This story takes place in Germany in 2009. I was 15 at the time, which meant I was just old enough to legally work over the summer holidays to prop up my allowance. I was young, green, living in the countryside (and not allowed to drive), so my only option was to apply with companies that were on the way of my dad's commute to work so he could drop me off and pick me up there every day.
The first company I called was one that supplied brushes and panting supplies to all the big home improvement store chains. They immediately agreed to take me for 4 weeks over the summer. Naive as I was, and this being my first job, I was basically just happy to be making any money at all, so I took the job, which paid 5.20€/h, as it was “what all their student workers made”.
This was before Germany had a general minimum wage. FYI, the minimum wage is being raised to 10.45€ this year, but my 5.20€ back then would (adjusted by inflation) only be worth 6.17€ today. So now you have an idea exactly how much they valued 15-year-old me 🙂
Anyway, they saw I was great with math and put me in accounting. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I was a GREAT employee. I finished my work quickly and accurately and saved them a TON of money.
To give an example of how much money I saved them – one of their jobs in accounting involved checking the accuracy of the invoices they received from their logistics suppliers. For that, you had to manually look up the zip code of each delivery destination in a huge binder, then calculate the price of delivery based on the weight of the freight. It took AGES. So I said f* this and converted this binder into an Excel spreadsheet where all you had to do was type in a zip code & freight weight and it would do the rest of the work for you. Hours of work per week were now reduced to minutes. The nice elderly ladies of accounting were still using this spreadsheet years later. But that's just one example.
Anyway, after 2 weeks of this 4-week gig, it showed just how criminally understaffed they were at this company. That's because due to some people only working part-time and others going on vacation, I was suddenly the only person available to cover accounting & the reception desk. That's right, I was now manning the reception desk, delivering in-house mail, answering all inbound calls and forwarding them to the relevant departments in the building. The company had <200 employees, but there were still around 50 phone extensions I had to memorize and forward to.
I would like to remind you, again, I WAS 15. I WAS HIRED AS A LITTLE OFFICE HELP OVER THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS.
So I finished this week running the reception desk by myself and staff returned from their vacation. Two days later I'm called into the office by the boss who tells me that “against his judgment, he's generously agreed to give me a raise to 6€/h”. Not of his own volition, but because 3 of my adult colleagues had sat down with him to negotiate a raise on my behalf, because at least THEY'd seen the work I was doing there. Unfortunately the raise only covered the last week of my employment period, for a total of 32€.
Fun times 🙂