I had high hopes last Spring as I filled out applications for a summer job. I dreamed of working at one of the three state parks that I applied to, or working in an office somewhere filing papers and bringing coffee to very successful people, or at a Petsmart with hundreds of kittens and puppies. I didn't think I was being selective or overly optimistic, but after about a month of not hearing back from any of these places, I got nervous.
Around the last week of April, I started submitting applications to every business within half an hour of my house that was hiring. I gave up on my idea of working somewhere that I would actually enjoy working. I applied at restaurants, nearly all of them- from the classy waterfront ones to Pizza Hut, and I applied to retail stores of every sort. I asked all of my relatives where they thought I should apply, and I applied to all of those places. I even applied at Hooters, and I spent two weeks as a door-to door knife salesman.
Those were dark days, but I didn't give up my search. I knew that eventually, someone would call me and I would work somewhere. I didn't care what I did as long as I got paid and had something to put on my resume at the end of the summer.
I thought I had exhausted my search when one morning, my mom pointed out a classified ad to me. It said that a company was hiring in a nearby city. It didn't say what the job was and I didn't care. I went to the business, which turned out to be a moving company, and I filled out an application, writing "any" under the question about what position I desired. I didn't really expect them to call anyway.
But they called me, and within two weeks, I was a packer. In late May, when I started work, I had absolutely no idea what I had gotten myself into, or what a packer was.
I learned quickly that the title of "packer" implies many jobs. Sometimes, like on my first day, I worked in an enormous warehouse, where I wrapped furniture in big, dusty blankets or in brown paper and then helped to load it all into large wooden crates, which were stacked by forklift into giant crate cities.
Most of the time, I didn't work in the warehouse. I was "on the road," as the other packers called it. Specifically, I was on I-95. When you're "on the road," you go to a person's house and pack all of their worldly possessions into boxes of various sizes. There is a difficult science to this, because if something breaks in transit, it's the packer's fault. Also, keep in mind that the homeowner may or may not be watching the entire time, or may expect you to help watch her five children.
I traveled from two to four hours in a moving van almost daily, packing houses all over Northern Virginia. I spent a great deal of time with my co-workers, who sometimes tended to over-share details of their lives with me or to gossip about the other people I worked with for hours at a time.
It was hard work. But I can't complain- I could have been a waitress at Pizza Hut. It might sound cheesy to say this, but working like this really changed my outlook on life. I know now that whenever I walk into someone's house, I can calculate how many boxes of what size I will need to remove all items from every room and how long it will take me. I can tell you pretty much anything about the moving business, from an insider's point of view. But really, I learned a lot more than how to put things in boxes. I got an experience that I will treasure for a lifetime. I learned how to work with people who are extremely different from me, I learned how to make even the most difficult customer happy with my service, and I learned how to deal with an incredibly stressful and erratic schedule.
I believe that I am more grateful for my lot in life than I ever have been. I certainly know why I'm in college now: so I never have to pack another box of someone else's delicate china, or sweep all of the black dust from the forklift tires off of a loading dock, or saran wrap a couch ever again.
I still believe that someday, I will get a good job- one that I'm proud of and happy to go to every day. But even when I do, I'll still tell stories about that summer after my freshman year of college, when I was a packer.
