Welcome to English as a Second Language podcast number 106, High School Jobs.
This is English as a Second Language podcast number 106.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
Today's podcast is about having a job in high school.
Let's get started.
I got my first part-time job when I was 15, working at a car wash in the summertime.
A friend of mine, Rob, worked there and got me the job.
I think it paid $2.90 an hour, which I considered a fortune.
There were no allowances in my family, so most of my brothers and sisters started working as soon as they could to get spending money.
I hated working at the car wash, drying cars all day.
After only about six weeks working there, though it seemed much longer, I up and quit one day.
I felt badly about not giving a two-week notice, but I had it up to here with the job.
Luckily, another friend of mine got me a job working at a nursing home, washing dishes in the kitchen.
I started the day after my 16th birthday, qualifying me for a slightly higher minimum wage.
Life scrubbing pots and pans was no picnic, let me tell you.
I lasted there for only three months, working after school and on weekends while trying to keep up with my homework in high school.
My next job was much better, making keys at a locksmith.
The working conditions were much better, and I had flexible hours around my school schedule.
I stayed at that job for nearly seven years, right through my college years at the University of Minnesota.
To this day I still know the names of all the common key blanks, but it doesn't come in handy very often.
We're talking about having a job, a part-time job in high school in this podcast.
I should explain that in the United States it's very common for many students to work in high school when they are still studying for their high school diploma.
This is especially true among middle class and working class, those students who come from families with less money.
It is very common to have people work after school and on the weekends.
And this is something which can cause a problem.
Sometimes you have students who are working 15, maybe 20 hours a week and going to high school during the day.
But, as I say, it is quite common and getting jobs during the summertime or during the school year is a fact of life.
It's a common occurrence in many, many families, as it was in mine.
I got my first part time job, and a part time job in the United States would be anything less than 40 hours a week.
I had a part time job when I was 15 working at a car wash.
Now I should say that normally it's not legal to work in most jobs until you are 16 in the United States.
However, there are some exceptions to that rule and it is sometimes possible to get a job at a lower salary.
Salary at a lower wage and a wage W-A-G-E is how much you get paid at a lower wage if you are 15.
And when I was 15, I got a job at a car wash.
A car wash, two words, is of course where you wash your car.
In this case, it was an automatic car wash, so it was washed by a machine and then it was dried.
That is, you take a towel and you put the towel on the car to take the water off.
It was dried by hand.
Sometimes these are called hand car washes because the drying is done by hand.
I got this job in the summertime.
All one word, summertime, wintertime.
Those two words, of course, mean the same as summer and winter.
You can't say fall time or autumn time, but you can say spring time.
I don't know why, but you can say spring time, summer time, winter time, but not autumn or fall time.
You just say autumn or fall.
Anyway, I got this job and it paid, I believe, $2.90 an hour.
And I thought that was a fortune.
A fortune, F-O-R-T-U-N-E, is a lot of money.
And there is a magazine in the United States, a business magazine called Fortune.
And every year this magazine publishes publishes a list of the 500 biggest companies in the United States.
This is called the Fortune 500.
And if you are a Fortune 500 company like Apple or Microsoft McDonald's, then you are a very big company.
The Center for Educational Development, for example, is not a Fortune 500 company.
In my family there were no allowances.
An allowance.
A-L-L-O-W-A-N-C-E is money that parents give their children so they can spend it however they want to.
So in some families, each week or each month, the parents give the child I don't know 15 20, 30 in order to spend on buying candy or going to a movie or whatever the child wants to do.
In my family, because I come from a family of eleven children there were no allowances.
We were lucky just to get food now I'm kidding but there were no allowances, and so if you wanted to have spending money and spending money means, of course, money that you can spend that isn't essential.
If you wanted spending money, you had to get a job as soon as you were old enough.
Even before, of course, we would work at other informal jobs, like cutting the grass of our neighbors.
So we would mow their lawn, that is, cut the grass.
We would, in Minnesota, shovel snow and get paid for shoveling the snow off the sidewalk of our neighbors.
The car wash, as I say, was not a very happy place to work, not a very pleasant place.
So after about six weeks, I up and quit.
The expression I up and means I suddenly decided to do something.
Usually it has to do with leaving a place.
I up and quit or I up and left.
It's just an idiomatic, strange expression.
