Working Nine to Five
2006-12-16 | Filed Under Participatory Books |
Okay. Working for a living. We all do it. I’m interested in your job stories.What was your first job? What was the first time you had to deal with the reality of employment?or was there another job that was really memorable? What was it? What did you do? Were you good at it? Who was your boss? How long did it last?Post the story and I’ll illustrate it.
12 Responses to “Working Nine to Five”
My first job was our local public library. It made sense. I loved the library. During the summer when I was a kid my mother would take us there all the time. And I was always reading, albeit always the wrong thing which is why I didn’t perform very well in school.
My job was mostly to stack books. The cart would be full of books and I would wheel it in between the stacks and have to put them back in their right place. My training involved a lot of testing about the Dewey Decimenal System.
It turned out that I wasn’t very good at this job though. Inevitably as I was placing books back on the shelves I would see a book that would strike my interest, and I would sit down in the aisle and start reading.
They weren’t always good books. I remember skimming the entire works of Sydney Sheldon in an afternoon.
I used to work at a Libby’s canning plant in upstate New York. I worked there summers, and into the fall, the period referred to as “pack.” We canned, I’d guess, hundreds of tons of green beans every year. I started there to make money to go back to college in the fall, but after the second year, I didn’t go back to school, and I’d work from July through October.
When I started there, my job was to walk back and forth across a catwalk which was just above this fifty foot long sluice, a big silver roadway for beans. The sluice was constantly vibrating, making the beans shake their way down to the end, past twenty little openings that dropped the beans onto twenty conveyer belts way down below. There were metal gates, about afoot long and six inches high, which controlled the amount of beans passed through each little hole, and on to the conveyer belts below. At each conveyer belt sat a woman, whose job was to remove from the beans the larger bits of things which were not beans–sticks, rocks, insects, mice, pieces of mice, etc. I was supposed to make sure that each woman received the same flow of beans as all the others. I had a big mallet with a rubber head, and I’d bang the gates more open or more closed to adjust how much reached each woman. As the speed at which the beans entered the plant from outside varied widely, from a quarter ton an hour to eight or ten tons an hour, and with every change, every gate had to be adjusted at least a bit, I was kept hopping.
This was just the first in a series of processes the beans underwent, and eventually my job was to be controlling the flow of the beans throughout the plant.
I worked the night shift, from six pm to six am every night, and by the end of August I would always pretty much lose contact with the rest of the world. I’d wake up around three or four in the afternoon, eat a big panful of fried potatoes and onions everyday, pick a tomato from the backyard to take with me, and walk to work reading a book. The walk was about two miles, along one straight road, empty except for people driving to the plant, and it took me about an hour to walk. I wore overalls and a t-shirt and a white hard hat with a ponytail sticking out from underneath it. Before I arrived, in about the last quarter mile, I always smoked a joint.
The machinery was deafeningly loud (we were supposed to wear earplugs, but only the women actually did), and the building was hot, and it was another world. I drank lots of extra-sweet, extra-strong black coffee from the vending machine, in poker-hand paper cups, smoked endless cigarettes–for a while I carried both Marlboros and Newports and chainsmoked alternate brands–and ate little white-cross speed all night.
There was a bucket-sized jar of aspirin in the little room that served as the infirmary, and I’d take a handful and stuff it in my pocket from time to time. I mixed those in with the speed, pretty much indiscriminately.
At lunch break, around midnight, while everyone else was in the cafeteria, I’d go outside with my tomato and sometimes a ham-salad sandwich from a vending machine inside. The machines would be stopped and it would be quiet for a while, and I’d go in back of the factory where the farmers dropped off their beans. I’d sit in the cab of one of the trucks with the door open, or maybe in the cage of a big forklift, over by the huge containers the farmers dumped their beans in. Sometimes they’d have left the truck in the middle of emptying it out, if that’s when lunch came, the rear of the truck slanted up into the air, with a few tons of beans just waiting to fall, like an avalanche.
Beyond the factory was miles and miles of nothing, empty fields, and stars above like you never see here in New York.
