The Baboon Congress

Memoirs of a Teen-aged Flock Sucker

72 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Steve.

I got my first “real” job when I turned 16. My dad, a top executive at his factory, didn’t want to be accused of nepotism, so he arranged for me to work in an allied business that he never dealt with. The business where I worked was a silk screen processing plant.

Our work was to use squeegees, screens and paints to emblazon various products—t-shirts, sweatshirts, pennants, caps—with college logos or mascots. After we had screened a design on a shirt or whatever, that object would be covered with wet paint. We would then send it down a long conveyer belt under a bank of heat lamps. All those lamps made the shop as hot as a steel mill. There was a concern at the time that sweating too much would deprive our bodies of precious salts, so we spent a lot of time around the cooler belting down water and eating fistfuls of salt tablets. Workers occasionally fainted, dropping gracefully to the floor by their work stations.

I remember when Gina went down. Gina was a skinny Italian girl with a hooked nose and saucy mouth. She looked like a pocket rocket version of Cher. On the day I started working in Silk Screen Processing my dad pointed out Gina, saying, “Keep your distance from that Dago girl. She’s already had one kid out of wedlock.” His warning, of course, just inflamed my interest. Our production manager—an excitable man—happened to be nearby when Gina swooned and hit the floor. Gene knelt over Gina, babbling wildly about how she needed air. Then he suddenly noticed that his hands were up under Gina’s blouse, unhooking her bra. With a scream, he lurched to his feet and fled the building. That incident became just one more reason the workers held him in contempt.

A raw ink design on a shirt looks cheap, so most of our sweatshirts had ink designs that were flocked to make the design fuzzy and elegant. Flock is a curious product, sort of like thousands of tiny short hairs, and in your hand it feels like a handful of dust. After we had dumped several cups of flock on the wet paint of a sweatshirt, the shirt was filthy because of the excess flock. All those tiny hairs settled deep into pores in the shirt and refused to leave.

That’s where I came in. My dad designed a Rube Goldberg machine that was basically two Hoover vacuums, one upright and one upside down. These two vacuums met face-to-face with perhaps three quarters an inch of space between them. My job was to fold a sweatshirt, hold it tightly and then run it back and forth between the two roaring Hoovers. Two minutes of sweeping a shirt between the Hoovers would clean it up almost like new. I’d throw the clean shirt in a big bin and reach for the next flocky shirt. I could never get ahead. The faster I cleaned the shirts, the more dirty ones they would stack by my machine.

It was unpleasant. The Hoovers roared at such a volume that I could not listen to music or converse with the workers around me. The machines were hot, plus the effort required to drag the shirts back and forth between the whirling beaters was exhausting. Sheets of sweat ran off my chest and back as I worked. But the greatest sacrifice involved with working on those Hoovers was boredom and isolation. I couldn’t say a word to anyone all day.

And you know what happens when you run a Hoover over a loose rug: the beaters eat the fabric, the fabric gets wrapped around the belt, and the machine seizes with a sick whoop that often means the belt is broken. And if the fabric in question is a white sweatshirt, as most of ours were, now it would be ruined with black rubber skid marks. To keep shirts from getting sucked into the Hoovers, I had to pull and stretch them to keep the fabric taut. We only screened enough sweatshirts to fulfill each order, so if I spoiled a shirt or two we would be forced to set up an emergency run of that design to replace the ruined ones. Guess how popular that made me with the workers who had to replace shirts I had spoiled with my Hoovers?

There was a final twist. Because I was “the boss’s son,” I was terrified of being seen as a slacker. Typically for me, I over-compensated by attacking my job with a ferocious effort, suffering in silence while forcing myself to smile with the fixed grin of a corpse. The bosses couldn’t find anyone else who would do that job. After a day or two on the Hoovers, anyone with half a brain quit. Not me. I got to suck flock off sweatshirts all summer long for three summers in a row. At the end of that time, shaking with rage, I asked the production manager what I had done to cause him to keep me on those damned machines for three years. “You were fast and you were always smiling,” he said, “I wanted to keep you happy.”

