Color - My Employment

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The first color wheel has been attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1706 arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk. As the disk spins, the colors blur together so rapidly that the human eye sees white.

I remember spinning a color wheel in elementary school. It looked something like this.

I used my knowledge of the color wheel when I worked in retail. I worked in Nichols Department Store in Colonial Heights Virginia for about three years. I worked in the men's and boys clothing section and domestics. When needed I also worked in ladies and children's wear. I would arrange clothing by style and color. Bolts of fabric were arranged by type of fabric and then by color... solid colors first and then prints. My supervisor's liked my work :-)

Color arrangements sell products. That store display just pulls you in! When you planned your home decor you looked at the colors and coordinated the colors. When you work on a knitting or crochet project that requires more than one color, you coordinate those colors. All this is part of the color wheel. You can explore more about all this by typing color wheel or color theory into your search engine.

After a few years I quit Nichols so I could take a course in bookkeeping at the local community college. I worked at the college bookstore while I took my course. There were still things to place in the proper color order and to coordinate colors of... shirts, bandannas and towels and of course books.

Then I needed to go back to a job with more hours. A Family Dollar Store was opening up in Petersburg. I went there and got a temp job stocking the store. I did the baby outfits and the area supervisor was very impressed, but they had all ready filled all their positions for the store. I got referred to another store in Dinwiddie county just outside Petersburg and a few miles from our home.

I worked in this store almost three years. It was a wonderful place to work. The work was hard, but the employees were a good team. I worked myself up to the assistant store manager. After a couple of raises I was making $6 an hour :-) Doesn't that amount sound pitiful now?

We made our decision that when David graduated from high school that we would move to Georgia to be near family. I really wasn't too keen on the idea, but Mama and Daddy didn't have any of their children living close to them and they might need someone around when their health started to fail.

I transferred my job to Georgia, but Frank and David had to get jobs after we arrived. Frank had promises of work before we left Virginian, but it did not pan out. The only store that they could tranfer me to was in Dawson Georgia about a 35 mile drive for me one way. We lived with Frank's parents for two months. It wasn't easy finding a home. We were just going to rent to start with, but there was just no suitable place. Somehow we made it through those two months. When we bought our home my drive became about 23 miles to work.

The area supervisor was not keen on me having such a high wage. I had to go to a store in Albany for a while to help restructure it... I was assigned the shoe department. I got bursitis in my hips from all the up and down in arranging the shoes... by style and color and doing markdowns.

I made the mistake of taking the manager job at the store I worked at. It was awful... the employees were lazy and I couldn't find replacements any better than them. I had two good workers and they were over the age of sixty. My hips got so bad that I could no longer stand the work, so I quit and took a few month's rest to help my hips heal.

I then worked at Allied Clothing and then at a uniform place. I herniated a disc while plugging in a vacuum cleaner at the uniform place. I had surgery and I tried to go back to work, but it just hurt too much.

Well that is enough on my work in retail... oh my first job was not at Nichols but at the post laundry at Ft. Story and before that babysitting... and there are some stories there :-) but they will wait for another time.

We use our knowledge about color in our everyday lives... we may not realize it though :-)

I took this quiz Test Your Color IQ a couple of years ago and got a 5 I think and this time my score was 14. I blame it on the LCD screen :-) Oh... 0 is a perfect score. The quiz takes some time.

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Violet will be a good color for hair at just about the same time that brunette becomes a good color for flowers. -- Fran Lebowitz