Finding 35

3. Aug 2, 1988

I am eighteen years old.  I am starting a new job today working at the big mall, Mic Mac Mall, in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, at Direct Film; a one-hour photo-finishing store.  This day coincidentally is the same day my parents are going on their first real vacation to England and Scotland.

I remember driving my parents blue Buick, a Delta 88 to work that day. I had been working since I was young, but this was different.  This was the biggest mall in all of Atlantic Canada with over 150 stores.  Working hard was not something I wasn’t accustomed too, or taking chances.

Like almost every other kid in the world, I sold lemonade in the summer at the age of seven or eight.  I don’t know why parents let their kids do that…  As I don’t have any kids, I haven’t really thought about it until now, but it does seem kind of silly, but at the same time fun!  I had a paper route for a while that was a total joke. I think there were 21 customers on the route for a weekly paper that came out on Wednesdays.  That lasted about 3 months.  But business was in my blood.  My dad was a banker.  One of those 1970’s bankers, with the three-piece suits, vests and everything, his closet was filled with suits!  And he had lots of ties and shoes, and more dress shirts than I could count.

We had some sort of an office in our basement.  Elizabeth, my sister (almost five years older than me) and I would play office.  One of us was a secretary and the other was working in the office.  Somehow we knew how to make the old rotary dialed phones ring, you dialed a four-digit code before your phone number and your own phone would ring.  I’m sure today you could Google it to find out, but back in 1978, we just knew how to make the phones ring.  It was really cool.  We made up bank drafts and notes, and used old date stamps with purple inkpads on them to make them look official.

My first job was one I got all by myself.  I think I was finishing grade eight.  Elizabeth’s boyfriend worked at the Halifax Metro Centre, the big hockey stadium which seats almost 10, 000 people, in Halifax, the city on the other side of the harbour.  He sold event programs as part of the concessions staff and he said it is a great place to work.  He gave me the name and number of the concessions manager, his name was Steve Pottie, and he told me to drop by.  Mary Angela, my older sister, drove me over.  It takes about 30 minutes by car, or about an hour by bus.  There wasn’t a lot going on there in the summer, Halifax wasn’t a basketball sort of town.  I was a small kid, with a really, really high voice.  I can only image what Mr. Pottie must have thought.  Here is a 14-year-old kid, calling me up from Colby Village, and his sister drives him in? 

I had no idea what the kids were called that sold pop and chips, so I said a candy striper.  Later I learned it was a ‘Basket Boy’.  Anyway, he said he would give me a shot, and see how I made out, and that when the hockey season started up in a few months, I would get a call.

Wow!  How exciting!  Mary Angela later told me that I just marched right in there and asked for the job–direct, and straight up.

So for the rest of the summer, I practiced making change.  You give me a dollar, and the ice cream is 65 cents, that is 35 cents change.  Popcorn: 75 cents, 25 cents change.  Pop: 90 cents, 10 cents change.  Then if you had to break a $2.00 bill, well that was another level of complexity I mastered.  I practiced and practiced, and I waited for the call, or the announcement of the exhibition hockey games.  Every season, the NHL teams would tour the smaller cities where the farm teams played, which Halifax was one.

Finally, it was around the middle of August, and I got a call.  I think it was August 18th.  I was to show up at 6:15.  Doors open at 7:00.