Don't try to analyze it grammatically.
But it's it's common.
I up and quit as an informal means I quit suddenly.
I didn't even give a two week notice.
Again.
The common custom, at least in the United States, is that when you leave or quit your job, you give your employer two weeks notice, meaning I tell you two weeks before I plan on leaving.
I said I had it up to here with the job.
The expression to have it up to here means I was tired of the job.
I could no longer tolerate work.
I could no longer put up with the job.
So you can say I've had it up to here with the bad weather means I can't take it anymore.
I can't tolerate it anymore.
Luckily, another friend of mine got me a job at a nursing home.
A nursing home is where usually older people who cannot take care of themselves go.
It's usually there are 40, 50, maybe a couple hundred people.
It's not a hospital.
It's a place where they live, but it has medical care.
I said that because I had started after my 16th birthday, I qualified for a higher minimum wage.
To qualify means that you are able to do something.
You have the qualifications.
You have certain something that allows you to do something.
For example, we use the term to qualify often for a sports event.
Or in the Olympics, for example, a certain number of people qualify to be on the Olympic team.
And you compete against other players and you qualify.
You have what it takes to be on the team and you can go to Torino for the Winter Olympics next year.
The minimum wage is the lowest amount that a company can legally pay you.
In the United States, a company normally has to pay you a minimum amount.
It can't just pay you $1 or $2.
It has to pay you a legal amount and each the federal government, rather the national government has a minimum wage.
I think it's $6.50 or $6.75 an hour.
I said that life scrubbing pots and pans was no picnic, let me tell you.
To scrub means to rub very hard in order to clean.
Pots and pans are what you cook in.
So you put soup or whatever you're cooking and you put it on a stove and you turn on the fire.
Those are called pots and pans, the actual things that you cook with.
I said life was no picnic.
That expression, it was no picnic, means it wasn't easy.
It wasn't fun.
A picnic, P-I-C-N-I-C is when you go to a park or somewhere to the beach and you have a little meal and you relax.
Well, this was no picnic.
Let me tell you.
That is a very common expression.
Let me tell you.
It wasn't easy.
Meaning, you should listen to me.
I know what I am telling you.
I know what I am talking about.
Let me tell you.
I lasted only three months there, meaning I stayed only three months because I was having problems keeping up with my homework.
To keep up with means to be able to do my homework on time.
The working conditions of my next job were much better.
My next job was at a locksmith.
A locksmith L-O-C-K-S-M-I-T-H all one word is a place where you make keys like car keys, house keys and so forth.
Working conditions is a term we use to mean how comfortable, how nice of a place it was.
It can include whether it's a safe place, a clean place, all that is part of the working conditions.
I stayed at that job for seven years.
And to this day, I still know the names of all the common key blanks.
The expression to this day means from then right up until now, or still, okay?
I still know, even after all these years, to this day.
A blank, a key blank, is a key before it is cut, okay?
So it has the shape, but it doesn't have the cuts in it.
I said that this knowledge doesn't come in handy very often.
To come in handy, and handy is H-A-N-D-Y, to come in handy means to be useful.
Now let's take a listen to the story, this time at a native rate of speech.
I got my first part-time job when I was 15, working at a car wash in the summertime.
A friend of mine, Rob, worked there and got me the job.
I think it paid $2.90 an hour, which I considered a fortune.
There were no allowances in my family, so most of my brothers and sisters started working as soon as they could to get spending money.
I hated working at the car wash, drying cars all day.
After only about six weeks working there, though it seemed much longer, I up and quit one day.
I felt badly about not giving a two-week notice, but I had it up to here with the job.
Luckily, another friend of mine got me a job working at a nursing home, washing dishes in the kitchen.
I started the day after my 16th birthday, qualifying me for a slightly higher minimum wage.
Life scrubbing pots and pans was no picnic, let me tell you.
I lasted there for only three months, working after school and on weekends while trying to keep up with my homework in high school.
My next job was much better, making keys at a locksmith.
The working conditions were much better, and I had flexible hours around my school schedule.
I stayed at that job for nearly seven years, right through my college years at the University of Minnesota.
To this day I still know the names of all the common key blanks, but it doesn't come in handy very often.
That's all we have time for today.
Thanks for listening.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
We'll see you next time on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
This podcast is copyright 2006.
