Dry Clean Only?

As a junior in high school I got my first job working after school at a dry cleaner’s. I did everything but run the big machine that did the actual dry cleaning: took in clothes to be cleaned, returned clean clothes, handled money, ordered/tracked supplies and kept the shop clean. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Not so fast. The owner and his wife had two kids: a boy of 10 who was the Golden Child and a girl of about 17 who had a severe developmental disability. The owner would leave to go see his girlfriend while the dry cleaning machine ran, leaving me to face the angry customers who wanted to know why their dry cleaning wasn’t ready, because they expected one-hour service all the time. I swear, most of these people only had one suit and and they had it cleaned daily.

So eventually the wife would show up with the kids in tow, asking me where the owner was, and then yelled at me because I always said I didn’t know. So she’d say she was going across the street for lunch, take Golden Boy with her, and leave her daughter in the shop for me to babysit while people yelled at me about their ugly suits not being ready. And the daughter was curious and into everything, and since I never did any babysitting I had no clue what to do. Later they hired the mother of my childhood nemesis as the day-shift clerk, which was just grand, especially since she stopped working as soon as I got in (15 minutes early) and BS’d with customers or the owner/s if they were in, leaving me to jump on the work that was there, although I wasn’t allowed to put those extra 15 minutes on my time sheet.

The sad part of all this was that I kept that job until I left for college because I was an uptight kid who thought that if I quit without a good reason like leaving for college, it would follow me around forever and employers would be saying, “Oh, you only stayed at your first job for a year. You give up easily, don’t you?” Fortunately college straightened me out.