My sixteen-year-old self found this question surprising. Yes, in her defense, I was wearing a shirt and tie, which might normally make a person look more mature, but not in my case. Putting a shirt and tie on me was a lot like putting a shirt and tie on a baby, which is to say it made the outside observer even more painfully aware of the fact that what they were looking at was a literal baby in a shirt and tie.

“No,” I said. “I’m sixteen.”

“Oh,” Janice said. “Well. My daughter just turned eighteen and she’s having her second baby.”

“Oh,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah,” Janice said. “And it’s with a different guy this time.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s . . . nice, I guess.”

I should point out that I have absolutely no judgment of Janice’s daughter. I mean, hell, she’d gotten two more guys to knock her up than I ever had. Good for her. I hope by now she’s had ten other babies with ten other guys and every Christmas she takes a picture with all the kids on Santa’s lap and then she mails the picture to all twelve of her babies’ daddies with a note that says, “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop.” It would be adorable, and I’d be happy for her.

Still, though, how is a sixteen-year-old virgin supposed to respond to that information? Especially when it’s being provided by a woman I’d met literal seconds before this. But this was my first job, and I wasn’t really sure how people were supposed to behave in an office environment. Maybe teen pregnancy was just what grown-ups talked about when they worked.

As the days wore on, it became painfully obvious that I had no idea what I was doing. I was a child playing office with a receipt machine. When it came time for my twenty-minute lunch break, I’d stand outside Shirley’s office and wait for her to get off the phone, like a kid waiting for his mom to get out of the bathroom, just so I could ask her for permission to walk down the hallway to the break room and eat the snack I’d brought from home. I thought I wasn’t allowed to leave the room without her express permission. Some days, I’d spend longer than twenty minutes just waiting to get her attention.

To give you a full picture of just how bad I was at this job, and how ridiculous it was to let a sixteen-year-old boy be in charge of money that didn’t come with a board game, I fucked up one particularly important task.