My First Job

When I was a teenager, like many other’s my age I had a paper route.  It was a weekly route that delivered the local paper to the people in my own community.  I had decided to take it on when a letter was passed out at my school looking for carriers in each community.  Our community never had a newspaper carrier that I knew of so I thought it would be a nice thing to have, and I could earn some extra money.  The way I saw it, everyone would benefit, so I brought the letter home and got my mom to sign it.

A few weeks later I was informed that the paper route was mine!  I was excited because it was my first real job.  I kept thinking about the paper routes people my age had on TV shows I had watched where they joyfully rode their bikes through communities and tossed the rolled up papers through the air never missing their target.

One thursday afternoon I came home from school to find a stack of newspapers and a big carrier bag that had been delievered earlier in the day.  I was excited to get startedand managed to convince my best friend to help me with the delivery.

As we rode our bikes through the community my bubble of the idelic TV version of the paper route was quickly burst!  No one in my small community had a subscription, so we had to knock on each door and ask if they would liek to buy a paper.  This was exhausting and very time consuming.  My community, although quite small was very hilly and a lot of the roads were unpaved.  The added weight of the carrier bag made balancing on my bike a real problem and I had to get off and push it up even the slighest hill because I just never had the power in my legs to pedal if the ground wasn’t almost flat thanks to my Cerebral Palsy.

I also ran into another slight issue.  I wasn’t sure how to get to the door at a lot of houses because the only time I’ve been to many of them was at Halloween.  I was glad Kristy came along because I could count on her to show me, or at the very least shout dirrections while she stayed with our bikes!

By the time I got home from my very first paper route I felt as if I needed to tak ethe next day off of school and have a long weekend.  My legs hurt so much that night I just layed in bed exhausted thinking about the money I had made and how it would get easier each week.  I knew if I worked hard my muscles would eventually calm down and not hurt so much.

As the months went on I continued doing my paper route with Kristy.  I would follow her on my bike so I knew where I was going and on days when the weather was bad, or when I just couldn’t gather the strength to ride my bike or walk the route my mom would drive us.  I had my regulars by then, and a couple of older women who wanted the paper every other week or occasionally.  There were a couple of houses we always skipped though.  At least when Kristy and I went alone!

The first was a family that everyone in the community couldn’t help but know.  They had always had very bad hygeine and the smell that hit you as they opened the door was enough to make your eyes water!  They had always been that way, and only the sister and one of the brothers had moved away and cleaned themselves up.  My stomach would churn just thinking about knocking on their door.  Maybe it was my OCD, but I decided that skipping this house was well worth it!

The other house was on it’s own road far from the rest of the community.  To make things worse, it was uphill!  Each week I would ask Kristy if it looked liek anyone was home, and she would reply that it didn’t look that way!  I knew her answer suited both of us because neither of us wanted to make the trek up that long hill, and we were both happy that the people living there were never at home!

Even though there were less than two hundred residents, and only a fraction of them read the paper I made a small fortune at Christmas!  I would get card with money, extra tips, cookeis, cake and even some gifts.  There were also a couple of people who would always invite me in for something cold to drink, or a snack, or just to have a chat every week.  I don’t think a lot fo the older people had too many visitors and enjoyed the time I spent chatting with them each week, as I enjoyed it.

The one time I will never forget that still makes me laugh though is when I knocked on the door of an elderly couple and the husband answered.  It wasn’t his “job” to pay for the paper, so he promptly yelled out for his wife to come to the door.  After urgently calling her name a few times she came rushing to the door in her bra!  She didn’t know who was there and she gave her husband a real tongue bashing for making her come to the door that way!  Kristy was laughing so hard once the door was shut that I thought she was going to fall off her bike!

When I went to Halifax to attend the school for the blind for a term when I was fourteen I had to give up my paper route.  My cousin and Kristy took it over for the rest of that year and eventually a younger girl who lived at the other end of the community took it over.  Once she stopped, the paper route was no more.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to it though.  It’s left me with a lot of memories and I think it’s one of those rights of passage jobs that all teenagers should have at some point.

It would be interesting to hear what some of my readers’ first jobs were.