A New Job

I never had a very easy time finding a job when I was a teenager. That's because it's hard to convince a prospective employer that it would be to their advantage to hire you when you don't really believe it's true... Yeah - I'm still not exactly sure how I ended up feeling so totally useless - but my self-opinion couldn't have been much lower.

Aside: I did have an offer from one of our neighbors at the apartments to work as an apprentice carpet installer but after he showed me how to use a "kicker" I was pretty sure I wouldn't survive the first day. (The kicker is used to stretch the carpet around the edges so there are no loose spots. You operate it by slamming your knee into it repeatedly. I used one a couple of times to install carpet in my home and was limping for a week.)

So I decided to try an employment agency. There was a "for profit" one in Richardson (the next suburb over) and it really wasn't too bad of a deal. There was no fee unless they found you a job and then it was a percentage of your paycheck for the first six weeks or so.
I was kind of surprised when the first thing they did was administer a test. (It was the Wonderlic Personnel Test, but I didn't find that out until later.) Their were 50 questions - not particularly hard but there was a 12 minute time limit (~15 seconds per question). If you took the time to "think through" all the problems you'd be lucky to finish half the test. But after the first few I realized that I already knew the answers to many of them. For example : "If farmer John has 51 chickens each laying an egg a day, how many eggs would he have in a week?" Well - the answer is obviously a little bit less than the number of days in a year (52 weeks times 7 days) and a quick glance at the answers revealed that only one of them was in the ballpark. As it turns out, there were shortcuts to a number of the questions and spotting them was the key to getting a high score. That makes perfect sense given that the purpose of the test is to measure "trainability". (Applying what you already know to new circumstances.)

So - when my time was up the young lady (roughly my age - possibly the daughter of the owner) who was administering the test took it back to her office to score it. (BTW: I was kind of bummed because I didn't make it through all the questions.) Then a couple of minutes later she came flying out of her office so fast that she almost tripped and fell. She gave me a glance as she hurried past that is still etched in my memory - it was stunned disbelief... The owner (a middle-aged heavy-set blond woman with too much makeup) was on the phone when the young lady interrupted her saying "You have got to see this!!"
She immediately called me into her office and informed me that I had gotten the highest score she had ever seen on the test (I think it was a 42 - above the 99th percentile)... I was like "Really??"

Aside - I've mentioned this many times before but it bears repeating: My entire childhood I always had the sense that I was smarter than most of the people around me but all of the evidence seemed to indicate otherwise... Things that were obvious to every else (including my teachers) were hopelessly confusing to me. I saw nothing but ambiguity in even the simplest of tasks. And a lot of the time I had no idea what was going on... By the time I finished high school I still felt like I was somehow "different". I wasn't sure exactly how or why but I was pretty certain that it had nothing to do with "smart" :-)

Despite my high test score I still had no specialized education or work experience, so there were only 2 job listings I might possibly qualify for. The first was for an apprentice machine maintenance / repair person at a manufacturing facility. It paid quite well and (in retrospect) I probably would have been extremely good at it, but at the time I wasn't so sure I'd be able to handle it. (Plus it was at night.)
The other listing was for a delivery driver at A-1 Plastic Supply (13700 Gamma Road - not in business any more). It also paid quite well ($5 an hour - about triple the minimum wage at the time) and was only about a mile from the apartment. They were looking for someone with experience but the agency owner convinced them I'd be able to handle it and arranged an interview.

After coaching me a bit on how to behave and what to say the woman sent me over there and (much to my amazement) I got the job.