I would love to hear all the TBPers tell their “dirty job” stories and the attendant life lessons (HSF has been doing this). Should be educational…
My job cleaning up a bakery back home down south in the summertime during high school was absolutely the hardest, dirtiest work imaginable. The heat of the bread ovens and no air conditioner was just a bonus. I know what you’re thinking: free pastry. Believe me that I was covered in dough, powdered sugar and flour dust and a free pastry would have made me barf after an 8-hour shift.
What I realized was that the boss worked even harder and got up at 330 am every morning to make the mess I cleaned up for 2.25/hr. I learned young what it was going to take to run a successful business and I never forgot the experience.
I’ve had clients who owned bakeries and your commentary is spot-on. Hard workin’ bunch!
Gator
March 12, 2018 8:48 pm
I like his line about student loans even better. SOmething along the lines of ‘we are loaning money we don’t have to kids who can’t repay it to train them for jobs that don’t exist anymore’. True story.
Captain Willard, I haven’t had anything quite like that, but I worked in a nursery in high school, and it was hard, dirty work. Mainly loading heavy, dirty things into people cars. Especially hated sod. Speaking of sod, I also did landscaping for a few months before going into boot camp. Also, obviously, had to deal with sod. I will say that sucks more than just about anything else I’ve had to do – laying sod, on a pretty steep hill that you of course have to walk up carrying sod, in the middle of the day, in July, in Georgia, so its hot as hell. Landscaping really wasn’t that bad, but god damn I hated laying sod. I’d usually have to go pick up a couple (probably) illegals from where they’d hang out looking for day jobs when we had a big yard to do. Those fuckers would do it from sun up until the job was done for 50$ cash. Wouldn’t hardly take breaks either.
Zipsaw
March 12, 2018 9:26 pm
In high school I worked on a chicken farm. We had 16k chickens. I used to shovel out the coops in the summer. Nothing like 95 deg. day humid with putrefied chicken shit. Dust and ammonia eggs buried for so long they had a vacuum inside. If you broke them you would gag. Bringing dead chickens covered in maggots to the “pit”. Honest to god I saw rats as big as cats take down chickens. This was the time when the movie Willard came out. The nastiest thing I had to do is remove chicken shit soup from a flooded coop. That stuff smelled. I miss-stepped and lost my boot. The next step took a while to take but……. I was 15 and working 45 to 50 hours a week in the summer and 38 to 44 during school. Had that job for three years before going into the Navy. I worked on the fight deck as an AT. Then worked full time in a pasta factory and put myself thu college full time. I graduated with a BS in Manufacturing Engineering Technology. I am currently in the best job I ever have had as an assistant professor at a small technical community college. I am actually teaching a worth while job skill in machining and manufacturing software. The problem is we can not find students worth as shit.( I usually take more care in writing but I figured this would be more enjoyable with run on sentences.)
What run-on sentences, Zippy? The run-on sentence is a myth, what prissy English teachers call a run-on sentence is nothing more than a lack of punctuation. But look up Geo Washington for a good example, actually, several.
Geeze…..my job would have seemed like a week of vacation compared to the chicken shack. Respect!
Thunderbird
March 12, 2018 10:13 pm
Times have changed and so have people. Each generation has it’s own experiences. Wealth comes from work. The lack of it comes from sloth. It’s a natural law.
The rich get richer because they are material. The poor get poorer in this country because they have traded their freedom for government.
Don’t know what happened to the last two generations but they sure dropped the ball when it comes to the american dream. Free education along with freedom wasted for some wild dream that government on all levels is going to take care of them. This mentality has gotten so absurd that even the 911 calls have overwhelmed their purpose.
This is america today for the majority. Fortunately there is a percentage of Americans that really believe in freedom and responsibility. Hopefully this small group will carry America through these dark times.