The only good that came of all of this was my determination to get a college education. I wasn’t sure I was smart enough to do college work. Nobody in my family had ever been to college, and I had hardly distinguished myself as a scholar in high school. But having sampled the delights of factory work, I was ready for a change. After sucking flock off sweatshirts for three years, inorganic chemistry didn’t seem so formidable.

What is the worst job you ever had?

72 thoughts on “Memoirs of a Teen-aged Flock Sucker”

  1. When I was 14 or 15 a neighbor asked my family if I could help pile up split firewood. I wasn’t sure what a “cord” of wood was but after a day or two of stacking firewood on a sunny July afternoon I decided I would not repeat that activity for 50 cents an hour ever again!

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    2. i’ll bet they’d pay two dollars an hour today. i love splitting wood but it can be a bit sweaty in july. there is something theraputic about it.

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      1. Thanks for the kindness last night, tim, of bringing me punch at Sherrilee’s.

        When we bought our cabin, there was a huge mound of unsplit wood. I took it on with a big axe and a yellow plastic wedge that carried the name “Oregon.” Once Kathe asked where I was. Molly said, “He’s out splitting wood with his organ.”

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  2. Good morning to all. I worked for 2 1/2 years at the Hormel plant in Austin. At first I worked as a temporary employee in a small lab which was an okay job. That job went away and I decided to take a job as a quality control clerk. I couldn’t do that job because the only quality control job available required me to get trained to do all the different quality control clerk jobs in the plant and be able to fill in at all of these jobs if needed.

    Those quality control jobs are not easy and I couldn’t get down all the details of each job and learn to do them at top speed as is sometimes required. Also, some of the foremen for the production lines were not the easiest people to please and the quality control engineers who supervised the clerks were not always the best.

    I moved on to become a production worker which also was dificult at times but a little better than the quality control work. If I only had to learn a few of the quality control jobs and was given enough time to learn them I would have been okay. I had to move around to several different production jobs and there were some of them that I couldn’t learn fast enough meet the requirements to do them. They require you to get up to speed in a very short time on many of the production lines.

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      1. I didn’t see the kill area. I did see the rendering area with dead pigs lying around and where there often was a bad odor when the operations got backed up.

        It is interesting to learn about jobs like the one you had, Steve. There were lots of interesting people working at Hormel and I’m sure you met some interesting ones at your worst job, Steve.

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      2. I remember a few of the workers (besides cute Gina). There was one short, muscular woman named Bert (short for Alberta) whose body was liberally covered with tattoos. Few people today would know how spooky it was back then to encounter a heavily tatooed person. Bert had been married three times. I didn’t want to tangle with her, but actually she was very pleasant to me.

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  3. Ah Steve, what a great story, you’ve got me smiling.

    Worst job because it was yucky: Hospital lab assistant, 1964. You know the little test tubes they use when they take blood samples? Ever wonder what happens to them after they get the info they want? Somebody gets to wash them in really hot soapy water, after first getting that gunk out. At least that’s how I got to do it back then.

    Worst job because it was boring: factory job where i drilled the threads into a small gauge part. Same three-step motion, hour after hour, 3 months that summer – also cemented my decision to get at least a B.A. in something.

    The fun part of that job was there were a few of my friends in that factory too, and at 3:30 we all piled into someone’s car and headed for the Dairy Queen, where you could get a Buster Bar for I-am-not-kidding 20 cents, which is what we could afford on those wages.

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    1. Hi Barb! The only good part of my flock-sucking job was lunch. Our plant was across the alley from a Maid Rite sandwich operation. Lunch each day was two icy mugs of root beer (the best root beer I have ever tasted) and four chocolate covered doughnuts, big jumbo ones. As a teenager I had a cast iron stomach. The Maid Rite had a big counter where we could sit and place our orders, and there were those small chrome boxes wired to the big juke box. Remember the metal tabs you used to flip through the selections?

