Get A Real Job (Part 4 of 7)

And then I got my first pay check. Wow, I got paid two dollars and fifteen cents an hour! I was amazed that I got so much. I found that if we wanted to buy anything, we just ran it through the register, we signed the back of the receipt, the checker put the receipt in the til, and it was taken out of our pay check. I worked on Monday and Thursday evenings and either all day Saturday or Saturday evening. One slow evening one of the older checkers taught me how to be a checker. The register was electric powered but had a place for a handle in case of a power outage. You had a little key which you inserted to gain access to the register. There was a big button you could push and open the til at any time. The face of the register was curved and there were up and down columns of numbers for each digit. For example if an item was $1.23 and it was from the meat department first press the” meat” key. You would then skip the first column. Then you would press the button for the number “one” in the next column. Then on the next column you’d press the “two “ key, and go onto the next column and go down and press the “three” button. You then pushed a button to complete that item. After you subtotaled everything, you had to look on a card what the sales tax was. Pretty soon you got so you could figure out in your head the sales tax. It was a straight five percent back then so it was pretty easy. When the sales tax was raised, then we had to go back to using the card until we memorized what it was for certain amounts. I took cash, food stamps, WIC vouchers, personal checks, and third party checks. People could write checks for up to $60.00 over the amount of their groceries. One checker was designated as the number one checker. That person would always be at the check stand. Everyone else who was working could be called up to the front to check if it got busier. After my first night of checking I secretly made a goal to be the number one checker on a busy Saturday morning. It wasn’t long until that goal was realized.