Boat Guy
March 13, 2018 8:19 am
Everyone leaves out the 800 pound gorilla in the room and that’s government reps sold out American workers for a ride on the circle jerk . That ever present Wall Street to K-Street to Capitol Street and it all started in 1913 with the creature from Jekyll Island . With the monatary policies devaluing currency unfair trade deals favoring huge amounts of high paying production jobs move to countries that have literally slave labor and even child labor . The corporate bottom line goes up directly in proportation to the unemployment and welfare line increase !
Then there is the left bringing illegals to be cheap labor and votes and the right turning a blind eye to the illegal issue because it drives wages down until there daughters are raped or carjacked .
Just recently the public utility had contractors come in my community to run new underground power lines . Not one of the contractors employees spoke English or were taller than 5 foot nothing . This is no accident however when you look at the nations tax base and the damage incurred to American families the finger points to the CEO’s of American corporations and the senate and congress selling out Americans for 30 pieces of silver . The add now is $10 dollars per hour must have own transportation LMAO
TC
March 13, 2018 9:13 am
Had all sorts of odd jobs growing up from landscaping, masonry assistant and mechanic, but the nastiest job had to be doing detail work at a dumpy used car lot. People do and leave some pretty repugnant shit in their old beater cars they trade in for another crappy beater car, albeit one that has been polished to a (temporary) fine shine. The education I gained at that place not just about sleazy sales tactics, but also about humanity was worth the price of admission. My boss was a round, seemingly jovial guy who was as slick as they come. Dude always wore a smile, but also carried a giant .45 revolver with him at all times. Dealed almost exclusively in cash. That guy knew how his customers ticked better than they knew themselves.
TPC
March 13, 2018 9:35 am
I work in manufacturing (early 30s). Our standard shift workers come and go, typically making it about 90 days before leaving.
I don’t get it. The work is steady enough that you aren’t bored, but not so high octane that a slow worker gets left behind. For those who want advancement, we have options. Its not air-conditioned, but its mostly climate controlled, rarely getting below the 40s and stalling out in the low 90s. You aren’t in the direct sun….hell, most jobs involve just driving a forklift around and picking orders.
Its not hard. I don’t get it. If I had a job like this when I entered the work force I wouldn’t have bothered with college.
hardscrabble farmer
March 13, 2018 9:42 am
I think work and liberty are very closely connected. People who dislike the concept- and of course the practice- of work are those most likely to see Government as the source of their provender. Indolence is a form of slavery. People who are perpetually busy don’t have the time to interfere in other people’s lives because they are involved in their own.
I think of work as a form of worship- to do something for myself, my family, my property, my friends and neighbors and especially my Creator is it’s own reward. Every calorie expended delivers a payback in confidence, skills, fitness and mental acuity that was not present before.
It’s a great shame that so many people look down upon it to their own detriment.
I am 42, and have lots of real labour experience. I grew up in a rural area with a civil servant dad who liked to do another full-time job’s worth of farm/woods labour in his “spare time”. Starting at age 6, I drove a tractor around the field so he could pick up hay bales. By 11 I was getting dropped off by my stay-at-home mom in various fields around our community that Dad rented, to do the raking while dad was at his day job. By 13 I was doing all aspects of making hay, all by myself. Did I have a cell phone? hahahaha
At age 15 I got a call from a dairy farmer up the road because I’d gotten a reputation for being good (and prudent, unlike other teenagers) with a tractor. I ended up working there for two summers. They milked out of a 1945 barn that didn’t even have an automatic gutter cleaner, so every morning there started with me using a shovel and manure cart (trolley on overhead track) to clean out the gutters. After they were shoveled out, it was over to the horse barn. I lugged a few wheelbarrow loads of the manure/straw mix that was shoveled out of there back to the dairy barn, because it was better at absorbing liquid cow manure than straw alone. I never helped with milking (I started at 8 and the milking was finished by 7:15). They had automatic milkers, but not a pipeline – they still used the first generation of milkers that were suspended under the cow from a belt, and attached to a stainless steel “pail”.
When this pail got full, it was detached from the milker and lugged to the milk tank. At that time they milked about 35 head. It was a 3-generation farm, and the old patriarch used to milk 26 cows by hand, twice a day, until they got the milker in the 1950’s.
