What Was Your First Job? A Labor Day Post

I was fired several times from my first job, but they always brought me back.

I was hired to be the janitor of our small church when I was about fourteen (average attendance was around one hundred people a week). My primary job was cleaning the sanctuary.

This was an Evangelical Free Church, so it wasn’t an elegant or elaborate worship space. No pews, just folding chairs. No stained glass, but plenty of windows to the north and south. A simple wooden cross at the front of the room.

Sometimes the choir chairs needed setting up. Sometimes not. Vacuuming was required every week. I also cleaned the restrooms.

I wasn’t responsible for the Sunday school rooms. (Did teachers have to clean their own rooms? I don’t recall.) I didn’t clean the kitchen – that fell to whoever used it. The window washing and landscaping were done by church volunteers on regularly scheduled work days.

I don’t know who suggested my name for the job. A few others might have been approached before I was asked.

When I first started, one of the trustees (elected church officials who were responsible for the church building and property) showed me what needed to be done. After that, I was on my own. For the first two years, until I got my driver’s license, my parents dropped me off every Saturday. I’d work for four hours or so.

Sometimes people in the congregation complained about the job I was doing. People complained about cobwebs I hadn’t swept from the ceiling or that I didn’t vacuum well enough. The biggest complaint was chair placement.

Some thought the rows should be straight and some thought they should be curved. There was disagreement about the amount of space between chairs and the space between rows. A few had surprisingly strong opinions about how far the front rows should be from the pulpit.

Every other year or so, people would raise a ruckus and insist the church hire a professional cleaning service. The church would pay a proper janitor substantially more, and right away, people would complain about the work, or lack of work, done. More than once, the pastor would arrive on Sunday morning to find nothing had been done.

I held the job, on and off, for five years until I left for college. There were other jobs during those years (McDonald’s fry chef, movie usher, singing telegram deliverer, etc.) that I held along with the janitor job. At one point, I even had another janitor job.

Once I got my driver’s license, there were times I didn’t get to the church to clean until 11 pm or midnight (I specifically recall this being the case when I was in school plays), but I always got the job done – and made it to church the next day for Sunday School.

That church no longer exists, but for a time, I kept it clean enough.

So, what was your first job?