I’d walk home every night, smoking another joint as soon as I left. I walked alongside the lake, Lake Seneca, and by the time I was halfway home, the sky would start to lighten just above the lake, from deep, velvet blue to a lighter electric blue, and by the time I got home, it looked just like the cover of Weather Report’s Mysterious Traveler album.
You write so well that I didn’t really need to search out the album cover, and yet I felt compelled ……
I was the first one of my college friends to get a job after graduation. It was like.. a month out of college, working as an emergency social worker for the state after hours. I manned the phones for the Department of Social Services for all of Massachusetts. So my work schedule was like 5pm-2am 4 days a week and midnight-8am one day a week. I was super excited to have a job! and be helping people! And it was close to my new apartment, in a dodgy area of Roxbury that seems to have become much nicer (no more mattresses with heroin addcits at the end of the street these days). i would ride my bike back at unnatural hours with the oddballs on my street looking at me strangely.
There were emotional ups and downs (wishing a social worker in Springfield, MA happy new years at midnight while tracking down a 16-year-old who was in a 21+ club was par for the course). Dead baby reports just as you were getting off an overnight shift, dads who locked their kids out of the home while they played golf. We made the most of it though, cracking jokes that are horribly inappropriate for any company (yet provided an enormous amount of stress relief), reading alot durng downtime, and generally having a good time.
The most time consuming aspect of the job were these 12 page reports that we had to file for every case we dealt with in a night. there was a lot of “family name age relation to the child” type stuff, but the bulk of the paperwork was centered around the narrative of what was going on in the home. The narrative was formed primarily by the original reporter of child abuse (usually cops calling in domestic violence, or nurses & paramedics, and quite frequently neighbors who wished to remain anonymous and wanted to get the person next door in a heap o’ trouble with DSS). there would be small addendums from workers on site, or the reporter would call back with a bit of additional information. This was where I found I could make what was rapidly becoming a tedious job much more fun. i would extrapolate on these stories, add in “color commentary,” make the story as much my own as possible without distoring the facts too much. Oftentimes I was rebuked by my supervisor for injecting too many opinionated statements (in the above mentioned case of the golfing dad, I described father’s afternoon as “an arduous day at the links”). But overall I managed to make people’s days a bit more enjoyable because my reports deviated from the normal “x Y Z happened.”
I managed to work there for a year fulltime without going bats, and another year part time as I started taking classes again and working during the day. I also managed to make a number of people uncomfortable by having 2 relationships with co-workers. One ended in a public blowout at a party with most of the younger co-workers, the other ended in me silently suffering after the girl with the interesting haircut broke up with me. However, the brief fling that resulted in the blowout also got me mentioned in the acknowledgements of her memoirs. So maybe it was ok, if only to get my name in print, where the scott fitzgerald was me, and not the f. scott fitzgerald most people think of.
When I moved to New York I stopped working there completely, which was a good thing, since the nature of the job, the hours, and the failed romances started to really wear me raw. Sometimes though, I think back at the weird and strange environment and miss the comraderie that can only be found in a foxhole like that. I mean, really, I will never ever be able to laugh about that sort of stuff again the way i did there.
The summer of my sixteenth year, and therefore, my first summer where it was legal for me to work, I got a job at the concession stand at my local movie theater. Previously, my only other jobs had been babysitting the kids in my neighborhood, so I was pretty excited to have a job that involved something of a commute, an honest-to-goodness paycheck, and coworkers. In addition, I got to wear a uniform: a short sleeved button-down, with a maroon vest and a little black bow tie. I even got a nametag.
I was paid $4.25 the hour (the minimum wage at the time). Every night, I would come home reeking of popcorn, and would have to scrub the smell off. It was worse on the nights I was assigned to pop the popcorn. Every month, along with my paycheck, I would get free passes to see a movie, which I saw as a huge bonus, even though I hardly ever used them and would forget to give them away before they expired. I also thought it was great that I could watch movies on my breaks, never mind that I always got my break at the same time, so I always saw the same 15 minutes of the movie (that was the summer of Jurassic Park, which played on pretty much every screen, so there was this one 15 minute segment that I knew by heart; it’s the part where everyone first gets to the island and it’s a magical place and no one thinks it’s a bad idea to walk around an island with huge carnivorous reptiles).