The highlight there would have been filling the hay mow. If the temp outside was 85°, inside the mow (once it got close to filled) it would have been probably around 125°, with hay chaff so thick you could barely breathe. No dust mask of course. Their remedy for such extremely sweat-inducing conditions was a mixture of ice water, salt, sugar, a little pit of cinnamon and a bit of rolled oats – sort of an old-school Gatorade. It worked.
Later on I worked at a large chicken farm for 4 years, putting myself through school. I mostly gathered eggs out of the large breeder barns – two floors with about 3000 chickens and 400 very aggressive roosters per floor, all running loose. As Zipsaw says, the air was bad, especially in the winter when it was too cold to use the fans much. We had to wear the cartridge masks. When I wasn’t gathering eggs, I worked on the farm crew and did vaccinations, loaded birds into cages and loaded the cages onto tractor trailers, cleaned out barns, etc. As dirty a job as you can imagine.
My last two summers in school I worked in the woods, cutting timber for sawlogs, pulpwood, firewood, fence posts, etc. Of all the things I’ve ever done, nothing gets me sweating like running a chainsaw, and its not even close. My partner and I were in the woods by 6:00 am and out by 3:00 pm, and I would drink about 4 gallons of water a day.
After that (having graduated with a BSc in Forestry) I worked for a summer in Denver for a tree care company. I went down with a bunch of other students under the impression that we’d be doing arborist work, but when we got there they informed us that we’d be spraying pesticides all summer. That was physical work, but not remotely difficult compared to what I was used to.
Aside from that I worked for a short time installing woodstoves, chimneys and also cleaning chimneys. Shimmying across the 35′ ridge peak of a Victorian house with a metal roof in work boots with no safety harness would always sharpen my concentration, but luckily I wasn’t scared of heights.
I had a job being a rod man on a survey crew for awhile building a new 4-lane highway. Very loud and dusty.
I did timber cruising for about 5 months one fall/early winter, doing the stands that the company’s summer crews had considered “inaccessible”. Lots of walking in bad weather.
I did a stint being a floor mat delivery/pick up guy. Nothing says status like asking businessmen entering a bank to step aside so you can roll up the 3’x12′ floor mat, saturated with slush, salt and dirt.
Now I work in an office and chuckle under my breath whenever I hear someone complaining about “how hard” their job is.
I can hear the pride in your voice just by reading the words.
turlock
March 13, 2018 10:13 am
i went to work at age 13 in the family ice plant. Weighed about 100 lbs. Had to load 56 ice cakes (300 lbs each) per truck. On a hot summer day, 25-30 trucks loaded. My twin brother and I had to work together pushing and pulling to move the ice. Hands got bloody by day 2, callouses by week 3. By age 15, I could do anything with a pair of tongs and ice. Hard work and long hours. Parents put all the wage money in the bank for future college expenses. Had to work a second job for pocket money. Often worked 80-90 hours a week. Left there at age 19, believing I could handle life and most of it would be easier than what I was leaving. I. Was. Right. Thank God and my parents for the crash course in reality.
Awesome memories for you!
By the way, I assume you’ve seen the classic Three Stooges skit of the boys as ice delivery men.
Done in Dallas
March 13, 2018 11:08 am
Had the typical fast food restaurant job in high school.
Worked through college doing the following jobs all in South Lousiana:
Car muffler repair shop. Summer before college. Welding etc under cars. Had my own 5 gallon water cooler that I would drain during the day.
Plumbers helper 2 years. Thankfully, new construction so I only rarely had to tie into new sewer lines. Dug ditches for underground plumbing, ran copper in walls etc. Some freakin’ hard work in the summers.