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  4. I have managed to be remarkably lucky in my jobs – first non-babysitting job was working at a floral shop where the worst of it was sweeping the front sidewalk, which got to be a bit of an exercise in meditation. One summer in college was market research surveys; one of those was an agriculture survey and about every fourth call I had to convince the farmer at the other end of the phone that I was not from the government. And then there was the years at the student loan guarantor…which was mostly tedious, not dangerous or loud. The upside of my work was that I occasionally got to tell lawyers they were wrong (bankruptcy lawyers filing the wrong thing to get a student loan discharged in the bankruptcy). I somehow avoided anything too dirty or stinky. Charmed life, I guess.

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  5. three come to mind,
    selling magazine subscriptions to poor folks at age 16. a grease ball cadalac driver loading a bunch of kids in the backseat and driving them to tough neighborhoods to see if anyone was dumb enough to buy one of these deals.
    working in a factory in southern california making really good quality garden clippers. steel in various modes. stamping parts, sharpening blades, drilling holes, putting a bolt in for assembly, etc. gloves wrapped with tape the sanders buzzed through, ear plugs to stop the drones and grinding noises at a muted intrusion instead of chirping right in your ear and hat and glasses to keep you completely covered from the outside world. every one wore coveralls and glasses and gloves and earplugs . it felt like a quick emergence in prison life. i was thankful i was passing through, a lot of the guys were life long factory workers going from oranges to clippers to whatever was next.
    the third was tough but construction has a comradarie that takes the edge off in a bowling alley mentality kind of way. dumb humor dumb guys but everyone had a good spirit except for the mean ones or the drugged up ones. we did limestone quarrying for a rebuild at fort snelling. the most physical labor i have ever done, came home filthy, exausted, seeing the world through a very clear set of eyes as to whether i had done a good days work or sluffed off. it was easy to get by with less than full effort as most of the guys working there were there under odd circumstances because of connections through the owner, and they did what was needed to keep fro being fired, i worked as hard as i could and tried to apply whatever logic and methodology could be worked into the meat based labor. it paid off when at the end of the job everyone but me and one other guy who was an exceptional worker got offered work on a job building a high school in the north suburbs as everyone else was let go. that was a short lived job as the new foreman saw that we were green in the construction business and fired us the second or third day before he got to see we were there as a result of being good workers, he liked his comfortable familiar grunts instead of quality guys with a good work ethic and a desire to learn.
    so it goes.
    got me to work for the jerk i work for today. i deal with him every morning in the mirror.
    steve i am glad to understand more clearly now, i heard heard that you were all flocked up as a kid and now i see what they meant

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    2. Like you tim, on all of my jobs I have always tried to be a good worker which helped make the jobs more interesting. I would challenge myself to find ways to do a better job. Some of the old experienced workers did what they could to keep their spirits up including pulling tricks on each other. Those experienced guys also knew a lot of ways to stay out of trouble with management and to cut corners to make their work easier.

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  6. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    My worst jobs were not physically draining, just boring. Data Entry, then called Keypunch Operator, carried the challenge of never dropping the tray of cards arranged in specific order. If you dropped them, you were stuck arranging thousands of cards.

    However, the worst job was at a nursing home as the night shift floating nurse’s aid. Certainly there were bedpans, but also elderly men who had not yet lost their interest in cute young women. That became a game of hide and seek with a man named “Tony.” Watch Tony the staff told me. And then there were the other CNAs having a squirt bottle fight with disinfectant over the local Judge’s mother. What a bad idea that was! I told my boss that time–made me unpopular, but really, the Judge’s mother?

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    1. um, I would say that would be just plain wrong with ANYBODY’S mother, but then, I loved the job you felt was your worst (and at the same place, 10 years later 🙂 ).

      I was fortunate enough to work with really good people as a CNA. Sure, some of the residents were a bit much to handle (one old farmer objected to being bathed and round-housed me), but the actual work was decent, satisfying and needed to be done,

      I’ve worked in a couple of office jobs, and I could say none of the above about them.

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  7. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job that was truly awful. At every one there was always a nice supervisor or some nice coworkers, and all the jobs delivered a paycheck, which was a good thing. I do have a couple of least-favorites, though. One of them was a seasonal job with the call-before-you-dig organization. It was a sort of a sweat shop with computers, one of those places where you have to get permission to leave your phone to use the restroom, and you’re on the phone nonstop, so you don’t get to know your coworkers. The woman who trained me was very nice, though.

