My First Job
art by Jameson Currier
ink and pastel on paper
20240530001

My First Job

by Jameson Currier

I have told long versions and short versions of this story. The short version is that my first job was shoveling shit. I was fifteen years old when I was hired to work at the petting zoo at Six Flags Over Georgia in Atlanta. I walked behind the goats with a broom and a dustpan picking up their shit. At the end of my shift I would have to replace the shitty saw dust with a fresh pile of saw dust. On the days that I was not working at the petting zoo, I walked a mule around a carousel, and sweeping up the shit when it happened. I learned many things from that job—life doesn’t treat you the way you want it to treat you, you are not who you think you are, life is not fair, etc. etc.—but it would take many years to fully comprehend the journey I was on.

In my fifties and sixties I worked in a legal department of a large media corporation. Most of my tasks were those that no one else wanted to do or were too lazy to do. One day at a department luncheon there was a conversation about “first jobs.”  I answered my job remained the same as my first one. I still shoveled shit.