The First Time I Was Fired From a Job

I was fired from my first job at a gas station for dropping a customer’s car off a lift

I grew up on the outskirts of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. My family lived in a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood at the top of a hill. There was nothing for miles around except parks, schools, and single-family homes.

The last strip mall before you headed into miles of residential zoning was a place called Knollwood Plaza.

I got my first job when I was fifteen at the Chevron gas station in the Plaza. I was told about the opportunity by my friend Chad, who was in my English class.

I rode my bike down to the station and was hired on the spot. The owner told me to be back the next day at 8 am for my first day.

I was so excited to be employed! The job paid a whopping five bucks an hour. The minimum wage in 1994 was 4.25 so five bucks was amazing for a first job at fifteen.

I was working to buy a motorcycle with the money I made because in California you could get a motorcycle license for a bike under 150cc at fourteen and a half.

I met my coworkers. The owner of the gas station/auto shop was a man named Jim. He was about 5'2" and wore his mechanic shirts half unbuttoned so you could better see his gold medallions nestling in his white chest hair.

Jim was a hothead. The slightest thing would set him off. He had a southern accent and his eyes would bulge when he screamed at us.

Jim’s nephew Scott was the main mechanic. He gave me my first pinch of chewing tobacco before I ever inhaled a cigarette. He was studying to become a surgical tech and going to school on the weekends.

Scott knew all the dirt on Jim and wasn’t shy about talking about it. He said Jim was on his fourth marriage. When Jim told us to tell his wife he was going to the bank or test driving a car, he was really going to one of his mistresses houses to bang.

Finally, there was Chad. Chad was my fifteen-year-old friend from school and also the gas station’s manager. We ran the station at night and on Sundays.

Two fifteen year old's running a gas station. What could go wrong?

Everything.

I wouldn’t say we did a bad job, but we could have done better.

The station was ancient even by 1994 standards. Our station was one of the last stations with full-service pumps, we did credit card transactions by impressions, and the pumps needed to be reset with a gas key after every customer. We didn’t sell snacks or cigarettes, we didn’t even have a soda machine.

We were likely the last gas station in the valley that was pump, then pay. All the criminals in the San Fernando valley knew this and that two fifteen-year-old's ran the station at night. At least twice a week people would drive off without paying. Due to the prices at our station being 20 cents higher than the other three gas stations a quarter-mile away, very few locals bought gas there.

I’m not sure how it works between Chevron franchisees and Chevron. Between the ancient pumps and the fact that Chevron made us price our gas 30% higher than other gas stations in the area made me wonder if they wanted the station to fail.

It was a fun summer. Chad was a good guy at heart, but when he got bored he would play with things. And a car mechanic shop had tons of things.

He would mount and balance tires for fun. One time he rolled one of the mounted tires down the hill. We watched it crash through someone one's front window and ran back inside the station. Somehow we got away with it.

“What do you think would happen if I dropped this match into this bucket of gas?” Chad asked from the side of the station.

“Bad things,” I replied.

“I think it will go out before it even touches the gas. I bet if I drop it from…”

BOOM!

A ten-foot fireball rises into the air. Chad is engulfed in flames for a moment but somehow wasn’t seriously injured. Chad loses his eyebrows, eyelashes, and the front of his hair.

At the end of the night, Chad pulled the customer's cars that were being worked on into the shop. I don’t think the customers would have been too happy knowing their cars were being driven by someone too young to have a driver's license, but what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

When there were more cars than there was space, we were to put cars on the hydraulic lift to park another car under it.

Neither of us were ever trained on how to properly put a car on a lift. Apparently, there’s a lot to it. We had done it before dozens of times with cars but that night we had a big old Chevy 2500 that needed to go up and be out of the way.

Everything seemed fine at first. Then when the car lift reached the top, it started to wobble. By the time I realized the truck was shifting it was too late.

WHAM! SHATTER!

Oh my god. We had just destroyed someone’s truck.

We had to call our boss who was going to be furious. Before that, we racked our brains trying to think up an excuse.

Looking back, it wasn’t our fault. We didn’t know what we were doing. A proper manager would have cost our boss more than the two kids he hired. We pulled the truck in too far. Trucks are massively front-heavy, much more so than cars.

It didn’t matter what we told him. Jim had to get out of bed at 9 pm and come to the station to find one of his customer's cars on its side. He was going to be pissed.

When our boss got to the station and saw the truck he started calling us every name in the book. He accused us of stealing, which we were but he didn’t do inventory so it was an assumption. He ranted about having us arrested.

Chad tried to take full blame but Jim didn’t care. I’ve never been chewed out so hard in my life. He told us to get the fuck off his property and would call the cops if he saw us again.

The truck falling off the lift turned out to be the tip of the iceberg for my former boss Jim.

When I went to get my check a few days later Scott was working alone. He didn’t know where my check was but wanted to hear the story from me about what happened. He laughed and told me the station was shutting down at the end of the week anyway. If I wasn’t fired I would have been laid off a few days later.

Turns out Jim hadn’t paid his taxes for a few decades. The IRS seized his Chevron station, filed a levy on his house, and took possession of his motorhome.

He had 20 thousand dollars left to his name. He put the money in his wife’s name so the government couldn’t touch it.

That’s when his wife says, “I want a divorce.”

Jim shot his wife in the head with a shotgun four times at point-blank range. Then turned the gun on himself. Their bodies were found a few days later at their home by IRS agents who had come to seize it.

Today there’s a McDonald's where the Chevron station used to be.

And that was the first time I was fired from a job. I never got my last paycheck.