Crappy Jobs part 5...

Hopefully I can wrap this up and bring you up to the present day in my crappy jobs. The R. L. Polk job was seasonal, so when we canvassed the entire area, I donned my backpack and crashed the student union job placement notebook again. One of the jobs I got was at the Valspar paint factory. I was hired as a lab assistant, it sounds great but I swept floors and fetched chemicals for the lab technicians. They gave me a metal bucket with a big jumper cable clamp on it. (the clamp was to ground the bucket to the spigot to prevent sparks and fire) I had to go down to the basement and get chemicals (from a spaghetti network of piping) that had names like FH-2, AD-8 etc. I had no idea what they were, but they gave me a hell of a buzz. As a matter of a fact all the employees there walked around like they inhaled way too much of the chemicals. The scary part was it was a very old building and the big paint vats were accessed from big holes in the floor. One wrong step and you could be part of the next batch of eggshell ceiling paint. I lasted about 3 months when the next student union job called.

It was the big boss at the county highway department. They had a part time temporary job open at one of their satellite garages cleaning up at the grounds for the summer. I started June of 1986 for $4.78 an hour with no benefits. I was still playing guitar in bars for whiskey and food (and a few dollars) so a government job seemed like a good idea. Plus I know how the government works, part time today could be full time tomorrow. The supervisor at the east garage was Don Shoudel. On the outside, he was a 300 pound mean son-of-a-bitch, but once you got to know him, he was one of the nicest guys you would ever meet. He would give you the shirt off his back and really helped me out when it got close to laying me off. I developed a strategy to lengthen my employment status. On Thursday afternoon of Friday morning, I would completely tear everything out of an area of the garage to give it a thorough cleaning. Of course, there would not be enough time to complete the job as needed by the end of the week and I would have to come back monday to finish it up. I would then coast until Thursday or Friday and start the process all over again. I did do a good job cleaning and Don made a few phone calls and they kept me on; part time still, but at least I still had a job.

I worked part time at the east garage until November of 1987 when a full time position came up. I became an official government full-time employee with benefits! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I traded the 76 pacer for 78 Ford Granada and rolled the biggest fattie I could hold in my grubby little hands. It had been a long time (since the bowling alley manager job in Garland) since I had health insurance, vacation days and the job security a 26 year old needs. The rest is history. I have been at the highway department for 21 years. I now hold (with pride I may say) the crappiest job ever. Plowing snow sucks, I take that back, it is actually fun for about the first hour, then it sucks. But like I said at the beginning, (whoda thunk it would take 5 posts to get this far?) in today's economy, we should be happy to have any job. I write this post with a pending snow storm and a scheduled mandatory overtime posting for us to come in at 4 am.

We made it, thanks for stopping in...