    If you call this organization and ask them if you have to have your utility lines marked before you dig, the answer is always yes. Even if you’re planning to dig a single dandelion in your yard, you should always have your utility lines marked first.

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    1. if you can find joy in being with people you can be happy everywhere you go. the guy walking in the yard with the flags has a mindless job which is a different sort of appeal. thats why they call it work i guess, its somethig that you wouldnt do if they didn’t pay you. i have always found the trick is to do what you’d love to have the chance to do and then figure out how to get paid for it.

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  8. good morning, All! i’m lucky – i’ve forgotten about most of my jobs except the good parts, i guess. (it all becomes good in the faint, distant past – as Tony Soprano’s terrible mom would say of his terrible/gangster/killer dad – “he was a SAINT!!”) so i don’t remember but i know many of those jobs motivated me to change careers and go back to college, and that was good also.
    but there was this one boss……. ugh. too pleasant a day to try to remember him.
    thanks, Steve iSP – very patient young man to do that for three years!

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  9. I think that detasseling seed corn for DeKalb was my worst job. It was hot and muddy and the supervisors didn’t allow for many breaks at all. My most stressful job was when when I was in graduate school and I worked (illegally) for a Canadian Provincial Education department as a behavior analyst in a small school in a small border town. The people who hired me knew I didn’t have the proper work permits, but were desperate for someone to help out in this school. Many of the kids and teachers had parents or husbands who worked at the border station, and I had to pretend that I was Canadian. We had to sing God Save the Queen and O Canada every day when school started, and then recite the Lord’s Prayer. I knew the prayer but wasn’t too sure of the songs. I had to drive 90 miles one way to get this to this job, and I was glad when it ended when the school year ended.

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    1. I have a black friend who grew up near Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s (and who feels lucky to have survived that). As bad as detasseling corn is, I gather that picking cotton is much worse. You cut yourself on the cotton plants and it takes forever to fill a sack, for which you get almost no money. The crew boss told Ralph he was the worst cotton picker he’d ever seen, and Ralph wasn’t sure whether that was an insult or praise. But detasseling is just about the bottom of the barrel.

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      2. A friend of mine who used to work for the jolly corn company told me I shouldn’t buy the creamed corn. Don’t ask, she said – just don’t buy it.

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      3. Soybeans are self pollinating and seed production does not require any hand pollinating because their is no production hybrid soybeans that would need cross pollinating. Soybean breeders do need to do some cross pollinating to develop new kinds of soybeans. The breeders might hire some people to do the cross pollinating which I think might require the use of feathers or something like that.

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      6. Feathers are also used in fish production. The eggs from the female are placed in a metal bowl along with the milt from the male. These two are stirred together with a feather, then put into a large jar which is hung upside down on a rack for incubation.

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  10. I’ve been lucky to have pretty good jobs over the years too. I remember some very interesting incidents, and some clueless administrators/managers, definitely (some that stick in the mind: the bookstore where a coworker found a knife hidden in the bathroom and the manager wanted her to just throw it in the trash and not report it to police; the library foot fetishist, which would have been funnier had he not liked teenaged girls; and the bookstore that refused to close even when the air conditioning died in the middle of summer and it reached almost 90 degrees inside the store) .

    My worst/hardest job was sorting packages at the airport Post Office the year between high school and college. My dad had worked at the PO for almost 20 years at that point and kept talking about the great benefits (even though he never did anything but complain about his coworkers and the management), so I reluctantly agreed to give it a try. The job required THROWING the packages across the room into bins (and now you know why your packages arrive in the condition they do!). I could lift the boxes, just, but I didn’t have the upper-body strength to hurl them, so I quit after only 2 days. Also, I thought I’d go blind from the orange sodium lights. Like many of you, that job convinced me that college was the only way to go.

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    1. In case you were wondering, the first bookstore closed and that manager was fired from the company, amidst rumors that he’d been having an affair with a female district manager. The foot fetishist vanished in fairly short order, and we heard he’d been arrested on some kind of molestation charge; at any rate, we never saw him again.

