Assessing a Career

It’s hard to believe that there are only 7 more days before “The Big Day” – first day of retirement!  I’ve been reflecting a little bit (okay a lot) on my 44 year working life.

It started in July 1970 with my summer job in the livestock office at Burns Foods in Winnipeg.  Back in the day they were still using comptometers as calculators.  My job was to calculate the combined weights of the cattle being slaughtered for the various farmers.  After the first week my father (who was the plant superintendent) asked my boss how I was doing.

“She’s still a little slow on the comptometer” was the response.  Or so I heard that night at the supper table.  Then my father told me the trick to up my speed.  Instead of going all the way up the scale to the 8 or 9 – add the 4 & 5 – my father was nothing if not an efficiency expert.  Sure enough by the end of the second week I was going as fast as the woman who had been doing this job for 15 years.  Invariable over the years I would talk about my job at the supper table and often I got some good advice from either of my parents on how to handle matters as they came up.

I’ve worked in a lot of different sectors but excepting my second summer job when I worked on the bacon line at Burns I have always worked in an office environment.  My first full time job was at an insurance company as a telex operator (does anyone remember those pieces of equipment?) but I’ve worked in manufacturing, furniture stores, charitable foundations, law offices, car dealerships, engineering firms and oil companies.  I can say that every job taught me something from new skills (telexing, splicing film, bookkeeping, payroll, computer skills, troubleshooting car repairs) but more importantly I learned to interface with a variety of personalities.  It was extremely rare for me to work with someone who I simply could not get along with, somehow I always managed to find some common ground, but there were a few times where it was impossible.  What did I do?  I quit. 

Common themes in my career were Organization and Friendship.  I still have friends that started back in 1978 from my first law firm but what is most amazing is that in the last 15 years I have developed so many more friendships than ever before.  Something that I have discovered in myself is that I really like people.  I honestly think that if that is the only knowledge to come out of my 44 years of working I walk away rich.

Thanks to The Man.