By Edward Witt, Huntsville, AL
The jobs before the job
Before I ever wore a white coat, I worked the counter, the register, and whatever shift nobody else wanted. I caddied at golf courses. I worked at McDonald’s. I lifeguarded through summers when most kids my age were just trying to get out of the house. None of it looked like preparation for a career in medicine. At the time, it wasn’t supposed to. It was just how you paid for gas, or saved for school, or kept busy between hockey seasons.
Looking back, I don’t think any of those jobs were a detour. I think they were the actual training ground for the parts of medicine that no textbook covers.
What the counter teaches you
Working fast food teaches you something specific: how to stay calm when five people want five different things at once, and how to be decent to someone who is not being decent to you. You learn to read a person in about four seconds. Are they in a hurry? Are they having a bad day? Do they need you to move fast, or do they need you to slow down and just listen for a second?
That is not so different from a waiting room. Patients are not always their best selves when they walk in. They are scared, or in pain, or embarrassed about why they are there. The skill of staying steady while someone else is not, of not taking it personally, of figuring out what a person actually needs versus what they are saying, that started for me behind a counter, not in a classroom.
Caddying teaches you to watch
Caddying is a strange job because you are not really being paid to carry a bag. You are being paid to notice things. Which way the wind is moving. Where the ball actually wants to go versus where the golfer thinks it should go. When to say something and when to keep your mouth shut and just hand over the right club.
I use that instinct constantly in medicine. A big part of patient care is watching for what someone isn’t saying out loud. The person who says they’re fine but won’t make eye contact. The one who keeps circling back to a question they already asked. Caddying trained me to pay attention to the small, quiet signals before anyone puts them into words. That habit carried straight into every exam room I ever worked in.
Lifeguarding teaches you what attention actually costs
Lifeguarding looks easy from the outside. Sit in a chair, watch the water. What it actually teaches you is how expensive real attention is, and how easy it is to fake it. You can look like you’re watching a pool and not actually be watching it. The job only works if you resist that.
Medicine has the same trap built into it. It is possible to go through the motions of listening to a patient without hearing a single thing they say. Lifeguarding is where I first learned the difference between looking attentive and being attentive. That distinction has mattered in every clinic I’ve ever run.
None of it was wasted time
I don’t think people need a straight line from their first job to their last one. I think they need to treat every job, even a temporary one, as an actual apprenticeship in dealing with people. The specific skills change. The core of it doesn’t. You are always managing someone’s expectations, reading their mood, and deciding how much of yourself to give to a stranger who needs something from you.
When I eventually ran clinics of my own, the thing I built the business around wasn’t a medical technique. It was customer service, plain and simple. That word gets treated as beneath medicine sometimes, like it belongs to retail and not to care. I disagree. Customer service is just attention with follow-through. I learned that at a McDonald’s counter and a caddy shack long before I learned it in a residency program, and I never saw a reason to unlearn it once the job got more serious.
What I’d tell someone working their first job now
If you are sixteen and bagging groceries, or eighteen and waiting tables through college, don’t treat the job as beneath whatever you plan to do next. Watch how people behave when they are tired, or annoyed, or in a hurry. Notice what calms them down. Notice what makes things worse. Whatever field you end up in, that skill will still be useful, because it doesn’t come from the field. It comes from paying attention to people when nobody is grading you on it.
