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?

It struck me as appropriate for Black Friday, an orgy of unfettered purchasing, that we get a guest blog about making the most of the raw materials that surround you.
Today’s post is by Jim from Clark’s Grove.

As an impoverished student I learned to do a lot of improvising. In those days I got by with shelves made from boards and cement blocks which were also found in many other student apartments. I even had a guide to living as an impoverished student that gave all kinds suggestions for living cheaply. It gave a recipe for cooking a tasty chicken dish to serve on special occasions, along with instructions on making your own beer, and talked about using colorful cloth to cover worn out sofas and other things.

Most of the improvised things from our student days have been replaced by items that cost a little more and don’t need to be covered with colorful cloth. The lamp made from an over sized beer bottle is no longer in use. The board and block shelves were replaced by less rugged shelves made with 2 by 2s and boards and those shelves were finally replace some that were purchased at a furniture store.

We are still making use of some used furniture that we refinished during our student days. One of these items is a Hoosier cabinet that we bought for next to nothing at a back street auction house. We painted this cabinet and used it for many years before stripping it and giving it a coating of polyurethane. We even found a source of hardware that matched the style on the cabinet and replaced a broken latch. This cabinet has a lot of interesting features and is still in use for storing dishes and other things in our dining room.

There are some other pieces of refinished used furniture that we are still using. Most of these refinished items came from relatives. They include and old arts and craft styled oak kitchen table. The legs of the kitchen table were not refinished and still are covered with the old wood finish and decorative stripes of green paint. We are also using a refinished dresser that might be made of maple and a small refinished table made from some kind of fairly good looking wood. An old oak dresser has been stored for many years in our basement waiting refinishing, but I doubt that I will get around to working on it and I think it will end up as a donation to the Salvation Army.

The most treasured remnant of impoverished student days is a homemade spice rack still being used in our kitchen that is seen in the picture. It was made from some rustic wood slats that came from an old wooden orange crate and is filled with sets of recycled glass jars of various kinds. This is one of the few times that my tendency to hoard all kinds of things, including used jars, paid off. It isn‘t a highly attractive item, but it has a ‘folksy’ look that keeps it from sticking out like a sore thumb. It could use some new better looking jars with better looking labels on them. This spice shelf is a well liked reminder of the days when we didn’t have much money. It can never be replaced.

What is your favorite piece of re-claimed furniture?

Today’s guest post comes from Steve.

About a decade ago I was delighted to discover that I was a storyteller. Storytelling is amusing for others, and yet it can be so much more. I saw it as a rich activity that is essential to forming values and shaping the way we perceive the big issues in life. I was proud to identify myself as a teller of stories.

Maybe a year or two later, after some reflection, I began to see the dark side of storytelling. What could possibly be wrong with being a storyteller? In a word, storytellers are rotten listeners. There are exceptions, of course, but the statement is essentially true. Painfully true. And I began to see evidence that I was an especially inept listener.

It isn’t hard to see why. A storyteller is driven by a burning desire to tell a story that others will enjoy. But nobody can tell a story and listen at the same time, just as nobody can suck and blow simultaneously on a tube. The acts are incompatible. Telling stories well requires full concentration. When a storyteller isn’t actually talking it might look as if he or she is listening. The sad truth, however, is that a silent storyteller is (at best) listening with half an ear while preparing to trot out the next story. Most storytellers suffer impatiently while others talk, waiting until that other person shuts up and they can tell another story. Talking when they should be listening, storytellers fail to appreciate what others have to offer, and they typically fall into the trap of telling their favorite stories over and over.

While storytellers are a blessing to mankind, the greater need is for more folks who listen well. Listening well is the ultimate act of respect we can show for others. Because people talk inefficiently and repeat themselves, it is rarely necessary to listen closely. We can listen with half a mind without missing a thing. Listening well requires concentration and a bit of humility, and it is the rare person who concentrates with a full mind on what others have to say.

I was married to such a person. My former wife is the best listener I’ve met. I’ve often watched her relating to people she doesn’t know. She might ask a good question or two, but mostly she listens, and it is instructive to see how quickly people respond to that. They experience a glow of good feelings toward her without knowing that they are thrilling to the rare experience of being listened to. My former wife is a highly accomplished woman, and I’ve always felt that her business and personal success was based largely on her amazing ability to listen to others.

When I became aware of the terrible temptation that drives storytellers (including me) to talk too much, I resolved to listen better. I made a project of talking less and listening more. It was amusing to see how hard that was. After all, the normal mode for a storyteller is talking! Ironically enough, I suddenly found myself wanting to tell stories about the need for listening well.

Even so, I got better almost instantly. Because so few people bother to listen well, it is actually easy to become a superior listener. If you make an effort—even a small effort—you will do far better than most of us do in daily life. And if you want to do even better than that, there are a few well-known techniques that signal to others that we are listening attentively to them. (A typical “trick” of listening well is repeating what someone has just told you, which is a strong signal that you are interested and are paying attention.)

Just at the time I had launched my project to become a better listener I gave a ride to Carolyn, a young woman in my book club. I hardly knew her, although I liked Carolyn, for she is a passionate reader of books. Carolyn and I were making small talk as I drove her home from the club meeting. I think I had just asked her about her job. I was preparing to tell her a story about bad jobs . . . but I stopped myself. I thought, “Shut up, Steve! Be a listener, not a damned talker.” And then I noticed that Carolyn had just spoken the same sentence, word for word, two times in a row. That seemed odd. I ditched the amusing story I had queued up and instead asked Caroline a question about what she was trying to say.

Both of us were shocked when Carolyn burst into tears. Because she scarcely knew me, she was embarrassed, and yet she couldn’t stop sobbing for several minutes. I fought the impulse to start blathering advice. What Carolyn needed, obviously enough, was someone to listen.

Carolyn explained that she had doubts about everything in her life. Although she was fond of the young man she was living with, she knew he would be a terrible husband. He was pressuring her to buy a house with him, which would have made the relationship more complicated and difficult to leave. She had equal doubts about her job and the profession she was preparing to enter. When Carolyn looked at her life, “everything” about it seemed wrong, and she was being pushed toward commit to several decisions she dreaded making. She was terrified.

We talked. I don’t know if the things I said to her that night did any good. I’m sure it was a good thing that I had listened to her. I’m sure the way Carolyn opened her heart that night was ultimately good for her, for she dragged all her unacknowledged demons out of the closet and shoved them in the bright light of day. At the very least, I knew that the trust Carolyn had shown me was a thumping validation of the wisdom of listening well.

I knew a ranch hand in northern Montana, a man named Sonny Turner. His weathered face had a lot of character, particularly since his long nose slanted sharply to the right. I once asked, “Sonny? How in hell did your nose get so crooked?” Sonny said, “Oh, that happened in a bar in Williston. It was one of them times when I was talking when I shoulda been listening.” I knew just what he meant.

Are you a good listener?

Are you a good listener?