This is part two in a series in which I reflect upon the numerous opportunities I've had to demonstrate the flexibilities of my protestant work ethic. You can find part one here.
My time of being a gas station sweeper/painter earned me enough pay to keep me happily unemployed during my freshman year of college. I was able to learn all of life's important lessons and attend classes without the hassle of having to do anything much more than making sure that I had enough Mountain Dew in the refrigerator to get me through the week. Of course, it helped that I had a pretty nice scholarship that kept four cinderblock walls around me and a cement slab roof over my head, not to mention that the salt-peter laced food of the cafeteria was kindly provided to me gratis by a Presidential Award (and to think, I never thanked him for all of those fried fish fillet sandwiches). But with the summer of 1990 looming, I knew that my idle time had to be filled. My father wouldn't stand by and let me do nothing. So I started making phone calls. Genius me came up with a plan. I would move to Atlanta for the summer and stay with my Aunt Jackie. Jackie's husband, Rex, said that he could easily get me some sort of job working on the truck docks at the company that employed him as an accountant.
So after moving in with my aunt and uncle, peeing in a cup, and spending three weeks gainfully employed as first a file clerk and then a dock sweeper, I was given a pink slip. Seems my salary pushed the company to the edge of bankruptcy. Feeling a little guilty that his promise to get me a job landed me only the prospect of drawing unemployment, my uncle made a few more calls. While at a party, he ran across an old friend who had a friend who knew someone who could get me a job working for an environmental engineering company. And so it happened.
I spent the rest of that summer working on the 11th floor of the Colony Square building in midtown Atlanta, making $7.50 an hour as an "intern." My job was to make sure the copier ran efficiently, to deliver samples to the lab on the other side of town during rush hour on a Friday afternoon, and to keep the desk chair that I sat in from making too much noise. Eventually, I was trained to do some of the asbestos testing and was sent out on the real grunt jobs—the places that had to be tested at two in the morning. Toward the end of my tenure at the firm, they decided to send me on a weeklong trip to Albany, Georgia, to test for lead paint at a housing project. Albany in August is no Amsterdam.
I made it back to school in time for fall semester, with stuffed pockets and another quarter of blissful unemployment to keep me busy. But I wasn't through with work. Just before Christmas break, my old boss at the engineering firm called and wanted to know if I could spend my month off testing for asbestos at Shaw Air Force Base in beautiful Sumter, South Carolina. Knowing that this would probably secure my unemployment until at least the following summer, I decided to spend my break with some like-minded people, working by day, drinking by night. Not much else to do in Sumter when the entire base was pretty much locked down because of the impending war. Hazards of this job included straying too close to the flight line when a B52 was landing and entering by accident a classified area which subsequently led to being asked to go "face down" by a couple of guys holding guns (which is not what anyone wants to hear, but especially if you're in South Carolina; ask Ned Beatty).
