Summer Job
It was 7 o’clock in the morning, the time in which every weekday of my summer starts with.  The sun not yet out, the air is cold, and a common light fog. However I did not know if it was good or bad that I enjoyed starting my day this way. My summer job has taught me many life lessons and has changed the way I view money, hard work, and the importance of respect.
I always loved the idea of having a job. I wanted make money and buy more cool things. The money that my parents were giving me was not enough. I went first to my parents asking them for advice about getting a summer job. Though they warned me of the challenge that it is to have a job; I didn’t listen and just wanted the money, unaware at the work ahead of me.
  It wasn’t until the summer heading into my senior year before I had my first job. I was now a school bus washer. It was an odd job to most, however the school bus business has been apart of my whole life. I took on the task of washing busses with a friend of mine. The first week of work I was motivated. The other guys who work full time for the bus company had told us the first week it’s the best job in the world, and after that “good luck.”
I sure needed that good luck. The job became tedious. Each day we went through the same routine. We washing the inside and outside of 7 busses a day. The dirty floors portrayed an unclean pigpen. A bus full of elementary and middle school students who find no problem with throwing what ever kind of trash they have right on the floor. The things that we found on the bus are indescribable. The smelly-rotten food- stench that will burn your eyes- hot steaming condition- baking under the sun like a turtle in a pond busses, those were the hardest to wash. However sometimes there are buses that were clean, you could tell that the bus driver and the students both had respect for the bus. Those buses were always made the day go by quicker. When we finished the seven lined up for us we were allowed to leave.
The key was the strategy, teamwork, and hard work. If we were lazy we would get out of work later. Obviously that gave us the incentive to get what we had to do done as fast as possible. And that was when we realized we began to cut corners. Rush through the strategy we had started. Every morning the seven busses we washed from the previous day are still lined up. We found ourselves rewashing busses because certain areas did not meet the standards.
From my summer job I was able to find significance in earning my own money, and made me have a greater appreciation for money. Preceding my first job I had everything given to me. I did not have my own money to spend. My parents fulfilled my needs and at times I did not spend the money they gave me wisely. My summer job showed me that money comes from hard work; money did not grow on trees. It taught me not to just go out and spend my money but appreciate it after all the work it took to finally earn that money.
My job was character building, I saw how so many kids my age and younger were so disrespectful. Little kids were capable of horrific cases of vandalism that takes time out of another person’s day to fix something that was done. According to an reliable online source regarding vandalism, they report the definition of vandalism” willful or malicious destruction, disfigurement, defacement of any public or private property” and record is as a criminal offense. Kids between the age of six and eighteen commit these crimes on school busses. I was on the other end of the stick. I had to clean, and fix the disrespect that was given toward the school busses.
My summer job has given me a taste of the work field. It has driven me to want to become successful and showed me how I can start to succeed that goal. After the three months of summer waking up at seven o’clock in the morning my work ethic had changed. I worked not to earn money to buy more cool things, yet I worked because I wanted to earn my own money and save it rather than spend it on things I did not need. Money did not come easy to me. That was a good thing in time of life, my summer job before my senior year opened my eyes to the real world.