When I was writing My (not so) Perfect Summer, I had the opportunity to think back on some of the summer jobs I did when I was at university. My children are just through the ‘summer job’ phase, as they’re both in full-time employment, but they seem to have fared pretty well on the whole. My eldest had a long-standing zero hours contract with Hever Castle, which he thoroughly enjoyed, and my youngest had quite the portfolio summer career, including babysitting and donning a Yeti costume at the local open gardens.
When I was doing summer jobs, the temping agency was king. If you were in their good books, you’d get all the plum jobs, but you had to prove yourself by doing the crappy ones first. So, before I got the job at Coca-Cola’s Weybridge depot, which lasted the whole summer and which I loved, I had to work my way up through a succession of less palatable options. Notable examples include a week at a car dealership, where I was given a large stack of continuous feed printer paper – remember that? It had holes in the side for the printer spindles and each alternate line had a green background to help you keep your place. On this stack of paper was printed the entire parts list for the car brands the garage represented, and my job for the week was to sit in front of a computer going through it. For each part, I had to enter the number, press a button to tell the computer I wanted to change the part number, and then enter the same number with a zero in front of it. It was mind-numbing, and I look back with my IT head on and think “If I had the skills then that I have now, I probably could have written a program that would have done it in seconds”! So that was a low.
Another low was a day hoovering an office building in Guildford. This shouldn’t have been too arduous, as two of us were sent to do the work. Unfortunately, less than an hour went by before the other person decided it wasn’t for them and left. So I had a very long day, doing his share of the hoovering as well as my own. It did earn me some serious brownie points with the agency though, so it wasn’t a total loss. And it did lead to Coca-Cola. Did I mention that I loved that one?
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