I am going to tweak this topic a bit and talk about the time I sold candy in high school.

I was on the tennis team all four years of high school and a big form of fundraising for players was selling candy. Every year, the school would give us a box of candy bags that sold for $1 each. And once we would sell through our box, we would then pick up another box until we reached our goal. Reaching my goal was never an issue and every year I always ended with credit in my “tennis account.”

Anyway, it was during my junior year that I realized that if I kept the candy box, instead of trashing it once I sold through all my candy, I could go to the store and buy candy lower than $1 and sell it for a profit.

For instance, I would go to the store and buy 3 chocolates for a $1 (back then, 3 for $1 was a sale that would regularly run at my local market store). I would fill my box with better candy than what my school would offer, which would give me more customers and an even faster turnaround. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation but hey, I was a teen in high school and it was just chocolate. If anyone has read "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh, I find that what I did in high school is similar to what Tony did with pizzas in college -- we both saw an opportunity and decided to jump on it.  

That’s my “first job" in a nutshell. I don’t know how much money exactly I made, but it was enough that I didn’t have to ask my parents for prom money.

​The first job I had was delivering the newspaper for the Sacramento Bee.   The papers had to be delivered on time every morning, regardless of the weather conditions. My goal was to make sure every customer was satisfied and had no complaints. The best part of the job was getting paid at the end of the month. To get paid, I had to go to all the customers' homes, talk to them, and collect the monthly dues. The majority of the customers appreciated the hard work and tipped generously. It was a challenging yet rewarding job that taught me many valuable life lessons at a young age.​​

Mary Callender’s was definitely my first real job experience, and it was quite the experience! I started as a dishwasher, and man that was brutal. The first 2-weeks were rough. I didn’t think I was going to last and wanted to quit 3 days in. It was gross as I had to touch soggy half eaten food all the time. My hands hurt from the hot water and my feet hurt because I was standing for 7-8 hours straight. Not a lot of people know this, but dish washing for a big chain restaurant can be stressful. The restaurant constantly needed clean plates and pans as they only had so much, so I was never able to stop. If they ran out of clean dishes, they would come and pressure you to get them out faster. Other than washing dishes, I was also responsible for other miscellaneous tasks like preparing soups and baking cornbread when the restaurant ran out of them, which it was often. I was always on GO! GO! Mode as soon as I clocked in. The servers would pop their heads in at the back of the house and scream “We are out of cornbread!”, and I had to stop washing dishes to go prep and bake the cornbread. I had to do those other tasks as fast as possible as the longer I took to do other things, the more dirty dishes accumulated on my side. Because I was always in a rush, I ended up burning myself several times either with the oven or the boiling soup. Luckily for me, they promoted me and took me out of dish washing duties after 2-months. 

It was definitely not an easy first job, but now that I look back at it, I’m very glad I went through that experience. It made me appreciate the hard work my parents did when I was little as they had similar jobs back then. It also gave me an even bigger incentive to finish my college education when things got difficult, as I told myself I would never do that job again. Most importantly, it makes me appreciate and be thankful for the jobs that I’ve had since I graduated from college. I often forget, but my dish washing experience ended up shaping my life in a very positive way, and I’m very grateful for that.