When I was a senior in high school….

It’s funny that when you get older, your memories start to run together.  Hopefully when you all get to be my age, you will have better retention than I do!

When I was a senior in high school, I feel like I was pretty boring!  I did have some good friends and we had fun together, but I didn’t have a boyfriend or do anything crazy that I can recall.  I guess I was just trying to figure out where I was going to go to college, and what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  We took an aptitude test my senior year that was supposed to give you ideas of what profession would be a good fit for you.  I remember my first match was “engineer”.  I had NO IDEA what engineering was or what they did!  Of course it didn’t help that my high school wasn’t exactly pro-active in preparing seniors for the real world with college counselors that helped guide you in the right direction.  The college application process is VERY different today than it was when I was applying.  Of course we didn’t have computers that enabled us to search for potential colleges based on our grades or test scores.  We bought these giant books that had colleges listed by state or alphabetical order, and each school was listed with only the bare minimum facts and an address that you could write to to get an application, which you had to complete BY HAND and mail in with REAL STAMPS AND ENVELOPES!!!  Of course this was a tedious process, so most kids only applied to one or two schools, instead of several like you guys do today.  And NO ONE that I knew EVER went on college tour trips to see what campuses they liked!  So, since I wanted to venture out of the state of Tennessee, the only other school that I had any experience with or knew anything about was Purdue.  Applied – got accepted, and voila there I was!  Turned out to be a good decision, of course, since I would not have met Joe had we not had our undergraduate school in common!

Since I referenced how technology deprived we were at your age, I do have to mention my first job…as a check out girl at the “White Store” – a local grocery chain that was just down the road from Mimi and Papas old house.  I had to wear a beautiful red polyester vest with a white shirt underneath (Kendall you would NOT APPROVE of that look!).  Unlike today, there were no “scanners” that read the price from the bar code on the item.  I actually had to punch in the price by hand and indicate which department it came from (meat, produce, etc).  When it was slow at the register, I had to get a price gun and actually tag canned goods with the price.  Imagine when there was a sale on an item – we had to scrape off all of the old price tags and re-tag them with the sale price.  I would usually work the 4pm-9pm shift, since the store closed at 9pm (I know – stores are open so much later now!), and the store was CLOSED on Sundays and all holidays!  All of that work and I made minimum wage, which at the time was a little over $3 per hour…..

Hope you all are having a great time at cousins camp – can’t wait to hear all of the stories!!