Becoming sixteen brought with it my first job. I walked down the street to the local grocery store chain and filled out an application. The bustle of people, the intercom overhead, and the ringing of cash registers faded into the background as I wrote out my first job application.

To my surprise, a few days later I found myself at corporate headquarters for orientation. We were shown company expectations, insurance benefits, and retirement options. I paid very little attention at sixteen. I was far more interested in the seemingly endless smiles of the actors in the training films and wondered if anyone could really be that happy.

I was hired as a Grocery Clerk—a stock boy. The job was simple in its design. Stock the shelves. Keep products faced. Run price checks when customers questioned the register. Clean the store aisles. Manage cardboard by making bales. Our department was responsible for six or seven grocery aisles and for knowing where nearly everything was located for customers who couldn't find it.

As a part-time employee I had to work at least twelve hours each week. Being in high school, that meant evenings and weekends. Weeknights usually offered three- or four-hour shifts, while weekends could run four to eight hours, with Sundays paying time-and-a-half. It felt like a pretty good deal for a teenager's first job.

But I was still a teenager—confident in what I thought I knew and consumed by the life I had built outside of work. Weekends were often difficult after nights spent with friends, usually staying out past curfew. I managed the fatigue with awkward grace, doing what had to be done while secretly wishing I were somewhere else.

Three years into the job, I had settled into a pattern. I worked hard enough to keep my job, but I carried the attitude that seemed to come naturally with being nineteen.

By then, I had built a reputation with my supervisors, as had most of my teenage peers. The relationship between us and management was inherently strained. We took extra breaks, cut corners, and called in sick when we simply didn't want to come in. We laughed at them behind their backs. They handed us disciplinary write-ups to our faces. Our schedules often reflected our attitudes: bad attitude...crummy schedule. They cared more about the work than we did, and we had very little remorse.

Then a new boss arrived.

A female grocery manager came in during a time when there were very few women in that role. She quickly learned about her "grocery boys" and established the tone. Our youthful snickers quieted while some of the veteran employees shook their heads at her methodical insistence that things be done correctly—her way.

She moved quickly through the aisles, keeping us on our toes. She noticed everything. She expected corrections. And she never wasted words when something wasn't right.

Before long, I began seeing her differently than the others did. I noticed the determination it must have taken to hold that position during that era. I still heard the jokes and the mocking from those around me, but I quietly stopped joining in. I had grown tired of being seen as another careless teenager who contributed very little.

Oddly enough, once I stopped resisting her, she seemed to ride me even harder.

She corrected nearly everything I did. She checked on me often. She showed me shortcuts that weren't really shortcuts at all—just better ways to do the work. Every so often she smiled, as if to say I was getting closer.

Did she smile at others?

The store was eventually scheduled to be torn down and replaced with a larger, updated building. She would be the one to lead that transition.

Two years later, at twenty-one, I told her I was leaving. My girlfriend and I were moving to the West Coast.

She looked at me for a moment, tilted her head slightly, and, in a sing-song voice, said, "Well...good luck."

Then she handed me my assignment for the day, turned, and walked away.

During my final two weeks she reminded me—more than once and in more ways than I recognized at the time—that if I was going to be on my own, I should do things right.

She didn't soften.

She didn't change.

She simply let me go.

I left.

On the West Coast I found work as a stock boy in a small organic grocery store, much smaller than the one I had left behind. I learned the products and the language quickly and was promoted to receiving clerk. Within six months I became the evening supervisor.

Then life changed.

My girlfriend and I broke up. We worked together, and I was the supervisor. She eventually found interest in someone from the Produce Department—a musician, to boot. That intersection of our work and personal lives brought our relationship to an end.

Two weeks later, after moving in with a friend across town, I realized I had no real direction. With my tail between my legs, I returned home.

I walked into the newly rebuilt store, found my former manager, and sheepishly asked for my job back.

She asked, "What had happened, Michael?"

I gave her the short version.

With a slight smirk, she put me back to work where I had left off two years earlier.

Over the next few weeks, she reminded me in her own way that it was over. Time to get back to work.

And do it well.

She saw something in me I did not care to see.

She did not rescue me.

She simply put me back in motion.

I stayed only a short while before leaving again. This time she wished me well once more.

At the time I thought I was moving my life forward. Looking back, I realize I was simply trying to steady myself.

Over the next forty-two years I worked under many people. Some have faded into the shadows of memory. Others I remember only because of the titles they held, the mistakes they made, or the impact they had on me.

But I have never forgotten her.

She never told me I was capable of more.

She expected it.

She never tried to become my mentor.

She was too busy running a grocery store.

Stocking shelves, making cardboard bales, and facing cans that customers would undo within hours taught a stubborn teenager—and later, a heartbroken young man—something he would not fully understand until years later.

Doing a job well wasn't about impressing a boss.

It was about respecting yourself.

At sixteen, I thought I had found my first job. Looking back over forty-two years of work, I realize I had found my first leader.

She was simply the first of many.

From the Gallery

Some people do not teach by instruction. They teach by remaining the same while everything else does not.