Forever Green and Gold

Summer Jobs 101

What off-campus jobs lack in glamour and prestige, they sometimes make up for in life lessons

Illustration by Mike Ellis

Back in the "Dark Ages" of the 1950s, when cars had carburetors and television screens had as much snow as a Winnipeg winter, I was a young seeker of truth, knowledge and cheap beer at the University of Alberta. For me, like most undergrads of that era, a summer job was what kept the wolf and the landlord from the door. And while a male student might dream of landing a job that would enable him to marry his boss's daughter and live happily and richly ever after, my summer jobs were much less promising. They were, nevertheless, interesting.

My first job was pumping gas at a service station (41 cents a gallon for regular - only nine cents a litre!). I recall a customer coming in once to ask why her car ran fine for the first 20 minutes but then jerked its way down the road until finally stalling. It turned out it wasn't an engine problem; it was an operator problem. Needing a place to hang her handbag, the driver would pull out the choke lever and hang her bag from it, oblivious to the mechanical consequences. Which just goes to show that common sense isn't always so common.

Another summer, as an employee of the local health unit, I learned that when inspectors checked out a restaurant, they finished by taking a swab and leaving the petri dish at the restaurant so staff could see the bacteria colonies growing on it. When the inspectors did this in one restaurant and returned to examine the results, there were no colonies whatsoever in the dish. The process was repeated, with the same perplexing outcome. While cleanliness might be next to godliness, no restaurant can be that close to God, so the inspectors thought they had a bad batch of petri dishes. Then they noticed some suspicious-looking fine lines on the surface of the medium. It turned out the restaurant's owner had been using a fork to scrape off the bacteria colonies as soon as he saw them. Which just shows that two wrongs don't make a right - and four prongs don't, either.

One of my summer jobs entailed inspecting garbage cans up and down my hometown's back alleys. On one occasion, I knocked on the door of a house to report something about their trash bins, and a young lady, who was known in our high school days for being rather (ahem) curvaceous, opened the door. Seeing her startled me and, using all the polish and savoir-faire I had acquired as a U of A freshman, I blurted out, "Good afternoon. I'm from the city. Your cans don't have lids on." As soon as I uttered those immortal words I realized they could have been misinterpreted (which, of course, they were). The young lady started to laugh and I made a hasty, red-faced retreat, hoping she wouldn't remember me. Two days later, I happened to bump into her husband, who I also remembered from high school. He looked at me, smiled wickedly, and said, "My wife tells me her cans didn't pass inspection." Which just proves there are some days when one has no luck at all.

Perhaps my experiences were really a hands-on version of Human Nature 101, since they confirmed my opinion that most people are (reasonably) intelligent, co-operative and helpful, with only a small minority falling in the "not so much" category. But while my summer jobs were great real-life experiences, I must confess I never want to inspect another garbage can. On the other hand, while I realize cheap gas isn't good for Alberta's economy, one thing I wouldn't mind seeing again is a gas bar offering a fill-up for 41 cents a gallon.