My Tomboy Job and its Bitter End

when I was seventeen, I was fired for doing my job too well, but mainly for being a girl

 

It wasn’t my first job, but it was the most memorable. I was seventeen, freshly fired from my first, low-paid, boring stereotypical waitress job for attempting to drink beer in the hotel bar. Well duh, of course they knew how old I was, but I was trying to be cool with my friends and hated working there. It was worth the risk, I thought, and when the axe fell, I went for the only job in town that paid real money in exchange for doing real work, down at the sawmill.

 

It was a guy job; in fact, all the guys in town worked there, but in the seventies there were already a couple girls at the mill so I thought I’d give it a try. It appealed to my tomboy side, always strong in my girl heart. As a kid, I was the one who played outside making roads, towns and tree forts with the boys. When I did play with dolls, I put them through their paces outdoors, chopping off their hair and staging elaborate space-operas (including some disturbing scenes of torture).

 

Thrilled to be hired on at a job that paid so well and came with such a coolness factor, I invested in the required pair of steel-toed boots (hard to find in my size), donned jeans, plaid shirt and hardhat and strode off to work. I was assigned to partner with an older woman (in her forties, but she seemed quite old to me—older than my mother) piling one-by-fours. The lumber landed beside us via chute from the guys upstairs who cut it to size; we piled it neatly on pallets and strapped the finished loads for the forklift to haul away.

 

Once I got over the considerable aches and pains of the first few days, I loved it. The machinery broke down regularly, so whenever we fell behind we were assured of a chance to catch up. We paced ourselves, worked hard and steadily and were able to rest during some of the breakdowns once we caught up. The first two weeks I worked day shift: then I rotated to afternoons, 4pm until midnight, which meant going to parties late in work boots, covered with sawdust and sleepy most of the time.

 

One day, one of the men approached us, a dark, heavyset Portuguese man that I didn’t know well. He said in a heavily-accented voice, “Girls, you shouldn’t work so hard. You work too hard!” He kept looking around as though worried that someone would see him. At our puzzled stares, he only repeated, “Please, don’t work so hard, it’s not good.” Then he anxiously hurried away.

 

We quirked our eyebrows at him, shrugged, laughed and went back to work. Obviously, the guy was threatened by our ability to do the job so well. It made us proud and motivated us to work even harder.

 

A few days after that, the foreman sauntered over to us. He hooked his thumbs in his vest, smiled toothily and said, “Girls, you’re doing very well. So well, in fact, I’m going to have to lay you off. The job’s too easy. I figure one man should be able to handle it.”

 

So. That was that. There was no possible argument to that logic, not in the seventies in the North. In a daze of helpless rage, I packed up my steel-toed boots, turned in my hard hat and went home. I took a job as a waitress down at the Chinese restaurant, trying to decipher the lesson I’d learned. Working too hard was wrong? Success was failure? Only if you were a woman, it seemed, and I added it to my every-growing list of all the ways it sucked to be female.

 

They hired Gordie from down the road, a burly young guy, to do our job. A few days after they hired him, they had to hire someone to help him, but we weren’t called back. I was crushed, but it was worse for the other woman, who had worked there for years with a family to support. I was just a kid, and I tormented myself with the fantasy that I had caused her to lose her job.

 

The only positive result from that fiasco was that it compelled me to return to school and graduate. I hated waitressing, but I might be at the sawmill today if I hadn’t been laid off.