A Beary Good Job

The summer after my first year of college, I had to stay in Logan, Utah to get residency and be able to afford another year at Utah State. I asked everyone I knew about jobs. I wanted one of those sweet ones on campus.

Nothing seemed to work.

So then I went with off campus. I had a car licensed in Utah since that was also a requirement for residency.

A guy I knew from ??? who I think was named Brennan, told me about openings at his employer. And that is how I started down the road to be a CNA.

I wasn't at the hospital or the rehab, I was in the nursing home. it was a new home. It was pretty and basically none smelly, but my job was working with old people.

Now I like old people. I like them more and more the older I get, but sometimes they are grumpy and obnoxious. And the hours! Seven hour shifts? Sometimes all night?

This was not the field for me, regardless of how much my supervising nurse begged me to switch majors and go into health care.

I lasted four months, and then off I went in search of a new job. With my second job, I hit pay dirt. A friend in my major, Elementary Education, told me that the professor she was working for needed another typist/editor.

I could type. Not very well if my trip to the local Job Service was to be believed (40 wpm). And my skills in Word Perfect were basically nonexistent, but I could read and edit as well as any one at a publishing house. at least I thought so. And frankly the professor didn't care. He was cranking books out for teachers in elementary science like there was no tomorrow. He was leading the STEM trend 20 years before it was a trend.

I got the job, and soon I was trying to format paragraphs and indent bullets. Thank goodness Alice knew more than I did, and I could leave the hard stuff for her.

Dr. Don Daugs was awash in ideas. He'd created a book on Ag in the classroom, a handbook for use at the local zoo, a water curriculum, and a sex education lesson manual. Soon I found myself not just editing, but researching and performing science experiments appropriate for the elementary classroom. It was a fun job.

Winter turned into spring and Dr. Daugs invited me to work as an assistant at the week long seminars he was hosting through USU for elementary school teachers. I was one of three students working with him. We spent four weeks, Monday-Friday, at the lake. We went on field trips to the other side of the lake to look at plants, up to Minnetoka Cave for geology lessons, and did lots of hands on projects involving dead fish and great stuff like that. We even went to the Pickleville Playhouse one night and, of course, consumed Famous Bear Lake Raspberry Shakes.



The next summer, I was the cook. I hated being the cook, but it paid more, $5,000, almost half of which ended up going to taxes, but it was  a large part of the money Tad and I lived off of for the next few months until he got his first paycheck. (We got married a few weeks after I finished up as cook. The taxes didn't come out until spring of the next year by which time we'd moved and had a real job with benefits at Compaq Computer in Houston.)