I Met Up With a Coworker From My First Job 20 Years Later
My First Job
I got my first legal job at 15 working as a host for this restaurant in Modesto called Baker’s Square.
I had mowed lawns and helped my mom with a paper route before but this was my first job with a W-2 (IRS tax form for you non-Americans).
Bakers Square was a casual American restaurant competing with Marie Callender’s that also served pies. My high school friend Travis got me the job since his dad was the manager there.
My time at Bakers Square, or the B-Square Lounge, as we called it, was very formative for me. It gave me a taste of independence (even though my mom usually had to drive me there and back when I didn’t catch a ride with my friends).
I learned a lot on the job. I loved the busyness and being in flow and having to get the time management right like those video games where you have to get the timing right of cooking and serving otherwise everything goes to shit.
I memorized my social security number for the first time because that was our sign in code.
I learned how to upsell people on pies, how to be more responsible on a job, and that a walk-in freezer is a choice place to cool down (and also make out).
If you’ve never worked in a restaurant, watch the 2005 movie Waiting. It paints an accurate picture, at least for the politically incorrect times back then. (I don’t know if most workplaces have cleaned up since.)
(Btw, I tell more Bakers Square stories in my friend Travis’ podcast.
I learned about work relationships and work drama. We had fun trolling each other by doing things like calling in from the parking lot asking if they had watermelon pie.
I was in the middle of high school, full of hormones, and the cast of characters there was great.
Cast of Characters
There was Carlos, the cool Mexican guy who was always down to take more people in his section no matter how insanely busy it was.
There was Dawn, the tough broad who drank Hurricane out of a cup and showed up to work with a black eye from her old man. (She also had me feel her boob because she was proud they were real.)
There was the sweet MILF Barbara that us teenagers would flirt with and who later cried with me when I had to stop working.
There was Sara, the chill girl, who Travis and I became close friends with. The three of us would drive around and get into trouble together.
There was Miguel, a manager who deserves his own post, who I would drive around with in his giant SUV. We would hit shopping carts in the Best Buy parking lot and laugh while they went flying. This was when he wasn’t trying to get me to go to a strip club, or drink at the Applebee’s bar while he hit on the bartender.
Then there was Dan. Dan was a 19 or 20 year old guy with a goatee and gauges in his ears. He was crazy. He would go out to the parking lot and do lines of coke off his server book.
He talked about doing vodka enemas. The guy was a partier. I went to my first proper party with Dan and his friend Phil, and did my first shot there. I remember the alcohol burning on the way down. This would be the beginning of my anti-love affair with alcohol!
Dan loved the manga series Berserk and let me borrow it. I remember flipping through it for naked drawings of girls.
I eventually stopped working there and moved away from the Valley after high school.
Reconnect
I’ve moved a lot in my life. My original hometown was Hollister, CA where I went to a nice Christian school. We were all friends and it was really wonderful socially. (I wrote more about this in my post on bullying.)
When we moved, I left a lot of really good friends. I always wondered what happened to them. This was before the age of MySpace so I never knew until I found some of them on Facebook many years later.
There’s something I really like about reconnecting with people from the past. Social media is a double-edged sword, though; it’s the best tool for looking people up and seeing what they’re up to, but it can take away some of the mystery and magic.
The same thing happened when I stopped working at Bakers Square and especially when I moved to Berkeley after high school, I lost touch with most of my coworkers.
I couldn’t find Dan on social media. Finally, I connected with him on Snapchat. He had moved to Georgia, but we texted back and forth once a year or so. At some point, I saw a meme about Berserk and texted him about it. Turns out he happened to be coming back to Modesto with his wife and daughter to visit his sick step-mom. The timing was perfect!
We planned to meet in San Francisco after he and his family visited Alcatraz.
I waited for him at the dock where people leave and return for the Rock. I was about to see the dude for the first time in 20 years! After scanning the crowds I finally spotted him and felt my heart race a little.
We had a really nice time. He was the same chill Dan, it felt like no time had passed.
I was surprised that Dan remembered a lot of detail from our past, even things I had forgotten about. For example, he remembered that I was always worried about my mom “beating my ass” if I came home too late. I brought up the coke on the server book, and without missing a beat he replied “Yep, that’s just what the job needed.” From my time doing interviews and discussing family history with lots of different people, I know how common it is to forget or confabulate, so I was impressed.
We ate lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf and saw the sea lions and his daughter went on the carousel. He told me about the jobs he was doing, like at a decommissioned nuclear site and all the cool architecture they had inside like a stainless steel floor. I love hearing about things like this, especially because of my fondness for urban exploration. We talked about other things like music. For you metal fans out there, Dan recommends the band Archspire.
It really is fun meeting up with people from the past because you can catch up and see how things turned out, but it can also be like a little time capsule where you reminisce and share stories the other may have forgotten. It’s great when you still “click”.
What has your experience been with reconnecting with people from the past? I’m actually curious about your answers so pls share!