One of the toughest problems that immigrants like me faced in Toronto in our first year was finding a part time job like most of the kids there. It was the norm to work after school and weekends. Parents thought their kids had to fetch for themselves to become mature and independent early in life. The daily allowance they gave them must have been very little because mine was enough for me to buy my lunch and sweets on top. I did not really have to work. But since everyone was doing so, I somehow felt a certain pressure to find a job. Most of the 16-year-old kids did newspaper delivery, landscaping, cutting grass, shoveling snow or cleaning jobs at donut shops and supermarkets.
The tough problem I mentioned above was what they called “Canadian experience”. Wherever I looked for a job, and they were mostly menial ones like pumping gas at gas stations or cleaning cafeterias, they would ask, “Do you have Canadian experience? “It was such an absurd question that, in my thirty seven years of living there, I never understood. How was a newcomer from another country to have Canadian experience if no one would hire them to get it eventually? It was like a vicious circle...No experience, No job-No job, No experience! Did people really clean floors and tables differently in different countries? Many times, I begged them to take me, train me without pay for a few days so that I could have that experience, but they all claimed they had no time to train. I suspect it is because of the paranoia of business people in a competitive capitalist system, as if they will teach you an amazing skill and after you master it, you will run away and work for someone else. Absurd! After a while, I gave up looking for a job.
But life is full of lucky breaks, and I can claim that I have had a few of them. One evening there was a knock on our door and when I opened, it was the dry cleaning man who had come to pick up our clothes. He had been coming twice a week for a few months then. He would pick up our clothes, dry clean them and then deliver them back a couple of days later. It was a special service he had arranged with the superintendent of our building which had more than a hundred apartments. He was an Armenian from Istanbul named Mihran. Before leaving, he asked me to call my mother. When she came, he told us that his business was growing and he had no time to continue doing this service in our building. So, he asked me if I wanted to take over. The question was both for me and my mother. He explained that he would come on Tuesday and Friday evenings to hand over the dry-cleaned clothes for me to deliver and collect the money. I would also pick up and organize the new orders from the customer apartments. He had a long list, and he promised I would get a 25% commission of the total I collected. My mother looked at me and I nodded a ‘yes’. My answer made Mihran very happy. I had agreed without knowing what I was getting myself into.
Thus began my first job in Canada. On the agreed hour on those two evenings, I would go down to the superintendent, pick up a hanging-rack trolley (similar to the bellboy trolleys in hotels), go to the front entrance of the building where Mihran would come in his van and hand over the night’s delivery. Most of the clothes were on hangers and covered with transparent nylon. The rest were folded in paper packages at the customer’s request. Mihran would hand me a piece of paper with the total I was to collect written on it. Then, I would take the elevator to the top floor and start knocking on the doors to deliver the clothes. The clothes were organized in floor and apartment sequences. I would knock on a door, the customer would open, get his delivery, pay me, and hand me new clothes to be dry-cleaned for next time. I had triple carbon-copy receipts on which I wrote all the items they gave me. One copy went to them and the other two I put with their order rolled up in a big canvas bag.
Once a floor was done, I would take the elevator down to the next and continue delivering and picking up the same way. Sometimes the customers would not open the door so their clothes would stay on the rack for next time. The whole thing would take about three hours. Once finished, I would take the trolley back to the superintendent. I would go home and do the counting of the total I had collected, considering that some customers did not pay because they were not home. Mihran would come next morning and take the big bag for dry cleaning.
The first night I worked, I realized that accepting this job had been a good decision.
To be continued
