Task Rabbit founder Leah Solivan on her first job and the lessons she learned from it

My first job was in high school as a bank teller at the Shirley Cooperative Bank in Shirley, Massachusetts, the small town where I grew up. Shirley had about 4,000 people, and it was the kind of place where everyone knew one another. If something happened at school, there was a good chance your parents would hear about it before you even got home. I worked the service counter helping the steady stream of townspeople who came through the doors every day. This was before online banking, before mobile apps, and even before ATMs were common. Everyone had a passbook. Every deposit and withdrawal had to be printed directly into that small book. You would feed the passbook into the printer, the machine would stamp the transaction onto the page, and the customer would leave with a physical record of their account balance. At the end of each day, every teller had to balance their drawer. If the numbers did not match the transactions, you had to stay until you figured out why. If your drawer was off by more than one dollar, you did not go home until it was reconciled. We were also trained to pay attention to every person who walked through the door. If the bank was ever robbed, we were expected to notice details such as height, hair color, eye color, body type, and clothing so we could describe the person accurately to the police. The assumption behind that training was simple. If something went wrong, it would probably involve a stranger. A lot of money Then one afternoon a kid named Arthur walked into the bank. Arthur was two grades below me in school. In a small town like Shirley, that meant we recognized each other immediately. I knew he lived with his grandmother and that his parents were not really around. It always seemed like a tough household situation. He was not known for getting into trouble, but he had more freedom than most kids our age. Arthur came up to my teller window with a handwritten check for five thousand dollars made out to cash. That was a lot of mone