Throughout my ongoing teenage years, I have only worked at one job. When people think of a teenager in the workforce, they think of cashiers or waiters; however, I worked as an on-call builder for IKEA. Everytime I bring up that I “worked” at IKEA, people get the wrong idea. Since I lived in Columbus, Georgia, the closest IKEA was about 2 hours away, with traffic, so people thought I had to commute 2 hours everyday in the summer just to work. The reality is I have only stepped inside of an IKEA three times in my life, and only one of those times was for my job. An on-call builder is a remote job where me and another worker build people’s flat pack furniture for them for an added price. Usually the jobs would be about 30 minutes to 45 minutes away, so I did have to travel a little bit but not anything too far.

The best part of this job was the payroll. I got paid for the difficulty of the job, so if a build was estimated to take three hours, I would get paid $60 however it is based on the estimated time to build an item, not the actual time. If a build that was estimated to take four hours to build took half the time to build, it effectively doubles the pay of your job due to only half the time being spent on the job. Knowing this, I quickly started to study tendencies in IKEA build manuals to maximize my efficiency in the builds, and to my surprise, there were a lot of consistencies through many different builds. I became hooked. I studied IKEA’s flat pack tendencies for hours at a time with jobs being my practice. Eventually, I was able to build entire dressers by only looking at the hardware and looking at the manual maybe three times. Of course I did not do this on the job because I did not want to mess up someone else's furniture, but it made the process of building so much faster knowing the hardware like the back of my hand. I was able to cut down any time estimate by two hours, on average. By the end of the summer, what started as a simple job, became a dedicated practice, and I became one of the most efficient IKEA flatpack builders in the southeast region of Georgia.