Unemployment

At different times after high school, I have been unemployed.  It went on for as long as a year and as short as a week.  I have had a job last for as long as six years and as short as four hours.

When I first came home from college, I tried to be a waitress, but I got fired from every waitress job I ever had.  I did things like forgetting the banana on a banana split and pouring coffee in their water glasses.

It was extrememly hard to find a job in Fresno, California.  I actually got a job the first week I was there.  I worked at a snack bar in a grocery store.  They hired me because I told them that I was an experienced waitress.  I didn't tell them that I was fired from every waitress job I ever had.  My employer wanted me to wait on the counter, cook and cashier.  A customer ordered a patty melt.  I had never heard of a patty melt.  I was fired because I asked the customer how to make it.

I took any kind of a job I could get.  I got a job tying tennis shoes together,  I was trying to impress them with how fast I could do it.  Instead, I impressed them by tying all the shoes with the toes pointing out, In other words on the wrong feet.  I was fired.  I felt so stupid.  I cried all the way home.

I did some temporary work with Manpower and I kept checking the board at the unemployment office.  One day a job as a file clerk was put on the board.  When I applied for it, I found out that it was really a telemarketing job and was only one day a week.  I used to call time and pretend I was giving them a sales pitch. 

My family moved to Ventura, California.  When I got there, I got very sick with a cold.  It lasted about a month.  I was supposed to apply for three jobs a week to keep my unemployment check.  I cheated,  I wrote down jobs I had seen in the newspaper and said that I had applied for them.  It was obvious that I was too sick to look for work.  The lady at the unemployment  office told me that she didn't believe me, but she didn't tell on me.

When I got over being sick, I got a job at Sears selling panty hose.  Around Christmas I got a job as a switchboard operator at the local hospital.  I worked there six years.