process of sending articles to journals and requesting grants and a lot of the more fund-raising side of science.

Julie said in comments...

I'm not sure I can answer this one. Sigh.

Mike said...

My fifth grade teacher was pretty good to me. He was the track and soccer coach, and I did well in both of those. He helped me a bit in track, but nothing much more than most students. Did I ever tell you I set him up with my sister? That might be a story for another time. There are benefits to having a sister ten years older.

That's it for now! I look forward to hearing about your good and bad jobs, past and present - and no, I don't expect you to name names unless you want to.

And I'm running low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments. Please, please, please email me some new ones. Thanks!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #259: Mentors

Hi folks! I should probably use a guest professor this week, but instead I'm going with a new topic idea of my own:

Weekend Assignment #259: The term "mentoring" has become a buzzword in recent yearsm but the concept of a mentor goes back centuries, and the word itself all the way back to Greek mythology, where Mentor was a friend of Odysseus. Have you ever had a mentor? How did you benefit from the relationship? And if you didn't have one, would you have wanted one?

Extra Credit: Have you ever been a mentor to someone else?

Harry's mentor Dumbledore, as played by Richard Harris.

I thought of this last night because I was rereading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's [Philosopher's] Stone. Although Harry's mentor, Dumbledore, is a presence right from the beginning of the first book, the two characters don;t actually converse until hundreds of pages later. Dumbledore, of course, comes from a long line of fantasy mentors, from Merlin to Gandalf to my own character Fayubi. Those particular characters fall under the archetype I like to call the "Tricky Old Man," a combination of Jung's Trickster and Wise Old Man. Mentor characters can also be female, although I don't see them as often. Madeleine L'Engle's Mrs Whatsit is sort of a mentor to Meg and Charles Wallace. Maximiliana Van Horne in L'Engle's A House Like a Lotus is explicitly a mentor to Polly O'Keefe, but a flawed one whose drunken betrayal of Polly drives the plot of the book.

Real life, of course, is a bit different. I've never been on the Hero's Journey, never met a wizard, never been sent overseas by a rich friend many years my senior. But I have latched onto a number of people as mentors over the years, at least to some minor degree. There were high school English teachers that I looked up to and appreciated for more than what they taught in class. There was the young woman across the street who claimed to be a writer and sometimes served me tea when I was in high school. There were the writers-in-residence at Clarion, particularly Harlan Ellison, with whom I had corresponded and whom I had met a few times by then.

But the main mentor I had when I was younger was a young English teacher from an entirely different school district when I first met her in early 1974. She was 23 years old. I was 16 going on 17. I had just published a Star Trek fanzine called 2-5YM, which inspired "d" to contact me. We got together and talked about Star Trek and lots of other things, sometimes sitting in her car for hours, just chatting. She had realized that teaching was not for her, so she went back to school to become a librarian instead. When I was in college the first time she ran a small one-room library at the University, and I hung out there after class.

d didn't teach me about writing or accounting or anything like that. Mostly she taught me how to be an adult while expanding my literary horizons a bit. I first read the 60 original Sherlock Holmes stories because of her. She taught me how to check whether the dish you are washing is clean, and advocated squash for pie instead of pumpkin, although I still disagree with her on the latter. She told me about Japan, where she wanted to live, and advised me about the Star Trek group and its members. She made me an afghan blanket, and was co-Maid of Honor at my wedding. And I think I still have some E. E. Cummings books I should really return to her. She was also an Episcopalian, a denomination I sought out many years later, in part because of her.

I haven't seen d in about 20 years, since she visited Tucson shortly after we moved here. Noe has she sought me out in the years since. I found her online a few years ago, and could write to her care of her current workplace, assuming she's still there. Would she welcome the contact? I don't know. But I hope she is well and happy.

As for being a mentor myself, I have occasionally had pretensions to this, particularly in online relationships with younger writers. But that's more of a mutual support and advice thing than true mentoring, I think. It might be different if my novels were published an in the stores, but they're not, and won't be anytime soon. Eventually - this Karen swears! - but not soon.

How about you? Have you had or been a mentor? Tell us about it in a blog entry, and please remember to link back to this entry so people can read what others have to say on the subject. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll post a roundup of your responses a week from now. Meanwhile:

For Weekend Assignment #258: It's A Small Web (After All), I basically asked how sociable you get in your social media. Here are excerpts from the small pool of responses:

Julie said...

For me, it depends on the situation. On places like Twitter and FriendFeed, I'm following (and am followed by) people from all around the world. Just yesterday I exchanged "tweets" with someone in the UK about the Manchester United match that was going on at the time. I'm more careful on Facebook, where I tend to follow and "friend" real-life friends and professional contacts, though I've made a few exceptions.

Florinda said...

I hesitate to say that my offline friends are the only "real" ones, though. My connections with some of the folks I've gotten to know online are just as "real" to me. I've met a few of them in person, but the fact that I'm unlikely to physically cross paths with most of them doesn't diminish those relationships. I enjoy meeting new people online and getting better acquainted with the ones I've already met via blogging and Twitter, which for the moment are meeting my social-media-interaction needs pretty well.

Mike said...

I certainly don't have a wide net of online friends. I don't belong to many online groups. I have this one here, and Carly's photo shoot as my only online groups. That's fine with me. If I had too many, I'd have trouble keeping track of everything I'm supposed to be doing. I have enough trouble getting to every one's posts the way it is now.

That's it for now! I look forward to hearing about your mentors and mentoring. And yes, as always, I'm still soliciting topics for these Weekend Assignments. Please email me your suggestions. Thanks!

Karen