But that doesn’t even touch on the worst part of the job – the politics. Yes, I know, every job has politics, but I can tell you right now that there is nothing more political than a concession counter run by suburban teenagers. To be honest, I wasn’t part of much of the drama that went on behind that counter. I was pretty quiet and kept to myself, partly because I was a little scared of my coworkers, and partly because I was a little in awe of them, too. They drank, got high and had sex with one another and would talk about it openly at the workplace; which was something my sixteen-year-old mind had identified as quite unprofessional, and not representative of the official bow tie we wore. But it also demonstrated how much cooler they were than me. Obviously, this alcohol/marijuana/sex/minimum-wage-job combo would lead to some pretty heated battles behind that counter. Fistfights, name-calling, keyed paintjobs … it got pretty ugly. And I found it fascinating. Only once had I inadvertently created drama. Stupidly, I remarked to one girl that another girl we worked with thought that her boyfriend was cute. In my little brain, I saw that as her complimenting the girl on her good catch. Well, obviously, it began a huge argument, where the one girl thought the other was trying to move in on “her man,” and the other one wanted her to “get out of her face.” I learned a pretty good lesson, and went back to only speaking when being spoken to.
Looking back, I have no idea why I liked that job so much. I suppose it was ignorance of how incredibly bad it was because I had never had a better job, much less any job, before. Or maybe I just enjoyed the company of people who were so different than my friends and me. Whatever the reason, by end of the summer the charms of the job were beginning to wear off, thanks to a guy named Mark and some nacho cheese. Previous to Mark, I had a couple of coworkers attempt to woo me, but their attempts were clumsily averted by horrible excuses (“I can’t go out with you Saturday … I’m busy … with … stuff”). Mark was an usher hired in mid-summer. What made him the subject of many behind-the-counter whisperings was that he was twenty-six years old, and talked to himself. A lot. For these reasons, many of us stayed pretty clear of Mark. But then the other ushers began commenting on how Mark was always talking about how he was going to get with me and another coworker. This shocked and absolutely appalled me, as I had never even exchanged a “finished cleaning theater 6?” with the guy. Apparently, his plans for me and the other girl were told (mostly to himself) in quite graphic detail. I started getting pretty scared, but the ushers told our manager (a guy I only knew as Mr. Z) and he got canned. But thanks to Mark, we all had to undergo several tedious sexual harassment workshops, watching video after video of bow tied employees making inappropriate comments and gestures to one another. These got old real fast.
The final straw, however, was the nacho cheese. For weeks, the nozzle end of the nacho cheese dispenser had fallen off, and no one had bothered to replace it. This would make the nacho cheese come straight out, instead of down onto the nachos. We all managed to deal with the new physics of the cheese dispenser until one day, I couldn’t get the cheese to come out. I started banging on the pump and just as I finished the words, “There’s something messed up with this cheese,” hot liquid cheese squirted all over my arm. Someone had turned up the temperature of the cheese, making it much less viscous, and much more scalding. I watched in horror as the skin on my arm started to blister and I felt the searing pain tear through. I told the assistant manager, and she just told me to put cold water on it, and went back to filing her nails. I went home a little early that day, and only returned to give back my uniform, along with the bow tie. I still have the nametag.
My first job was as a camp counselor at a day camp. I was the junior counselor for a bunch of 4 year olds. I remember there were three brothers that had just been adopted from Guatemala at the camp and they couldn’t separate them at first, even though they were different ages, because they had been on the streets together and the oldest one (who was probably 7 or
was really protective of the other two and wouldn’t let them out of his sight. Other than that, the experience wasn’t very memorable, except for the fact that I got hit by a car that August and broke my big toe and was on crutches for a few weeks and one of my 4 year olds asked if I had broken my toe completely off.
First, slow pitch softball. Let me start at the end.
