The summer job that accidently changed my life
When I was 17 years old, I was home from college and I needed a summer job. In “those days” there was no Indeed or LinkedIn. If you wanted to find a job for the summer, you had to wait for the New York Times to be delivered to your house. The actual paper. In the classifieds section, you’d scour the long columns with 10-word descriptions of temporary jobs and you’d circle the ones you were interested in with a pen.
One day there was a listing for the Museum of Natural History. My mom told me, “If you get this on your resume it will look amazing.” But the museum wasn’t looking for a new 17-year old archeologist or a whale tooth identifier. They just needed a greeter.
The greeter job, which I applied for and got because I was a human who was available, meant you stood OUTSIDE the museum. For orientation, a large group of college juniors piled into an unceremonious beige room in the basement of the museum. A woman, who can only be described as tyrannical, yelled at us we had to show up in uniform on Monday morning in white collared shirts and khaki pants.
We were placed outside the museum every day at the foot of ramp where the school busses pulled in. It was scorching hot but we were told to never lean on the stone walls or heaven forbid crouch down for a rest. Word spread fast if one of us saw the boss approaching. “Stand up!” we’d whisper, and we’d lift our butts off the ground and plant a sweaty smile on our face.
We weren’t allowed to let anyone see our water bottles. But one day promoters from a new orange-flavored juice/soda hybrid drink company gave us free bottles to taste. Someone accidently spilled it on the gray linoleum of the museum. After it was mopped up, a huge white circle remained on the floor as if the drink had bleached the floor.
Like the King’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, we stood guard in our khakis in front of the museum all summer.
Throngs of school buses showed up every day, filled with boisterous field trips coming to the museum. We had to give all the kids name tag stickers, explain in stern voices the rules about food and drinks (don’t eat, don’t drink, unless you’re in the cafeteria, I said multiple times a day), tell them where the bathrooms were (I memorized them all), line them up in small groups, and lead them through the vestibules at the lower level of the museum. All the while, there was so much yelling. The grown ups yelled at the kids, the kids yelled at each other, and I yelled at them all. I remember one teacher yelling at a child for not listening to him. And the teacher was wearing headphones.
But one day a bus showed up and it was quiet. The kids were lowered delicately onto the street in wheelchairs, one by one onto the city pavement. Some walked with broken gaits and were led by the steady hand of their teacher, who walked slowly next to them, telling them about the dinosaurs they were going to see. Those adults were different. There was no yelling. They were polite to me and asked thoughtful questions. It felt easy to be nice around them. They knew how to keep their groups organized, they respected the rules, and they spoke with enthusiasm to the kids.
Years later, long after the museum left my resume, I became a teacher. For a large chunk of my career, I primarily worked with kids who had a disability of some kind. I always knew that a big part of the reason why I went into that line of work was not just because I wanted to help those children. It was because that summer, not only had I learned where all the bathrooms were at The Museum of Natural History, I had figured out who the best teachers were.
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