All in a first day’s work

LABOR DAY IS LESS A CELEBRATION of work than of leisure. On Tuesday, the new year -- school or fiscal -- will start in earnest; today is the day for one last, wistful send-off to summer. There will be parades and speeches, of course, but they will be sparsely attended. Even the whiff of obligation is unwelcome today, and besides, for many Americans, work is not a cause; it is simply work. Which is not to say that it cannot be interesting and rewarding. But no job is always both, which is usually among the lessons learned in a first job. First jobs, like first dates, are usually either tentative or bracing, and are often remembered fondly even if they didn’t work out. Below are some of those remembrances, from a few members of the editorial page staff. Enjoy your day off.

Early travails

I LANDED A JOB at age 14 translating cartoons from French to English at 10 cents a caption. As with all prestige consulting positions, this one was obtained through high-level nepotism: My mother’s friend Doris up the street was a part-time file clerk with a cartoon agency. My job was to take the stacks of already published work by French cartoonists and make them sensible to U.S. editors. Inventing wholly new captions that seemed to go with the drawings was allowed, even encouraged.

Good thing. Armed with a French-English dictionary and barely more than a year of French, I tried to puzzle out what appeared to be the oddities of Gallic humor but were more likely gaps in my French vocabulary. I was particularly stumped by the repeated appearance of a “probleme de belle mere.” A problem with a beautiful mother? I didn’t have time to dissect the fine points of French idiom. I blush to think of how many deranged cutlines accompanied those cartoons until I reached French 3 in school and realized they were all mother-in-law jokes. KARIN KLEIN

Pushing papers

I WAS 15 YEARS OLD WHEN I told my parents I wanted to quit school. My mother, a teacher, was very upset; my father, whose fourth-grade education hadn’t prevented him from being a cultured person, wasn’t. Fine, he said. Find a job.

So I got a job as an office boy at a bank in Mexico City. This was in the ‘50s, in the pre-e-mail era, and my job was to carry papers from department to department. I didn’t mind the walking, and I got to know a lot of people, but in general I was bored. I had another chat with my parents, telling them I had made a mistake and wanted to quit my job, finish high school and go to college. They were happy with my decision but told me I would have to work during the day and go to school at night.

At first I thought they were kidding. But I soon realized that my youthful indiscretion had condemned me to work and study at the same time all the way through graduate school. SERGIO MUnOZ

A very loud lesson

THE SUMMER after my freshman year of high school I worked as a speech and debate tutor, earning the criminally low wage of $2.75 an hour. And while the perks were great -- full access to the teachers’ lounge, with its luxurious long purple sofas -- they didn’t quite compensate for either the low pay or the hard work.

I had 10 students, and with only a year between us, gaining control of the classroom was an uphill battle. I remember my most difficult student had that particularly devastating combination of a short attention span (when it came to reading) and a surgeon’s focus (when it came to making trouble). One day he took advantage of the 500 or so lockers kept unlocked during the summer, ditching one of his morning classes to open every single one. As soon as my class started, he and a friend ran at full speed around the quad, slamming all 500 lockers shut in rapid succession in the loudest, longest racket I had ever heard.

And that was only the first week. I didn’t make much money that summer, and the charms of the teachers’ lounge eventually wore off, but I entered my sophomore year that fall with a new appreciation for my teachers. SWATI PANDEY

Seeds of contentment

I GOT MY FIRST PAYING JOB more than half a century ago when I was 14 or 15 years old in my hometown of Big Horn, Wyo. My friend Lyle and I went to work for a Kansas City seed company, which came into town for several weeks each summer to harvest blue grass on a handful of ranches in the area. I forget the amount I was paid, though a dollar an hour was very good for a ranch kid at the time.

One day, Lyle reached into the seed-harvesting mechanism to fix some problem and got his hand caught in the chain, mangling it. Lyle had little more than a workable thumb and first finger from then on, but he managed to play a credible game of basketball through high school and junior college. As I recall, no one sued anyone.

Then one summer the company simply didn’t come back. We went on to other ranch jobs, Lyle and I, which I remember with a slight bit of misty romanticism. There’s nothing so sweet as the smell of freshly mown alfalfa. But the hours were long, and it was hot, dusty work, except when it was cold and wet, and at times it was dangerous. The experience did not make me want to be a rancher. BILL STALL

Danger zone

DURING THE SUMMER of 1996, I got an internship working with a nonprofit organization in Leimert Park that paid a whopping $300 a week. I was 15 and thought I was the luckiest teenager in Los Angeles.

That was my last pleasant thought that summer.

On my first day on the job, the group’s program director was robbed at a bus stop up the street. The executive director quickly grabbed a bat and led some employees on a hunt for the assailants. An hour later she came back with the stolen loot and some extra money (no questions asked). From there the day just got worse. On our way to a meeting, two of my co-workers were arrested for jaywalking. I tried to return to the office, but I couldn’t: Gang members had encircled it in response to the morning’s retribution.

Over the summer more drama ensued, including jail time for some employees, but somehow I managed to complete the internship for the (now-defunct) organization. In retrospect I look at it as a positive growing experience. But I would have been safer flipping burgers. RYAN SMITH