So tomorrow will be my first day of work as an air conditioning technician. I’m trying to remember my other first days of work. I can’t remember how I felt before starting my first day at Davio’s. I trained for a few days, for free, before they hired me. So it was more of an extended interview feeling. I remember feeling very nervous before my first day at Thurgood Marshall Academy. That was a total overload, as every first year teacher knows. Other first days…I’m drawing a blank. I guess I’ve had a lot of jobs “just to get me through.” This is the first job I’ve actually spent time preparing for in a very specific way. You could say that I spent time preparing for teaching, via my high school and college educations, but the timeframe between deciding to apply for my first paid teaching job and the first day of work was literally, like, two weeks. Like a lot of teachers, I guess I ended up teaching out of necessity. For this, I made a well-researched decision a year ahead of the schooling, and then two accelerated terms at Tech cranking through the lab book. I realize now I never picked up my lab book after it was graded. I do have, however, my text book, prominently displayed on my new used bookshelves, alongside two spirals and two binders—my sum total knowledge of vocational school.

I’ve got my clothes laid out next to my tool bag and my lunch in the fridge. Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up early and make a good breakfast and drive down the road to check-in at work. They’ll put me with someone for the first few days, and that will be that. Pretty soon I’ll be handed the keys to a truck and a Nextell and off you go. Looking forward to that first pay check.