The Summer before our fateful meeting at that place, I worked for Cerretani Construction. The owner, one Lawrence Cerretani (name should be changed to protect the innocent), was potentate of a once proud construction empire that if had not exactly fallen on hard times, was at least entering its sunset years (as was Larry). But allay all fears, Lawrence, or Larry as I came to know him, was likely worth a fortune in real estate. After all, it takes some serious coin to acquire a tricked out Chevy van complete with running boards and Mohair roof. This was the Eighties after all.
But don’t let ol’ Larry’s looks fool ya: he was quite the ladies man. Perhaps it was the van, or a prodigious co**k, or maybe, just maybe, it was the aforementioned real estate portfolio. I’m not one to judge. Despite the fact that he looked like the bulldog perched on the hood of a Mack Truck, it was a rare evening when Larry left the Three Bears sans a piece of eye candy; if you know what I mean. For more than one sexagenarian dilettante has found herself losing any semblance of modesty bent over a naugahyde divan engulfed in the tell tale scents of white hot monkey love and Old Spice. Larry possessed a certain jene sais quoi that can’t be learnt.
A generous man, Larry found it in his heart to procreate: twice. His son Anthony (name should also be changed to protect the innocent), or Ant for short, was the heir apparent to the Cerritani Construction empire. Ant was hell bent on carrying on his family’s proud tradition. You see, the Cerritani’s had been stoop laborers since time immemorial.
First day on the job, Stamford, CT. Yours truly is perched on the back of a 3/4 ton dump truck. The only thing standing between twenty-five pieces of slate and Mr. Jones’ new walkway was me. These were no ordinary slates mind you. These were “SLATES.” Each one must have weighed 150 - 200 lbs. Those Frisbee sized suckers you see in the movies are for pussies. Right ’bout then I was rethinking turning down the job at Home Oil runnin’ mail ‘tween Norwalk and New Milford. Fact that I didn’t have my lunch didn’t help. Turns out Larry had no intention of running over to TGIFs for some hot wings and Bud.
Well, there I am turning three shades of blue when all Ant comes round the bend. What set him off, I did not know, still do not know, and perhaps will never know, but I can still hear Larry screaming: “Ant, hasty wastey I’ll paint it on all my trucks.”
Well as it turns out this was SOP, or perhaps maybe just maybe an expression of a father’s love for his son. But these twenty odd years later I still get a chuckle thinking about that day. Sure there were others, like the time Larry crashed the steam roller in Jack Par’s driveway. Or the time Ant buried the steam roller have way up the rollers in mud. Or the day I learned a valuable lesson about the inverse relationship of asphalt’s core temperature and its spreadability.
So here’s to you Lar, wherever you may be
WORKING NINE TO FIVE (OUTSIDE, ON A COLD, SNOWY DAY)
My first job involved delivering packets of advertising to about 175 Long Island homes by ten o’clock every Saturday morning.
My boss, Mrs. Weinstein, would deliver the papers on Fridays. I’d take those papers down to the basement, stack records on the stereo, collate and fold the papers, stuff them into yellow plastic bags, stuff those bags into plastic shopping bags, and then put the bags into the upright laundry cart that I towed behind me on the route.
I listened to Stevie Wonder, The Beatles, Chicago, the soundtrack to American Graffiti, and jazz by Pete Watrous, Maynard Ferguson, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller. Later on in my career, I might have started listening to bebop, too. Sometimes I’d watch some old Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers serials on Channel 13, through the static of one of our black-and-white TV sets.
The folding and stuffing usually took about two hours, or six album sides. By the time I’d be finished, my hands would be black with ink.
On Saturday mornings, I’d put the plastic shopping bags into an upright laundry cart and deliver the papers, hanging a yellow bag on the front of each house on my route. Halfway through, I would usually take a break at my house before delivering to the remaining houses. The entire route usually took about two hours.
The pay was so small that I have trouble remembering it. It might have been seven cents per house.
One winter morning, the weather made my paper route almost impossible to do.
The snow was deep and the temperature was bitterly cold and windy.
I trudged through the snow for hours.
I got colder and colder in my parka and boots.
Hours passed before I finally came home to take a break.
I stripped off my snowy clothing in the laundry room and shivered.