Worked in a beer distributorship. Unloading tractor trailers sucked. They used to run over I-12 around Slidell, and it would tip pallets over. Hundreds of dead Miller Ponies in the back of a trailer in 95 degree heat, you get the idea… Had to unload kegs and stack them in the cooler etc. Never lifted any weights very seriously, but years later my sons friends in high school thought I was some kind of freak. Attribute it to hard labor…
rhs jr
March 13, 2018 11:19 am
As a poor country boy, I had to do it all too. Got to mention the strong ammonia smell in chicken houses; Jacksonville City Blacks would refuse to go in and would just stand around; they also refused to clean toilets at the Junior College. Slaughter and rendering houses smell good in the summer; milking is hard work. As an electrician’s helper, I had to go into the attics and it felt like A/C outside when I’d come down. I’ve been a mule unloading freight train cars and semi-trailers; carried everything builders needed up ladders and stairs; carried steel and cement building bridges. Working in the hot summer sun is hard whether it’s harvesting a field of something or building something; very few city slickers can do it, especially their silly liberal pussy youth.
CA
March 13, 2018 1:16 pm
I was ‘lucky’ enough to get a job in hi school doing tires of all sizes. From wheelbarrows to 980 loaders. By the time I graduated I would do a set of 10 on a dump truck in an hour by myself. That was back in the day of split rims only. Beat them with a bead axe, pull and stuff the tubes in. The shop was busy enough that I worked ten hour days. That didn’t include the loading and unloading the warehouse and stacking them ten high by myself.
The first year I went to university I ate every meal like my last and due to the fact I wasn’t playing sports or working I put on 50 pounds. Lost 40 of it the first month back to work.
Ragnar Deneskjold
March 13, 2018 1:29 pm
I used to work hard. Only did it for 30 years. Management/sales for two of the biggest companies in the world. Extreme travel, long days, big paychecks. I generally enjoyed my work very much and understood how hard others worked for a fraction of my wage.
Now I await a 1st in person SS disability hearing – 28 months after initial filing and summary dismissals. Have suffered with chronic pain (statin induced) for 12 years as it gets progressively worse. I wish I could work like I used to, but that is not up to me.
Enjoy your good health and do not take it for granted.
Ragnar- Disability pays a little better than SS if you are near the age of drawing a check. It is my understanding that you can keep the disability payment in lieu of SS if it is higher. Reason 101 not to take statins.
Robert (QSLV)
March 13, 2018 1:29 pm
The lagoon / swamp water hazard at the local golf course. I was about 12 then and discovered that I could sell retrieved golf balls to the golfers passing by. There was a lake in the middle with a reed island in the middle of that, covered with golf balls. To reach the water you had to traverse the ring of floating reeds around the perimeter of the lagoon. Easy to fall through and get stuck in the mud. Without a good staff to pull myself out, I might have stayed in till the next drought, when the course parkies might have found me.
So the deal was all the easy retrievals were done and I decided to swim to the island. The first time I got about 75 balls. More leeches, though. I removed about a hundred. Went out a few more times and the pickens became slim. So I would dive the mud at the bottom of the lagoon and found more that way (both balls and leeches).
We used to skate this lagoon in the winter and occasionally someone fell through the ice. We’d pull the kid out and bring him home before he froze to death. One winter day, a kid fell through and died. He went down there alone and had no help to get out. Times were different back in the day.
Robert (QSLV[img[/img]
Boat Guy
March 13, 2018 7:23 pm
Did my part time stretch hustling wood cases of quart bottles of soda , home delivery every Saturday morning for 2 years and a paper route for 3 then gas jockey for 2 all over laping generally always 2 part time gigs . After 1 year of lifting soda cases when I went out for football it paid off LOL . The man that had the route gave it up to a father son group and he became a cop and retired a detective . I kept going with a work ethic that never failed me . But times and employers along with regulations are all different . A 13 year old boy riding in a stepvan with the doors open holding on to the grab bar seated on a fold down jump seat would not go for snowflakes today …
I would love to hear all the TBPers tell their “dirty job” stories and the attendant life lessons (HSF has been doing this). Should be educational…
My job cleaning up a bakery back home down south in the summertime during high school was absolutely the hardest, dirtiest work imaginable. The heat of the bread ovens and no air conditioner was just a bonus. I know what you’re thinking: free pastry. Believe me that I was covered in dough, powdered sugar and flour dust and a free pastry would have made me barf after an 8-hour shift.
