Wednesday 8 May

Blog Every Day in May - Your first job

My very first job was as a 12 or 13 year old delivering bills for the practice that my father worked in - my father is a GP, now retired. The bills would normally be posted out, but if my brother and I delivered them on our bike, we'd get the money the practice would spend on stamps. Dad would bring home 5 or 6 boxes of bills which were sorted alphabetically, my brother and I would spend an afternoon sorting them according to roads, we'd divide who'd go where and off we'd go, on our bikes. Dad would take us in the car to the more remote patients, and a couple of weeks later we'd get a nice bit of pocket money. I was so proud of that money.

Throughout my teens I had a number of jobs - I remember stacking shelves in a supermarket and dropping a jar of babyfood (blergh), doing a fair bit of babysitting, and then when I finished my A-levels and had a long summer ahead of me, I got myself a cleaning job in an office. I actually quite enjoyed that and when I returned to Holland from my two years as an aupair, I rang the agency again and worked for them throughout my time at university. It was only a couple of hours a day, it was well paid, the team was nice and as the offices were at the local agricultural university (yes, it really is a university, where they do some ground-breaking research), I'd often come home with bunches of flowers or bags of vegetables.

My first real proper job is the one I am still doing now. I knew at the end of my degree that I'd be returning to the UK and then J. got a teaching job in Bury St. Edmunds. I had done a work placement with a large translation agency in Croydon and had gotten a very good reference from them, so once I knew whereabouts we'd be living, I just got the Yellow Pages and sent off several letters to translation agencies in Cambridge. I received a few replies, one of them asking me to ring them once I arrived in the UK. I made the call on a Friday morning, I got a phone call back on Friday afternoon and I started work on the following Tuesday. That's now almost 18 years ago and I'm still happily working there as a translator!