He's A Workin' Man

Yesterday was The Boy's first day of work.  He just got a job with The Girl, working at our city pool's snack bar.  It is a job he wanted almost as soon as The Girl started there.  But this is the first year that the manager there has hired boys.

You see, the storage room for the snack bar paper good, etc is accessible one of two ways.  The more cumbersome way is out the building and all the way around to the exterior entrance of the the storage room.  The easiest is through the women's locker room.  Thus girls only, to this point.  However, being a city facility and needing to heed the "equal opportunity employer" statute, Cheryl--the snack bar manager--was told by the city that she needed to hire a boy or two.

The Girl happened to be working the day this edict was made and Cheryl was fretting about finding the "right" kind of boy who would do the work, not flirt too much with the girls, and make the trip the long way to the storage room when he needed to go.  The Girl, said "What about my brother?"  And Cheryl asked "Does he still want to work here?"  To which The Girl answered, "Uh.  Yeah."

So The Boy was hired without so much as a n interview.  Cheryl is not only the manager down there she also has worked as a teacher's aid at our elementary school and I credit her and one other teacher's aid with helping The Boy learn how to read in the 1st and 2nd grades.  They were fantastic for him.  And he knows how important they are to him too.  Plus, they all like each other.  Not a bad back story to getting a summer job.

Yesterday he worked about 5 hours and he seemed to do fine.  The stories he shared when he got home were more amusing to me because I know many of the lifeguards that wouldn't believe he was working there--the only boy--surrounded by these lovely young women.  But he told them he certainly was working in the snack bar and having a marvelous time.  These almost-high school-senior-lifeguards seemed to feel that he was the luckiest kid working at the pool this summer.

I think he might think that too.  But today will be the real test.  He and The Girl work the full day (1-8 PM) together.  If they can do this job all summer without wanting to kill each other, I feel that will be a "payday" for this mom.