When I was fifteen, my first job was working in a kitchen at a small business in London.
I learned a lot from that job: the value of hard work, team building, and how being reliable can benefit you in the long run, even if that means picking up extra shifts, staying late, or volunteering to do a messy job. (In a kitchen… there are a lot of messy jobs). It took a while to learn these lessons because again, I was fifteen when I first started, and that was my first job ever. I stayed there for quite a long time (until I was almost 22), and only left during the COVID-19 pandemic after I had been promoted to lead waitress but… there were no tables to serve. By the time I left, I had a lot to reflect on, including one story I’m going to share with you now about the value of self-direction and self assurance.
I remember my first day vividly. It was an afternoon shift where I was working directly with the manager while she prepped food for the evening rush. I was scheduled from 11:00 am until 3:00 pm; a short shift, but I soon came to realize that, depending on the day, it could go by very fast or agonizingly slow. The manager asked me, for my first job, to sweep the kitchen and then do an inventory count of all the raw ingredients we had in the industrial-sized fridge. Those tasks took me about 20 minutes in total, and afterwards, I (confidently) asked out loud: “so, what can I do next?”
If you have ever worked in food service or retail, you know that’s not a great question to ask.
I quickly learned that I was supposed to “make work” for myself; whether that be washing dishes the minute they are dirtied by other staff or wiping down counters that were already clean. Idling was not an option, and there was always something to do. If you couldn’t find anything to do in the kitchen, you would check the dining room, the bathrooms, the staff office – anywhere – and you would make work for yourself.
It sounds kind of silly, doesn’t it? And I certainly thought it was when I was there. But, my now 24-year-old (and a half) self reflects fondly on the particular lesson I learned from making work. There is always something that can be improved upon. It takes a skillful eye and ambitious spirit to learn a job well enough to identify even minuscule tasks that could be undertaken to make something run smoother, work better, or make other peoples lives easier.
If you are reading this as one of my past employers, in any paid or volunteer setting, then I’m sure you understand now where my ambitious ideas tend to come from… even if they aren’t always feasible. Transferring my learned knack for identifying problems to be solved into current endeavours has come alongside a need to grow thick skin, precisely because of that feasibility point. Most of the time, you can identify issues in work or life, fix them, and maybe even receive some praise for doing so. But, not everything is feasible, even if it’s a great idea.
I’m telling you this story because recently, an idea I had was on track to be a great one – but it wasn’t feasible. And that’s okay.
I tried my best to prepare as far in advance as I could have to undertake a very large (and admittedly, daunting) task during the first half of this internship. I identified an area where I could use my skills to make something better, I organized a digital filing system so anyone who needed to could track my progress; I curated proposals, I ensured they were reviewed well in advance of deadlines, but at the end of the day, it just didn’t work out. Of course, I’m a little disheartened, but that does not mean I’m going to give up and it certainly does not mean I don’t have more ideas up my sleeve; it’s been almost ten years since I started that first job, but my learned propensity to seek improvement has not left me.
Most importantly, and something I learned through trial and error (hardship and rejection, really), is that a keystone characteristic of a strong person is resilience.
I’m going to choose to be resilient with this one, despite however many hours went in to a project that won’t work out. What I can do instead is reflect on what could have been done differently, and possibly even use the materials I created to help future interns with facilitating large passion projects that they want to undertake. If at the end of the day, what I have done for the first half of this internship is make the jobs of others easier in the long run, then I am okay with that.
Allison Pert - Western Heads East 