Day 129: The Worst Job I Ever Had

I get paid to write for a living. I literally write five days a week every week. That means I spend most of my waking hours with multiple deadlines hanging over my head. That used to bother me, but I don’t really even think about it anymore. I write about technology, and good chunk of the material is really complicated and really on the cutting edge. For some topics, like new hardware or software, for example, there’s literally no background or reference material from which to work from. You’re it. Many of the interviews I do are with engineers and software developers and IT and CEOs and CIOs and others with advanced degrees, advanced vocabularies, and advanced IQs. Keeping up is a struggle some days.

Still, I’m beyond thankful to be a writer and do what I do. I get to string words together and get paid for it. I get to construct ideas into new shapes. I get to learn about new advances, sometimes years before the general public takes an interest. I get to interact with people with brilliant minds and ideas and visions. I get a glimpse on almost a daily basis at the near and distant future. It’s often fascinating, and it’s sometimes mind-blowing. Moreover, I’m thankful to be a writer because I’ve had plenty of jobs that were anything but personally gratifying and that didn’t motivate me and that didn’t serve any other purpose but to make a buck.

Over the years, I’ve laid sod hour after hour on hot summer days, landscaped yards, painted houses, stocked books for next to nothing, dug hole after hole down long city streets to plant trees, and more. In the landscaping job, I worked with the same lazy, piece of crap owner of the business every single day. He did 10% of the work and took 100% of the credit. While working for a nursery, I also worked with the same guy every day, except he didn’t have an off button. His motor never stopped, and because he was hell-bent on making his superiors notice his effort in an attempt to be promoted, he didn’t want me dragging him down. I’m eternally grateful for my boss while painting houses, but he, too, was a workaholic, and there was no keeping up with him, even if I wanted to. Besides that, shutting every window in a new house when it’s 100 degrees outside spending the next eight hours with no air conditioning just so bugs don’t make their way on a fresh coat of wall paint gets old really fast.

The worst job I had, though, was working in an industrial plant that manufactured “tanks and containment solutions for the bulk storage, processing and transportation of a wide variety of liquid, solid, and dry materials.” Think those big, green tanks you see on farms or tanks used to house industrial waste. I spent two summers of my life while making my way through college working there, and I count them as the two most depressing summers of my life.

The first summer, my job was to repair the fiberglass fuel tanks that the company made and sold to the military, which used them in their own tanks of the blowing up kind. After the guys who built the tank were done, I tested them by plugging up all the valves, piping air in, slopping on a watery-soap solution, and looked for bubbles to form. If a bubble popped up, that meant leak, so I then took a power sander, sanded away layer after layer of fiberglass, and set about filling the hole with layer after layer of new fiberglass. Sounds easy enough, but it wasn’t.

First, fiberglass is itchy. Really itchy. Second, to hold the fiberglass layers together, we used coats of resin in between. If you don’t keep resin cooled at a certain temperature, it begins smoking and gets hot really damn fast. Flames ensue. Resin also stains the skin yellow, stinks, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth from the fumes.

Second, I worked with a guy named Bob. He claimed to be a Vietnam vet (he literally took cover when helicopters would fly overhead), claimed to be an ex-Triple AAA baseball player (he did wear a decrepit White Sox hat), and was basically full of crap in just about everything he said. Despite having amassed three DWIs, being a hopeless alcoholic, being on work release from jail, and having his paychecks immediately taken by the county to pay his back child support, I was fond of Bob. He was funny, he was a good worker, and his stories (whether true or not) kept me going until quitting time. I was glad to drive Bob around during the lunch hour and buy him a Little Debbie now and again.

Beyond Bob stories, the only other saving grace of that summer was I was one of only a handful of people who didn’t have to work inside, and being outdoors was a godsend. The next summer that changed. I moved indoors but basically did the same job. Bob was no longer there, though. One day the previous summer toward the end of my stay, he carried out a plot he’d been scheming all summer long. It involved a self-inflicted wound. Bob was tired of not seeing any money for his toil, so he decided it was time to pull checks without having to work for them. This meant that one afternoon while we both were carrying a 200-pound or so fuel tank from one end of the plant to the other, he dropped his end straight on his knee. I was told he spent the next few weeks in a hospital bed drawing worker’s comp. He pulled off the plan to perfection.

Instead of Bob, that next summer I was surrounded by a dozen or so literal bad-asses who left me scared virtually every second of the day. Even as the summer progressed and they warmed up to me a little, I was terrified. Why? I have no statistics to back this up, but through word of mouth, listening, and observation, I estimate roughly 90% of these guys were either on work release or had served prison time. The countless prison and jailhouse stories they told backed up my estimate. And I’ll assure you that the stories they told weren’t of the “prison food is so bad” or “I lifted weights all day” variety. They were of the violence and defiling your manhood type, and my teenaged-mind believed every last word.

Beyond the constant dread of being shived for saying something stupid, over my two summers there I counted maybe four or five other people out of dozens who didn’t smoke. Thus, on the days I could find the lunchroom through the thick cloud of cigarette smoke floating from it, I immediately bolted right back out after entering in a raging coughing fit. To top all this off, me and about everyone else there whose clothes weren’t dirty were paid peanuts to do dirty, grimy, thankless work day in and day out. I knew I wouldn’t be there forever, so it wasn’t too difficult for me to keep my eye on the prize. Others, though, weren’t so lucky.

I think about that job from time to time when I think something is too difficult or I can see an end in sight. I know firsthand many people who never get out of such situations, whether they lack the drive to get themselves out or the cards are such hopelessly stacked against them. Would I rather be a retired professional baseball player or getting set to take the stage with my bandmates at Madison Square Garden? Hell yeah. But I’m smart enough to know how fortunate I am to be where I’m at. I worked hard to get here, and I work hard to stay here, but it pay to reflect from time to time upon where you’ve been and how easily everything could change tomorrow.