Maximum Age / Minimum Wage

    I've got a Tee Shirt on my "NovelTees" store that portrays "Minimum Age / Minimum Wage".   It's meant to be a pun or jab at teens trying to find work whenever they reach the minimum age for a work permit.   Usually the only thing available is a minimum wage entry level job.  

    On the other hand, I've seen some teenagers venturing out to even start their own businesses while in high school, or even before.  The days of kids setting up lemonade stands are almost gone now.  Kids are web savvy, creating complex Internet sites and learning how to play and even create

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computer video games.  Some other young people are venturing into other areas, like crafts or food or writing.  I've heard of girls baking and selling cookies.  

   One of my college friends had a daughter who she helped set up a website and sold cookies online.  Although I'm sure that a lot of them had their parents' guidance and help, I am amazed and impressed that so many that are so young can manage to imagine and conceive such enterprises, and then follow through on it to actually put it into motion and achieve a measure of success.

   One of the focuses of this "Make This Job & Love It" site is to try to help people get out of the old mentality of "I CAN'T do this" or accepting their current job or career status as "Oh well, somebody's got to do it".  If you are in this mental state, then you are ACCEPTING the status quo, and ENDURING your work, rather than EXCEPTING the status quo, and ENJOYING your work.   I had lunch with a couple of friends yesterday.  One of them said about their past job, "Well, it was a necessary evil... it had its pro's and con's."  He enjoyed his co-workers;  in fact, some of them are still casual friends several years after he left the job.  He found that the job itself was not that difficult.  He was a photographer, who went in, did his job, and then usually went home.  But he found that the company did not treat him fairly, cut the benefits to a bare minimum, and at the end, left him with no alternative but to quit.

  My own story has similarities to my friend's, although the circumstances are different. It was about four years ago that I returned back to my hometown from about a two-year stay in Nashville, and was somewhat excited to be able to find a job within about a week.  It so happened that one of the managers, the one conducting the job interviews, was a former co-worker or boss at one of my former jobs.  I was hired, and settled into the retail environment once more.  Having just spent almost two years in a retail sales job in Nashville, it was natural for me to be comfortable in that setting.  But what I began to see and find over the course of the next 2-3 months was that this particular job was a return to "Point Zero" for me, a reoccurring revolving door or detour off of life's highway.  I had been making almost $10 an hour at the former job.  Even though our commission had been cut out about halfway through my stay there, I was pretty satisfied.  To some of you, working for $10 an hour is an appalling thought.  To me, it was Retail Heaven.  When I got back home, and got the new job, I was again making Minimum Wage, which was something in the neighborhood of $7.25 an hour.  I was being paid a stipend of 50 cents for store credit applications that were collected and approved.  (Wow!)  My former job in Nashville had given us $2.00 for each credit application.  When I asked the manager about the differential, he just flatly stated, "It's your job. Take it or leave it."  At 5:30 a.m. sales meetings, the store managers would look at me and make remarks like, "We're counting on you for five credit app's today. Come on.. you can do it!"   The appeal of this pitch was totally lost on me.  I began to see through this whole game of the corporate ladder, and the low rung to which I was seemingly permanently affixed.

  After about two months, the store laid me off.  It had been a seasonal temp job anyway.  Two or three of us got extended into regular employees.  I was one of the "unlucky" ones that got axed.  But looking back, I could not thank them enough for their generosity in letting me go.  It opened the door to almost two years of unemployment, through which I began to look for other alternatives to the Minimum Wage dead end.

  More later.. For an in-depth look at my history and background, read "My Story--(and I'm Sticking to It!").