I got a job at Sears when I was in my early thirties. I had just walked in cold applying for a job and the human resources lady who had conducted my interview told me the job they were hiring for was person to load merchandise into customers cars. It sounded good and the lady liked me and I took the job.
I come in my first day of work ready to go and my new supervisor leads me back to the dock where a 52 foot truck trailer packed to the brim with boxes and merchandise was backed up against the dock. He told me to start unloading it. I was surprised and I told him the lady said I would just be loading customers purchases into cars. He laughed and said we would be unloading one or two trucks a week. So what could I do? I started grabbing boxes and stacking them on pallets.
And I quickly learned that I was really hired to unload trucks, put away the merchandise AND load customers cars.
Within a week I hated it but I bit the bullet and I needed the job so I stayed on. Unloading a truck at a department store may sound easy; we weren’t unloading lumber or steel girders or barrels of nails. But it was tough; it took four people about 3 or 4 hours to unload it and there were bulky water heaters, heavy power tools like band saws and miter saws and huge tool chests, lawnmowers, gas grills, TV’s, etc. That stuff was heavy and you had to be pretty strong to do it.
I ended up not only staying there four years but after I had been there about 4 months I became one of the best, fastest workers on our 8 man crew. I was outworking handily a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings and I was getting compliments all the time on my work, I even had some of my co-workers and the sales people telling me to slow down and not work so hard! But for some reason I was driven and I worked like a fiend and never stopped or stood around or hid from work like most of my co-workers.
Yeah, it was a good experience but after four years I slowed down and all the old crew who I was used to left and the new workers were punks and things changed so I eventually left. But I impressed a lot of people there and even a few years later when I occasionally went into that Sears location to shop some of the salespeople remembered me and they were really friendly and stopped to talk to me.