My First Job

The prompt says ‘officially an adult’ rather than felt like an adult. For me, it was on taking up my first job that I was entering into the adult world. (I still felt like a kid for a number of years after that, something I share with just about everyone else.) That first job was a right of passage that a majority of the people I went to school with postponed by going on to higher education. After 7 years at the Maths School the idea of more education was not on my radar.

My first job was at Lloyd’s Insurance in their Gun Wharf building on Dock Road in Chatham. I was a Non Marine Policy Checker whose task was to ensure that there were no mistakes in the documents. It was a task I was wholly unsuited for at the time as I had no attention to detail whatsoever. That became abundantly clear over the next 10 months, 9 months of which I spent struggling before spending the last month working in the post room, which was probably seen by others as a final indignity because it was a job for unqualified people, but was actually a job I enjoyed and was actually pretty good at. The men I was working with were fun and they just treated me as one of the team.

By the time I left in July 1984, I had already secured my next job, as a Royal Air Force recruit, although I was not to start that until November due to the sheer number of people joining the service at the time. In the interim I worked on my fitness by running 5 miles a day every weekday morning and earning two pounds a game as the scorer for Frindsbury Cricket Club. It was like being a kid once again, with no responsibility and a focus only on myself. Even when I joined the Royal Air Force I didn’t feel like an adult because I had no say in anything that happened to me as the lowest of the low. It was almost as if the Lloyd’s job was simply a short incursion of adulthood into my extended adolescence, a state of affairs that lasted until I took my second full time permanent job in Civvy Street in February 1987, not long before my 22nd birthday, and was once again officially an adult.