Most first jobs are places that you stay briefly, places you don’t intend on setting up shop at. You’re there to cash a check, maybe earn some money while you’re in school. However, the longer you stay, the more that these places become as much social environments as they are work environments. It becomes more and more apparent that when you spend thirty hours a week with a group of people you start to form a bond, whether out of mutual interest or out of necessity to maintain sanity from eight to four.
In a few weeks I’m leaving my first job. During the midst of it, it can be hard to untangle yourself enough from your own responsibilities that you are caught up in, to stand back and consider what things mean to you, but now that there is an official end in sight I feel removed enough from it that I can start to look back and to give requiem. When I’ve been thinking about what mattered to me about my first job, it isn’t the day to day or the specific tasks, the sweeping or lifting of furniture that has stuck in my mind- it’s been the people. I know earlier I said that most people only stay briefly at their first jobs and that is true, but that is not the case for me. I was at my first job for three and a half years. Including summers, that’s just as long as high school, maybe longer. I was hired a naive sixteen-year-old boy and by the time I clock out I’ll be a naive freshly twenty-year-old “man”. Those are some formative, malleable years, so whether I like it or not the people that I have worked with over the last few years have had a hand in shaping who it is I am right now.
I’ve met a lot of people. It’s a retail/warehouse environment so there can be quite a bit of turnover. In fact, an old coworker of mine used to keep a little black notebook in her purse at work where she would keep track of everyone who got hired, listed their name and their contact information. Over the period that I worked with her I saw her fill that book page by page, and by the time that she left, well over a hundred name and phone numbers had been filed in the little notebook. A good amount of the people that I have gotten to know at work, I can classify as work friends. You know, relationships that are fundamentally based on the fact that you work together. Some relationships evolved into full-fledged friendships and started hanging out outside of the confines of retail; but a lot of relationships, once you leave the job and move on to the next thing can fizzle out. Honestly, most of our friendships in general are based on proximity, once you move along to your next trail all of a sudden you get yourself caught up in that web of responsibilities and obligations and don’t have the time or forethought to look back. It’s easy to get caught up whether you realize it or not.
That doesn’t mean that those work relationships didn’t matter, though. In fact, I think there is something special about them. You provided solidarity for each other. You worked, laughed, sweated, and toiled together. Just because you left and it ended, doesn’t make it a failure or less than. Because when we were all caught up in it together, when the day was great or it was dragging along, we were there together. Those relationships baptized by the breakroom table helped us get through the day. So when I leave in a few weeks, I know that I won’t keep all of the work relationships I have now. I know that some have the legs to last and we’ll keep in touch. Most, though? We move on, things falter, they dissipate once you don’t see each other every week. Knowing that, knowing that happens, I would be remiss to not mention how the people I’ve met over the last three and a half years have helped mold me. Thank you, guys. And I quit.
