Flashback Friday....Real World 101

I started my senior year in high school and without my asking, Dad starting shopping for a used car for me.

I suppose my after school schedule of every night play practice and yearbook was wearing mom and the family car out.

After we found the car (that's another Flashback for a different Friday), I was told, "now you need to get a job."

I wasn't quite sure how to fit a job into the crazy senior schedule, and I really don't remember any of the details of how I found it, but my first real job, with a real boss (I'm not counting working at the station for Dad here)...was at the Stuckey's at I-65.

I only worked a few hours during the week and on the weekends.

A couple girls from school worked there and I think some of the Merkel kids had worked there. (Maybe Aunt Maxine suggested it)??

I really wasn't thrilled about working with fast food. I didn't want to see my friends come in and have fun, while I was working. Honestly, I didn't want ANYONE I knew to see me in the awful polyester uniform and the ridiculous hat I had to wear.

I found out soon enough, that I had nothing to worry about.
The snack bar wasn't tempting enough to the locals.
Gas was always a little higher than the Truck Stop and all we ever saw all day long, were travelers. People on the way to or on the way home from somewhere else. 

Stuckey's was a unique company.

Most of the buildings were shaped alike.

An A-Frame type building with very high ceilings. Almost Cathedral looking.

They were also unique in that most of the managers were transplants from other areas. They would move managers around to various stores. Housing was provided. Each one of these stores had an apartment attached to the building. You walked into the back store room and there was the door to the apartment. I don't think it had an outside entrance.

This is where my first boss, Jim, lived with his wife Alice.

Jim and Alice.
They were an odd couple. Jim was a little man who was very quiet and calculating.
Alice was a heavy smoker who would come out of the apartment, cigarette in hand screeching "J-e-e-m." Her lipstick was bright red and always a little larger than her actual mouth.

I can remember Jim being sorta nit picky. The kind of boss that wants things a certain way, but never bothers to tell you what that way is...until he's telling you what you did is not that (right) way.
But, I don't think any of us had any major problems with him. It's just that he was the boss, we were not.

I still remember the day that he showed up.
Jim and Alice had been running us in circles all week long, getting ready for a visit from the District manager. There was a lot wrong with that store. It had been opened a long time. The bathrooms were not updated and pretty bad. Not dirty, but never clean looking...just worn out. There was flooding all the time due to the building sitting lower than Rt. 2. Neither Jim nor Alice seemed to make any extra effort to fix any of these things. That was until these visits...then it was lots of band aids and things done that we normally didn't do.

I was standing by the register in the snack bar when he arrived.
A handsome white haired man in a navy blue blazer with tan pants.
Jim scurried up to the door to meet him.

They exchanged hand shakes, a bit of small talk and headed toward the snack bar. There was a unspoken silent, "don't you dare mess up his order" threat from Jim in the air.
Jim turned to me and said "This is one of our new girls, Nancy Vandercar...Nancy this is our District Manager, Garland Fish."
Before I could get a "hello, nice to meet you"out, Garland turned to Jim and said, "Oh, I know who she is, Nancy and I go way back, don't we Nance?" He said to me with a wink. I was a little surprised, but this was not anything unusual in my life. Having grown up living behind the Log Cabin, the local Social hang out for the community, I often had people that I didn't know telling me "I remember when you were this tall." I figured that Garland was a customer of Dad's and he probably knew me from the station.

So neither Garland nor I was surprised, but poor Jim.
He looked as tho his goose had been cooked. I'm not sure if he was proud to have hired someone Garland approved of, or scared that I might give all his secrets away to his boss that I go "way back" with.

It was at that moment, that Garland Fish taught me my first lesson of working in the real world.
Sometimes...it's not what you know, but who you know.

Let's just say, my life got a lot easier at Stuckey's after Jim found out that I knew the District Manager and the District Manager knew me!