Gratitude

Thank You for Teaching Me What I Didn’t Want to Do

What I learned from a career program in high school

When you were in high school, what did you think you wanted as a career? I had ideas about wanting to write plays, but I knew that nobody had a career as a playwright except maybe Neil Simon (he was still alive back then).

Long before I had a clear idea about what I wanted to do with my time and my life, I was aware that I’d need to figure out something I could do which to me would be a day job but to everybody else would be my career.

I had a daydream about working in an office. This idea had no basis in reality because nobody in my life worked in an office. My mom taught preschool, and my dad worked on the plumbing at an aerospace plant. I had strong memories of family stories like how my grandma had worked off a debt in a hospital as a kid when her dad was ill.

Working in an office was something that women on TV did, like Mary Richards and Della Street. (We watched a lot of classic re-runs.) My dad was always saying things about how I should choose a practical job, and how I should learn about computers. I imagined I’d find some kind of office job, and write stuff at night.

I wasn’t a big extracurricular person in high school, so I’m not sure how I decided to participate in an after-school program. It was one where my friends and I elected ourselves to various positions in a pretend company. We then set about assembling and attempting to sell products to our family members and anyone who happened to walk by the table our mentors from a real company set up for us on the weekend at the mall.

I didn’t particularly enjoy the sales and the paperwork and all the other businessy bits and pieces our mentors guided us through in a scaled-down, hands-on way. But the clincher came when we went on a tour of the company where our mentors worked.

We were supposed to dress up, and my mom had bought me a blazer with a blue and black checkerboard pattern at the Brass Plum at Nordstrom. I remember the blazer, and I remember our mentors treated us to lunch in the cafeteria where we could have any sandwich we wanted, made to order.

Then we wanted to see their individual offices, and they took us around to their different departments like marketing and accounting. All our mentors had cubicles. How was it that these businesspeople didn’t have walls?

They barely had any empty desk space, either, just stacks of annual reports and legal pads and maybe a picture frame next to the big computers that took up most of their allotted area. Nobody’s desk was anywhere near a window.

Everything was bright from all the busy computer screens plus the fluorescent lights that glowed overhead. I looked around as we toured through the different floors, and I realized people there hardly talked to each other. They were typing on their computers or hurrying around with mail or stacks of papers.

I didn’t enjoy high school much, but I could suddenly appreciate how lucky we were to look up from our schoolwork and see grass and trees out the windows. And there was always somebody nearby who wanted to talk.

I didn’t have any kind of epiphany about what I wanted to do for a living — I had to hope that this was the kind of thing that college would help me with — but I wanted to thank my mentors for waking me from my office fantasy. I wasn’t especially tactful as a kid (is anyone?), but luckily I had the good sense to only thank them in my head.