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  11. Funny blog, Steve, and great stories everyone.

    Like several people here, I don’t consider myself to have had any truly awful jobs, though there have been some more memorable than others for various reasons.

    Waitressing, the summer before I started college, was probably the most physically demanding. That summer I worked three different jobs: the first I lasted 5 days, the second 4 hours, and the third the remainder of the summer. I have written snippets about each of these when I first joined the baboons. While waitressing can be both satisfying and rewarding in the right circumstances, I suspect that waitressing in a college town is more of a challenge. I recall at graduation time waiting on a table of 8, where the proud father of the graduate was treating the family and friends to a nice steak dinner. I remember busting my butt trying to make sure everyone got exactly what they ordered, only to be rewarded with no tip at the end of the dinner. On another occasion, two young men, seated near the entrance to the steak house, took off without paying their bill while I was clearing the dishes from their table. This after having consumed the two most expensive meals on the menu.

    But the positive experiences, by far, outweighed the negative. That’s how I met the woman who to this day is my best friend. She’d come in with her then boyfriend, and they’d always order the same thing. Tia stood out for a lot of reasons; she was short and fat, had outrageously colored red hair, long false eyelashes and was always in high spirits and talked a lot. She’d always ask if I had any spare doggie bones, and I would carefully save some big meaty ones for her. When I eventually met Romney, the dog, he was a tiny white mop of a dog, a Schitzu I think. Other student patrons would leave me everything from buttons, to green stamps and notes, instead of tips, they simply didn’t have any money. The regulars, the business men who came each day for lunch, were the ones who convinced me that I should apply to go to college. Without them, I might well still be waiting tables.

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    1. i remember the waitress stories. cant imagine anything worse. i went to a tgif here when they first opened up and got good and rowdy and told the guy i wanted his hat. i was being obnoxious and told him id stiff him on the tip if he didn’t sell me the hat so he did and i tipped him well but when i got home there was a message that i had forgotten to sign the bill for a total of 250 dollars or something like that. when i got there 2 days later to sign it the guy had quit because they made him pay for it out of his wages. i asked if they were going to forward the money to him seeing as i was indeed paying and they assured me they would. i have often wondered if they did.

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  12. I’m glad, in a way, that others have not experienced truly awful jobs. I think the job market had shifted since I was a kid. It is a sad fact that today it would be easy to find a worker to run those Hoovers. He would just have to be an undocumented Mexican.

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  13. i moved my stuff into a warehouse where they were doing recycling of plastic. it was a huge building with 30 foot ceilings and garbage truckes would back in and dump their loads of plastic, then it would be seperated by grunts who knew different types of plastic, then into the grinder where it would be shredded with a gring sound going through the kife blades that would turn jimmy hoffa into biodegratable pulp then repeat. they had this down to the point where it was a 24 7 operation and the gring and the powdered plastic dust wa always folooating through the air and the lights 30 feet up there appeared like the sun in a eclipse it was the eeriest feeling ever to be there with the noise and the stuff flaoating in the air. made me think of 1984 and the worker class test tube people. i felt like i was condeming people to hell to work in there. it lasted 6 months and i had to get the hell out of there. i hate moving but not being able to handle where you work makes it awful before it begins. i have to laugh with my office manager about some of the troubled people we have employed and how thankful it makes to have your life be so relatively on track.

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  14. Afternoon everyone.

    Thanks for the story Steve. I thought for sure you were making that up; Sort of along the lines of a ‘Confusing Fall Warbler’.

    I’ve mentioned before my fist job of pressing tuxedo coats and vests in a formal wear warehouse. Warm in there too. That only lasted a couple months one summer.
    After that I worked for the ASCS office (part of the Dept of Ag) and I measured fields and bins of corn or soybeans. Mostly I enjoyed that. I only got stuck on the top of a bin once when the ladder fell over. There was no one home (and this was back before cell phones) and I kept telling the farm dog ‘Go get help!’ He wasn’t that smart.
    And one hot day I was measuring a field and there were bugs and weeds and it was humid. I remember being grumpy.
    My wife will say ‘Walking Beans’ is about the worst job… (it’s cutting weeds in soybeans, usually with a hoe and typically done on the hottest summer days.) Picking rocks isn’t easy either.

