Ask your parents what their first job was. You’ll learn something, and they’ll probably be surprised you asked.

Parents arrive in your life already finished, which makes it easy to forget they were once nervous teenagers counting hours for small money. A first job is where a lot of their habits about work came from, including the ones that annoy you. Hearing about it changes the shape of the person slightly, and being asked tends to land as a kindness, because nobody expects that question from their own kid.

Ask over dinner rather than in a doorway, and ask what the worst shift was. Follow it with what they got paid and whether it felt like a lot then. The specifics are where the stories live.