What I realized was that the boss worked even harder and got up at 330 am every morning to make the mess I cleaned up for 2.25/hr. I learned young what it was going to take to run a successful business and I never forgot the experience.
3:30? Was your boss sleeping in? The local donut shop had workers there before midnight. Morning donuts ain’t gonna make themselves, you know.
I’ve had clients who owned bakeries and your commentary is spot-on. Hard workin’ bunch!
I like his line about student loans even better. SOmething along the lines of ‘we are loaning money we don’t have to kids who can’t repay it to train them for jobs that don’t exist anymore’. True story.
Captain Willard, I haven’t had anything quite like that, but I worked in a nursery in high school, and it was hard, dirty work. Mainly loading heavy, dirty things into people cars. Especially hated sod. Speaking of sod, I also did landscaping for a few months before going into boot camp. Also, obviously, had to deal with sod. I will say that sucks more than just about anything else I’ve had to do – laying sod, on a pretty steep hill that you of course have to walk up carrying sod, in the middle of the day, in July, in Georgia, so its hot as hell. Landscaping really wasn’t that bad, but god damn I hated laying sod. I’d usually have to go pick up a couple (probably) illegals from where they’d hang out looking for day jobs when we had a big yard to do. Those fuckers would do it from sun up until the job was done for 50$ cash. Wouldn’t hardly take breaks either.
In high school I worked on a chicken farm. We had 16k chickens. I used to shovel out the coops in the summer. Nothing like 95 deg. day humid with putrefied chicken shit. Dust and ammonia eggs buried for so long they had a vacuum inside. If you broke them you would gag. Bringing dead chickens covered in maggots to the “pit”. Honest to god I saw rats as big as cats take down chickens. This was the time when the movie Willard came out. The nastiest thing I had to do is remove chicken shit soup from a flooded coop. That stuff smelled. I miss-stepped and lost my boot. The next step took a while to take but……. I was 15 and working 45 to 50 hours a week in the summer and 38 to 44 during school. Had that job for three years before going into the Navy. I worked on the fight deck as an AT. Then worked full time in a pasta factory and put myself thu college full time. I graduated with a BS in Manufacturing Engineering Technology. I am currently in the best job I ever have had as an assistant professor at a small technical community college. I am actually teaching a worth while job skill in machining and manufacturing software. The problem is we can not find students worth as shit.( I usually take more care in writing but I figured this would be more enjoyable with run on sentences.)
What run-on sentences, Zippy? The run-on sentence is a myth, what prissy English teachers call a run-on sentence is nothing more than a lack of punctuation. But look up Geo Washington for a good example, actually, several.
Geeze…..my job would have seemed like a week of vacation compared to the chicken shack. Respect!
Times have changed and so have people. Each generation has it’s own experiences. Wealth comes from work. The lack of it comes from sloth. It’s a natural law.
The rich get richer because they are material. The poor get poorer in this country because they have traded their freedom for government.
Don’t know what happened to the last two generations but they sure dropped the ball when it comes to the american dream. Free education along with freedom wasted for some wild dream that government on all levels is going to take care of them. This mentality has gotten so absurd that even the 911 calls have overwhelmed their purpose.
This is america today for the majority. Fortunately there is a percentage of Americans that really believe in freedom and responsibility. Hopefully this small group will carry America through these dark times.
Everyone leaves out the 800 pound gorilla in the room and that’s government reps sold out American workers for a ride on the circle jerk . That ever present Wall Street to K-Street to Capitol Street and it all started in 1913 with the creature from Jekyll Island . With the monatary policies devaluing currency unfair trade deals favoring huge amounts of high paying production jobs move to countries that have literally slave labor and even child labor . The corporate bottom line goes up directly in proportation to the unemployment and welfare line increase !
Then there is the left bringing illegals to be cheap labor and votes and the right turning a blind eye to the illegal issue because it drives wages down until there daughters are raped or carjacked .
