Jun. 10—Finish a full day of school. Go to track practice. Then rush to Papa Johns to make pizzas for a four-hour shift.

Those were hard days. And I remember how thoroughly worn down and, frankly, disgusting I felt after finishing them.

Our cover story this week is about high school students who are making their way into the workplace, often for the first time. There are lots of young candidates for summer positions at Dion’s, swimming pools and retail businesses, to name a few.

I remember bouncing around low-paying jobs throughout high school.

My first job was at Papa Johns. I was 15 years old and the pizza joint was right outside my neighborhood. I made minimum wage, which I believe was $5.15 an hour.

I didn’t follow instructions very well. I remember thinking that I wanted to make the best pizzas, so I eschewed the easy-to-follow instructions pinned to the wall and free-wheeled the recipes.

A good rule of thumb was that I slightly more than doubled all the ingredients. One ladle of sauce would become two. The cheese would glob up the middle of a soupy pizza. You ordered sausage? How about extra sausage? And I’ll throw in some hamburger for free.

My manager caught on when customers started bringing back their overloaded pizzas. But it didn’t concern me, because I had gotten a job at a local grocery story that paid me 50 cents more and didn’t require me to work as late on the weekends.

My pay started increasing the summer I turned 16, when I landed a job at a telemarketing company, which are bountiful in Omaha, Nebraska. I was doing in-bound calls, meaning I answered the phones when people called 1-800 numbers to order things. One of the products I sold: The Girls Gone Wild videos seen on ubiquitous late-night TV commercials during the 1990s and early aughts.

Eventually my jobs improved. I got a job at a different telemarketing company that conducted surveys. One of the best ones that the telemarketers clamored for was a survey about farm tires. Your phone would automatically call a farmhouse and when the farmer answered you’d get a few additional dollars if you could persuade him to answer questions about farm tires.

Get a farmer to talk about farm tires? I don’t know how familiar you are with the Midwest, but I would say that’s about as close as you can get to taking candy from a baby.

Toward the end of high school, I got a commission job selling shoes, and then I worked for my school newspaper in college. I kept the shoe-hawking job through my summer vacations and when I graduated from college and got my first professional newspaper job, it marked a pretty significant pay cut.

So welcome to the workforce, kids. It’s all up from here.