I haven’t had that many jobs.  I’m married to a guy who has had a lot of jobs.  I swear, every time I try to paint/repair/trim/construct something he’s right there with a hammer or a brush to say, “Step aside, I used to get paid for this.”  Come to think of it, there’s a sentence that would be pretty funny to interject before certain moments.  But I digress. 

I haven’t had that many jobs, but one stands out from the pack as a favorite.  It wasn’t my first job…the waitressing job where I spilled hot prime rib all over an eight year old girl at my very first table  (I will have to discuss this later…I spent most of the next hour crying and hiding in the break room).  It wasn’t the next job where I was a grocery bagger for a chain called “Buttrey’s” either.  That would have been a pretty enjoyable job, if every other paycheck didn’t go entirely to union dues, or if the shift manager didn’t have a bad habit of talking about his…adventures. 

My favorite job was definitely the gig where I taught at a community college.  I was single and enlisted in the military at the time (read: extra, super poor) so having a second job was a good way to make car payments, or eat non-chow hall food.  I got the job through a friend.  I had to teach two or three evenings a week, and on the weekends, at the community college in a mid-sized North Carolina city. 

One thing they don’t tell you when you sign up to do this:  senior citizens in North Carolina can go back to school for free.  This means that the classrooms are full of older people.  This is pretty awesome…unless you are teaching computer courses.  I was new to the college so I got to teach all of the classes no one else wanted to. 

One of these courses was called “Introduction to PCs.”  NO ONE wanted to teach this class.  Imagine holding up a mouse, clicking it, and saying something like “This is a mouse.  Click.  Now you try it!”  Imagine answering questions all day like this:

Them: “What’s this box again?”

Me: “That’s the monitor.”

Them:  “I thought it was the computer.”

Me: “No, that’s the monitor.  That big box looking thing is the computer.”

Them: “What’s this again?”

Me: “A monitor.”

That’s pretty much what it was like, at least at first.  But things are what you make of them.  While teaching the esteemed seniors of Onslow County, I found vast reserves of patience that I didn’t know I had.  Some of the students needed more help than others.  One lady was so annoying that I couldn’t understand what in the world she was doing in this class.  Every time she tried to click the only part of the mouse that wasn’t a button, I wanted to jump out the window and make a mad dash to the Popeye’s across the street (to fill out an application).  But on the outside I answered her repetitive questions patiently and made sure to do all the demonstrating that she needed. 

After class, when all the other students had left, she came up to me and thanked me.  She told me that this was her third try at the same course, and that the last instructor had no patience with her and made her feel like a burden.  She was very appreciative that I was helping her, because she had almost given up.  I felt a lot better after that, and a little bit ashamed that I had been secretly wanting to ram my head against the wall because of her.

The best student in the class was an eighty-nine year old lady who had lived in North Carolina since her husband had passed away in the eighties.  She took to that computer like a bird to the air.  I was amazed, and she could tell too, because she explained herself.  “Did you know that they used to use punch cards?” she asked me.  “It’s true.  I worked in a big bank with the first computer system they had bought, and I got to program the punch cards.  But then I got married.  My husband was in the Navy, so I quit my job and that was that.”  While I was thanking my lucky stars that I had been born after this era, she added, “I always wanted to get back into computers, but married girls didn’t do those kind of things.”  Yet there she was, eighty nine years old, clicking away at the ol’ two button mouse.  Amazing.

There was an old man in the class…I say “old” but he was one of these old guys with the white hair and the bifocals, but what I think of as the “sparkly eye.”  Oh, he had the “sparkly eye.”  It was simple to imagine this guy at twenty five, chasing girls and bringing flowers to his mother.  Well, all “sparkly eyes” wanted to do was talk about hackers.  He knew what hackers were, and what they could do, and he was fascinated.  “You gotta have the virus protection,” he would advise the rest of the class.  “And you gotta get yourself behind a fire thingy, too.  Right?”  Then he’d look at me with great expectations and I would explain quickly the concept of a firewall while trying to steer the discussion back to How To Plug In Your Keyboard.   He derailed discussions on power saving techniques to hostile WAN takeovers.  He was like a little kid talking about the neighborhood cowboys and Indians.

Finally, the ten weeks of my first Introduction To PCs was coming to a close.  The last day of class, I got PRESENTS!  My class had brought me gifts.  I couldn’t believe it.  It was like they all got together at the pinochle tourney and plotted it out.  One guy brought me a whittled lighthouse that he had made years before.  One lady brought me a beautiful pink-yellow rose from her garden.  Another lady had given me something like fifty coupons to her son’s car wash in town.  I know, I know.  It would have been YOUR favorite job ever too, had someone given you fifty coupons to a car wash.  But it wasn’t the gifts that made the job so wonderful.  It was the sincere appreciation.  

I don’t even know that I appreciated it as much then as I do now.  See, later jobs came along.  Once I hit the five year mark at my last job, I got a bronze plaque and a pen with my initials on it.  The cold metal of the plaque was no match for that whittled light house, even though they managed to spell my name right.  The pen was nice too, but I’m really more of a Bic person.  It didn’t come close to a well tended, handpicked rose that came from someone’s Southern garden. 

That teaching gig happened ten years ago.  I know that a good chunk of those students are no longer here.  I sure hope that some of them went on to e-mail their grandchildren and friends with the tips that they learned in that Introduction to PCs class.  And I wish there was some way to tell their families how much fun I had with them, and that I’ll never forget them either.