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  15. Greetings! I definitely have a few nasty jobs in my past. I worked at a creamery in Green Bay for nearly 18 months and that was my impetus to finish college. I was the first full-time woman they hired to do heavy physical labor 10, 12 or more hours per day; lifting 40 to 70 lb cases of butter. The 70 lbs cases were just on Saturdays, but it was HARD, hot work. Still remember my first day. They had me start out with the 70 lb cases for the first hour, then I worked in the other part with the rest of the guys. They were all watching me. I was 19, slim and strong, so I just kind of waved back, and said “hi – howya doing.” Couldn’t let them know that the night before I had fearful visions of sexual molestation and gang rape, knowing I was the only woman there. Actually, there was another old gal named Goldie who worked part-time. Her hands were gnarled from arthritis, but she worked hard and fast.

    Turns out they were all nice, good guys — not terribly smart — but knew this was their job for life most likely. Once they saw I worked hard, could keep up with them and could handle it, they invited me out for beer after work. I was one of the guys. Two weeks after I started, we all went out for drinking and a party; and they confessed that they didn’t think I would last that long. They thought I was pretty cool. Eventually, I was ~promoted~ to foremen when they started a night shift and I had an affair with the night shift manager. Sordid stuff. Good thing I left for college.

    Here in Minnesota, I worked for a summer (like others) at the Green Giant plant in Glencoe on the production line. Horrible, messy work with 12 hour shifts. Went home crusted in corn juice and junk.

    But my very first job in Green Bay was as a waitress at Sambo’s — and I was a very BAD waitress. I would get flustered, hands shaking as I poured coffee, forgot people’s orders, tickets were added incorrectly, etc. But the manager liked me, so he made he hostess. That I did quite well.

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    1. I’d totally forgotten about Sambo’s! Being a child of the 70s, I’d never seen or heard of the book. I just liked the tigers. I remember asking my mom what “tiger butter” was, but she’d never seen the book either, so we speculated that the butter was stripey. I was horribly disappointed to find out I had nothing but plain old whipped butter on my pancakes! Once I did see the book, a decade or two after old Sambo’s closed, I was quite confused to find that it was set in India (where there are tigers) but depicted nasty African stereotypes (where, as you know, there are no tigers). The new version, “Little Babaji”, is much to be preferred.

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      1. I remember being vaguely disappointed, too, by Sambo’s the restaurant. I knew how “tiger butter” was made…and was expecting something somehow “more” than Perkins with different decor. Ah well.

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      1. I’m going to plead the fifth amendment here — I don’t recall exactly — but it was rather likely. None of the long-timer guys who worked days wanted to work night shift either. So it was R and me, and they hired a new crew of guys to work night shift.

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    3. I think there’s a cafe in S. Mpls called The Bad Waitress (Nicollet around 26th?) that I’ve always wanted to try. Anyone know it?

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      1. Yep! It’s where I pass the time waiting for my car when my curmudgeonly Saab mechanic is working on my car. It’s a funky neighborhood, full of all kinds of surprises, and the Bad Waitress has it’s share of them.

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  16. Jobs, bad ones and good ones, have so much to do with the people you work with. I have had jobs where I was like a fish out of water (working with accountants for instance…I was an enigma to them, and they to me!), and others where I quite naturally fit in. A lot of former coworkers, in most cases people I supervised, have remained close even after moving away. These are the folks who make the daily grind bearable in a lot of work places. Just this afternoon I received a Christmas card from one of them. She suffered several minor strokes this summer, her card informs me, but is recovering quite nicely, I’m happy to know. These annual update from friends, most of whom I haven’t seen in years, remain very important to me. As I discussed with one of Sherrilee’s former coworkers last night, people you work with 8 or more hours per day, five days a week, get to know you better than many of the people you call friends, and there’s a different, but very real bond there.