My hands throbbed painfully as they thawed.
“I can’t go back out there! I can’t go back out there!”
I was on the verge of tears.
My mother came downstairs.
“Mom, I can’t finish the route today.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s too cold. It hurts!”
“No, you have to go back out there. It’s your responsibility.”
“Are you crazy? I’m not going to do it! It’s freezing out there!”
“No! You must! It’s your job!”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me to go out in that cold! I’ve already been out there for hours and I’m only half-finished.”
“That’s what doing a job is all about. You must be responsible.”
“You’re my own mother…and you’re telling me to go out in that weather…to finish a stupid paper route? I HATE YOU!”
“That hurts me!”
“I HURT!”
I don’t think my mother answered that. She just turned around and went back upstairs, leaving me stewing: “I can’t believe she’s making me go back outside. How can she do that to me? For a stupid paper route!”
I went out again that day and finished the deliveries–but I was very upset about it.
This episode left a lasting impression on me. Years later I brought it up with my mother. I’m pretty sure it was the only time I said that I hated her.
“Do you remember making me go out in the snow that day, just to deliver those papers?”
Mom responded immediately. “Yes.”
“You know, I still think you shouldn’t have made me go out there. It was only a stupid paper route. Nobody would have been able to do anything with those papers on that day–no one was going outside. I’m sure Mrs. Weinstein wouldn’t have made me deliver anything if we’d asked her. Come to think of it, why didn’t we ask her?”
My Mom didn’t say anything.
“But Mom, I’m sorry I said I hated you. I have to be honest and say that I did hate you at that moment because you were being unfair…but I’m still sorry I said that.”
First job - delivering papers. The neighbors’ dog major bit me in the ass while I was riding by on my bicycle. That night I was supposed to go to roller kingdom with my friends. I quit.
Second job was working at an ice cream stand. All the kids did whipits and drank rum in the back. My shift was at 7am on Sundays. It was hard being drunk so early. I quit.
Next job was turning the knobs at a tanning booth. I would set the timer for 15, 20, 30 minutes…and then Windex up the sweat people left behind. I quit.
Next I sold sunglasses in Fanuel Hall (sp?) in Boston. It is a touristy kind of place. Every person would come up and try on the kooky pair of glasses and look at me to laugh. I quit.
I worked at a mental health center. (aka institution). A patient escaped a nearby hospital found the woman and I had to go get her and wheel her back to the center. The whole time she was screaming, “I’ll never get to heaven, and I’ll never get to heaven!” I quit
I worked in a toy store on Newbury Street. A guy came in and robbed me at gunpoint. I gave him all the money. He was soon arrested and as it turned out had just got out of prison for murder. About a week later another guy came in the toy store and said he was looking for a toy…he couldn’t remember the name of it…so he passed me a note which said, “I’ve got a gun, give me all your money.” I gave it to him. I quit.
Like MaryKate, my first job was delivering newspapers. Perhaps newspaper is too glorified a description. It was the weekly Suburban News, a local and free rag of a paper devoted more to classified ads than anything remotely close to journalism. If you were a halfway decent student who actually could produce a volcano that spewed some smoke in the yearly science fair, you made the front cover.
Anyway, when I was 13, I wanted to buy a CB radio so I could talk to my friends Jeff and Jack who had CBs converted from cars so they could talk on the radio from their bedrooms. We had handles and would talk like truckers or worse, cops.
As a 13 year old living in the suburbs of NJ, the only job I could get was delivering newspapers. The regional newspaper decided around this time that they wanted 16 year olds and stopped hiring kids under 16. The Star Ledger was a decent paper and you would get great tips from people around the holidays.
The deliverers of the Suburban News received no such tips — the paper being freely distributed, you got nothing except your meager $12.50 per week.
On Monday, the papers would be dropped off, not at my door, but all the way up the block on the corner. All 200+ of them! Plus the fliers I had to put in them. And the baggies in case it was rainy out. From Monday until Tuesday I had to insert and roll all of them, then slide them into their orange newpaper condoms.
