Check out other A to Z Challenge participants by clicking here . Come August I shall be celebrating my 27th anniversary at my job. I doubt the Boss will give me a gift of money or even a lousy pen to show her appreciation. The Boss is cheap. Yeah, I said it. C-h-e-a-p. Cheap. But, then, you see, the Boss is me. Like everyone else, I've had quite a few jobs during my life. Some jobs were temporary. I liked those. I knew when the ending would be. No fuss, no muss. As for the jobs from which I resigned, okay, quit, I had gone as far I wanted and needed to go with them. Cutting apricots was my first paying job. It was also the first job I quit. I was nine years old. The job entailed cutting apricots in half, pulling out the pits, and laying them on a wooden tray bigger than a kitchen table. When the tray was filled neatly with halved apricots, it was placed out in the sun for the fruit to dry. I think I got 75 cents a tray. Yeah, I know, a pittance. This was the early 1960