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    1. I still exchange cards with some of the nurses from the old days at Faribault Regional Center. Together, we made a really depressing place a good place to be. That is all good and I know that we are all still proud of it. Everybody thinks the “state hospitals” were such horrible places but you would have to be there to be able to see the goodness and love. You’re right, the people make all the difference.

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      1. There used to be a State Hospital in Rochester. It’s now the Federal Medical Center. (prison).
        I remember patients from there wandering away and stumbling onto our farm. (We’re only a few miles away as the crow flies).
        Dad says back in the 1940’s or ’50’s it wasn’t unusual for an patient to show up to help with farm work.
        Afterward Mom and Dad would feed them and call the sheriff who would come pick them up and take them back.
        When I was a child I was playing outside in the rain one day and saw a man come running from the woods into the machine shed. He was a patient who had walked away, got lost, lost a shoe and now was cold and tired. I remember Mom and Dad putting him in the shower, giving him coffee and calling the deputies.
        Not sure how I’d handle that if a prison inmate showed up these days.

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  17. I have really, actually enjoyed most of the jobs I’ve had, even the job providing total care for quadriplegic and developmentally disabled adults at the Faribault Regional Center. I really cared for those people and I didn’t mind doing some of the things that many people would not be able to do. There have been situations in almost every job (a coworker, a client, a particular task) that were difficult, challenging, or simply gross, but I think I’ve mostly enjoyed every single job. Maybe I would have finished college if I’d had some of the jobs you all have described.

    The worst job I ever had was a waitress at CJ’s Diner, a truck stop on the western edge of Faribault in the late ’70s. Some people really know how to verbally and emotionally hurt others, especially naive and vulnerable people like teenage girls. I think I’ve seen how this power of cruelty effects some people. I’ve never been treated that badly anywhere since. One night a truck driver abused me by sending me back when I came out with coffee and a menu. He wanted a milkshake, no coffee, no menu. So, I brought back the milk shake and he asked where I’d been with the coffee pot and the menu. Finally he ordered and I took his order to the kitchen. When I took his meal to him, he told me it was not what he had ordered. He sent me back with a new order and told me I’d have to pay for the meal he didn’t want. I went back and forth trying to reason with him, until I ended up in tears back in the room with the potatoes. The other waitress worked out his bill with him and asked him to leave. He didn’t give her any trouble, but she was in her 40s, thin and wiry with a lit cigarette in her mouth. Several months later, same job, I showed up for work at my usual time and there was a new girl there. My name had been erased from the schedule and a new name was where mine had been. I hung around, trying to find out what had happened, and why. Finally the head waitress told me that Mr. CJ had let me go but hadn’t wanted to tell me. I was supposed to figure it out on my own. Yeah, waitresses have it rough. “Come on boys, Don’t forget to tip ’em!”

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    1. Oh, Krista, that sounds horrible. And that was at a truck stop! Can you imagine what it’s like in the places where the waitresses are required to wear sexy, suggestive outfits? I had enough trouble in just a plain old waitresses get-up. One of my mantras is: “If you can’t afford to tip well for good service, you can’t afford to eat out.”

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    2. I had a housemate once who had a job at a truckstop. That’s a tough one. A lot of those truckers don’t have a lot of money, but you can’t pull a semi through the drive-thru at McDonald’s, so they’re gonna wind up at the truckstop. You would think that if they couldn’t leave a good tip they could at least have some manners, but my housemate’s stories were a lot like yours, Krista…except her coping strategy involved less crying and more swearing.

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  18. Kinda quiet, finally, around the college for a few weeks now. Meetings and catching up on computer things. And re-stacking lumber. And re-coiling cables *my way* –(NOT around your elbow! And my son taught me how to ‘over / under’ cables so tried his way too.) Nice.

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    1. I was informed by a visiting musician while I was in college that over/under keeps the cable from getting kinked up – and he was right. Still think of him every time I bundle a cord or cable. Happy coiling!

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      1. All right, I’m tired of the kinks from the elbow way – I can’t quite visualize how you do over under? (Anna, show me at the next BBC.)

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      1. may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. there’s more of gravy than of grave about you tiny clyde, whatever you are!”

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