On Wednesday, delivery. The route was all the way across town! Near the school I couldn’t attend, because it was TOO FAR TO WALK! I had to make four or five trips by bycicle to make all the deliveries. It took hours.
Did I mention I was paid $12.50 per week?!
After about the third week of this I had had enough. I tried to call and quit but no one would take my call, and for another 2 weeks the newspapers came, dumped on the corner with my name on them. My parents insisted that I stick to my committment and deliver the papers if I wanted my CB radio.
So I started thinking — who’s going to miss this paper? It sucks anyway… So, I inserted and folded the papers. But this time I didn’t bother with putting them in their condoms, they wouldn’t need them where they were going. I made three trips to the nearest creek, and for two weeks, dumped the newspapers under the small road bridge that crossed the creek.
Finally, after those two weeks, the Suburban News called me back. They had received several complaints that people didn’t get their stinking papers. I told them I quit. And that, was my first job.
I never did get that CB radio. I wanted to buy it with my savings but my father wouldn’t allow it. He was a cop and didn’t think it was a good idea for me to have one anyway. They never did find out about my dumping the papers in the creek.
Take this job and shove it
My first “real” job was at an advertising agency as a Production Artist (which is basically a Designer except they can pay you a lot less if they just call you a Production Artist). The Creative Director, Danny, was a big shot they had hired away from an agency in Houston. It was his job to take our work to the next level. The fact is, we had a pretty good setup before Danny showed up. I worked with two of my best friends and everything was great. Danny was one of those guys who always had to look and sound like the biggest, coolest, smartest, toughest, guy in the room (a true Texan). He especially seemed to get great pleasure from demeaning me in front of others. I think he thought he was being funny but really it was just dumb and offensive 99% of the time. And in reality he was probably just insecure and overcompensating for something lacking in his own life.
One of Danny’s first acts was to hire an Art Director. An Art Director is a Designer who makes a lot of money because he has years of experience and a “killer” portfolio. The guy Danny hired had neither. After about a month I think it became clear that a mistake had been made and the new Art Director was unceremoniously fired. I ended up inheriting all of his projects and it became my job to mop up the mess that was left behind. I redesigned everything and went on a three day photo shoot to finish a project that had been left in a state of disaster.
When I got back to the office the next week it became clear that I had fucked something up. Danny was furious. One of the ads we were producing had copy written that talked about a patient, and she was supposed to be pictured in the room where she had had her heart operation. The only problem was when the woman was scheduled by Danny for her photo they were operating on someone and the room wasn’t available. I think Danny actually expected me to have someone wait for their heart operation while I made sure we got the right picture. Actually I was able to Photoshop a shot taken of her into another shot of the operating room taken when it was not in use, problem solved. But that didn’t stop Danny from busting my balls.
Fast forward a few weeks and we had an ad deadline. A new Art Director had been hired to take the place of the last one. Only this guy was talented, but kind of an alcoholic, and a little forgetful. He had gone to lunch and instead of copying the latest files to the server, where he had been instructed to leave them, in case someone else needed to work on them, he left them on a Zip disk in his locked desk drawer. Anyway, the job was hot-hot-hot, under a tight deadline, and the new guy was out drinking so I got asked to finish and send it out. I grabbed the files from the server where I expected the latest version to be and put them on a disk for output. The output was slightly different from the approved ad because the correct files were not on the server and it ended up being my fault, according to Danny, despite the fact that neither he, the proofreader, the traffic manager, nor the media person caught the error. They had all seen this ad before. I had not.
Later that same day a job of mine was due. I had to put it aside to deal with the Art Director’s job. My project was a large job and required a lot of printing and pasting up to make it look like the actual booklet it was supposed to eventually be. The office had two antique color printers and I had them both working double-time. They were prone to overheating and both failed leaving me totally high and dry. Danny stormed into the room and asked when the job would be done. I told him I didn’t know and that I was working on it. He then told me I should, “Get my head out of my ass or else.” He walked off, and I tried to let it go, but by the time he got to the other side of the room I erupted with a, “FUCK YOU!” He quickly walked back over to me as if he was going to punch me or something and asked, “Do you have anything else to say?” To which I replied, “No.” He then said, “Well, then…” and I knew he was going to fire me so I interrupted and said, “No, I won’t give you the satisfaction of firing me. I quit!”
