Summer Jobs 2019 — 2024
As students, many of us find it necessary to work in our free time to gain independence and avoid relying on the continuous support of our guardians. This allows us to experience freedom and explore the world through our own perspective. For us, money means going to the pub, driving your own car whenever you please, and being able to take trips with friends to places you desire. Having a job from a young age teaches important lessons, such as working with others, satisfying your bosses, and receiving valuable advice from the older generation. This guidance helps us move away from being treated as children and transition into young adults, preparing us for future career paths.
My first real job was at a tearoom in my local village, just a 10-minute walk from my house. I got the job after completing an apprenticeship at the attached garden center by demonstrating a strong work ethic and attention to detail. One of the biggest takeaways from this job was realizing that I never wanted to work in the service sector again. It was a grueling and relentless endeavor, with work to do and people to please even during slow periods. Being the youngest and only male staff member in a kitchen of young women was a daunting experience, as the social dynamic was entirely different from that of a group of rowdy, awkward boys. I had to learn to adapt and befriend these people, despite having very little in common. I experienced several awkward moments, such as when I received an order ticket with “BJ” written on it. After asking what it meant, I was met with an uproar of laughter from the other staff, who quickly explained that it stood for “Blackberry Jam.” What this job taught me most was how to handle real pressure—like dealing with 10 order tickets at once while more customers were lining up—and how to interact with colleagues who were different from myself.
After the 2020 lockdown ended in September, I saw a post on a local Facebook page advertising a job at KBL Event Hire, a local company within cycling distance. I promptly organized an interview. It was my first real interview, and although I felt a lot of dread and panic beforehand, it was much easier than I had anticipated. I answered a few questions about my previous job and availability, and soon after, I was offered a day of work to test my abilities. Since it was autumn, the event hire season was nearly over. During my first few weeks, I completed a few deliveries and pickups of bouncy castles. After that, my work primarily involved clearing and cleaning a plot of land that the owner used for storage containers and helping expand the area for more shipping containers. Another employee was hired around the same time as me—he was in his early 20s and came from a middle-class family. He taught me what "slacking" really meant, as he often encouraged me to slow down on jobs, and I promised myself I would never behave that way. The boss was never happy with him and didn’t like him. As winter approached, it became ice rink season, which involved cleaning hundreds of white plastic slabs, stacking them into crates, and assembling them at various sites. By the end of the season, I had gone from barely being able to move a 1x1 meter, 20 kg ice slab 5 meters to carrying three slabs at a time over a 100-meter distance. When I returned to the gym, I could curl 18 kg dumbbells at age 15. After Christmas, I mainly managed the boss's estate and continued to renovate one of his other sites. When Easter arrived, I started working on bouncy castle events again, often pulling 12-14 hour shifts over the Easter and summer breaks. Autumn and winter then repeated themselves until January 2022, when I decided to leave KBL Event Hire to focus on my A-Level exams.
In the summers of 2022, 2023, and 2024, I worked through various temp agencies, doing menial labor for long hours and high wages to quickly build capital for university expenses. In 2022, I worked two weeks at Ardex, an aggregates factory, before going on holiday. At Ardex, I worked alongside middle-aged men packaging various concrete mixtures. Many of them urged me to continue my education so I wouldn’t have to work in a factory like that in the future. After my holiday, I worked the night shift at a food factory making sprinkles with an all-Polish workforce. The job wasn’t enjoyable, but I managed to power through the shifts with headphones, and we even slowed production at times to avoid overworking ourselves. In 2023, I worked at a cable hire and distribution center that supplied industrial cables to events such as Formula E and the Football World Cup. We received large pallets of cable, cleaned and repaired them, tested the cables, replaced broken labels, and then re-coiled them for redistribution. In 2024, I worked for a company called Camgrain, which received harvested grains from farmers, cleaned and stored them, and then loaded them onto lorries when needed. My main responsibility was emptying lorries from the harvest and loading lorries from the silos.