It was quite a moment. I still shiver when I think about how good it made me feel to stand up for myself. In that instant I decided to go back to school and get the hell out of advertising. I look back at that moment as one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. A few days later it got back to me through my friends that Danny had told them “I had made the biggest mistake of my life.” and that “I’d never work again.” That was fine by me if it meant I’d have to work with another douche bag like him. After school I did go back to advertising. It was an easy trap to fall into because the money is good and the work is endless. However, I now do it on my own terms as a freelancer. That way I don’t have to deal with the Dannys of the world.
My fist job:
Well I was in High School and my parents decided I needed a job. So one
summer my dad said he’d find me a job since he worked for the fire
department, he could find something from the city jobs. Well he found one
for me as a sanitation engineer, or garbage man. I was about 17 and had gone
that far without having to work except for cutting grass for neighbors which
helped me get a little money together which I spent on comic books as I was
pretty much addicted to collecting them.
I find out I have to get to work at 6:30am which wasn’t something I was used
to. Getting up early and running out the door would get my stomach in a knot
and I’d usually have to run for a restroom. So I usually didn’t eat any
breakfast for this very reason. I wasn’t a wimp by any means, all-though I
was only 5′5″ tall I was stocky and had played football most of my school
years so I was in pretty good shape. So I get up in the dark, get dressed
and drive to the worst part of town and walk in and wait with other guys
that look like prison escapees. Sure enough my stomach gets in a knot from
all this and I end up in the bathroom while I hear them giving out
assignments to the other guys. So I get out there and I’m assigned to one of
those super long garbage trucks and I have to just grab onto the side of it
and hold on….as there isn’t room for all of us in the cab. Next thing I
know I’m flying down the road….
Eventually we get to a subdivision and I’m told to get the trash cans from
behind the yards (This was 1972 or 1973 and they didn’t have the cans with
wheels that you take to the curb yourself yet.) and put them in the front of
the driveways. They then drive off. So I start going behind the yards and
dragging these heavy cans to the curb. One house after another. Dogs barking
and people waking up. No one seems to care that this guy is walking around
their back yard looking for their trash cans that early in the morning. I
get to the end of the street and then start up the other end….they’d
dropped off a few other guys to do this on other streets so they could then
just run up the road and dump the cans in. They fly down the street doing
that and then tell me I have to put all the cans back in the back of the
yards with the lids back on, and they tell me to run! Wow, this is some
service we provide. So I do all that. Taking the full cans to the curb and
then empty ones back all morning long. I forget what time it is and as I’m
thinking I’m about to pass out and don’t have any more energy they drive up
and grab me and say it’s time for lunch. I’m hanging on and thinking that
was way too hard. They had me running from house to house without a break.
I’m in pretty good shape but this is crazy. I’m not sure I can do this every
day. We get to the office and I drive home for lunch. I’m a sweaty mess as
it is over 100 degrees with high humidity in the summer here in KY. I catch
my breath and wonder how I’m going to make it like this all afternoon. The
only thing keeping me going is not the fact I only get $2.50 per hour, which
is the minimum wage at the time, but the fact I’m not a quitter. I never
quit football and it was harder than this, well, as hard. And I don’t want
to let my parents down. So I drive back and next thing I know we are back on
the truck and speed off.
We pull into the driveway of a middle school, that is not in session, since
it is summer and the truck pulls all the way to the top of the hill in the
front which is mostly hidden by trees and the truck parks there. I say to
the driver, where are the trash cans? And he tells me that we are done for
the day. We had done the full route in 1/2 a day so we could sleep the rest
of the day! So I crawled up into that back part of the cab, where that long
window is in the back, and since I was not that tall I could comfortably lay
down there. Oh, and since we started so early we got off at 4:00 in the
afternoon. At 3:30pm or before that sometimes, we’d drive back to the office
and play horseshoes till 4:00.
Hum, this job may not be so bad after all.