Just recently the public utility had contractors come in my community to run new underground power lines . Not one of the contractors employees spoke English or were taller than 5 foot nothing . This is no accident however when you look at the nations tax base and the damage incurred to American families the finger points to the CEO’s of American corporations and the senate and congress selling out Americans for 30 pieces of silver . The add now is $10 dollars per hour must have own transportation LMAO
Had all sorts of odd jobs growing up from landscaping, masonry assistant and mechanic, but the nastiest job had to be doing detail work at a dumpy used car lot. People do and leave some pretty repugnant shit in their old beater cars they trade in for another crappy beater car, albeit one that has been polished to a (temporary) fine shine. The education I gained at that place not just about sleazy sales tactics, but also about humanity was worth the price of admission. My boss was a round, seemingly jovial guy who was as slick as they come. Dude always wore a smile, but also carried a giant .45 revolver with him at all times. Dealed almost exclusively in cash. That guy knew how his customers ticked better than they knew themselves.
I work in manufacturing (early 30s). Our standard shift workers come and go, typically making it about 90 days before leaving.
I don’t get it. The work is steady enough that you aren’t bored, but not so high octane that a slow worker gets left behind. For those who want advancement, we have options. Its not air-conditioned, but its mostly climate controlled, rarely getting below the 40s and stalling out in the low 90s. You aren’t in the direct sun….hell, most jobs involve just driving a forklift around and picking orders.
Its not hard. I don’t get it. If I had a job like this when I entered the work force I wouldn’t have bothered with college.
I think work and liberty are very closely connected. People who dislike the concept- and of course the practice- of work are those most likely to see Government as the source of their provender. Indolence is a form of slavery. People who are perpetually busy don’t have the time to interfere in other people’s lives because they are involved in their own.
I think of work as a form of worship- to do something for myself, my family, my property, my friends and neighbors and especially my Creator is it’s own reward. Every calorie expended delivers a payback in confidence, skills, fitness and mental acuity that was not present before.
It’s a great shame that so many people look down upon it to their own detriment.
On a roll today, HSF. ?
As St. Lawrence said: “to work is to pray”.
I am 42, and have lots of real labour experience. I grew up in a rural area with a civil servant dad who liked to do another full-time job’s worth of farm/woods labour in his “spare time”. Starting at age 6, I drove a tractor around the field so he could pick up hay bales. By 11 I was getting dropped off by my stay-at-home mom in various fields around our community that Dad rented, to do the raking while dad was at his day job. By 13 I was doing all aspects of making hay, all by myself. Did I have a cell phone? hahahaha
At age 15 I got a call from a dairy farmer up the road because I’d gotten a reputation for being good (and prudent, unlike other teenagers) with a tractor. I ended up working there for two summers. They milked out of a 1945 barn that didn’t even have an automatic gutter cleaner, so every morning there started with me using a shovel and manure cart (trolley on overhead track) to clean out the gutters. After they were shoveled out, it was over to the horse barn. I lugged a few wheelbarrow loads of the manure/straw mix that was shoveled out of there back to the dairy barn, because it was better at absorbing liquid cow manure than straw alone. I never helped with milking (I started at 8 and the milking was finished by 7:15). They had automatic milkers, but not a pipeline – they still used the first generation of milkers that were suspended under the cow from a belt, and attached to a stainless steel “pail”.
http://surgemilker.com/history.html
When this pail got full, it was detached from the milker and lugged to the milk tank. At that time they milked about 35 head. It was a 3-generation farm, and the old patriarch used to milk 26 cows by hand, twice a day, until they got the milker in the 1950’s.
The highlight there would have been filling the hay mow. If the temp outside was 85°, inside the mow (once it got close to filled) it would have been probably around 125°, with hay chaff so thick you could barely breathe. No dust mask of course. Their remedy for such extremely sweat-inducing conditions was a mixture of ice water, salt, sugar, a little pit of cinnamon and a bit of rolled oats – sort of an old-school Gatorade. It worked.
Later on I worked at a large chicken farm for 4 years, putting myself through school. I mostly gathered eggs out of the large breeder barns – two floors with about 3000 chickens and 400 very aggressive roosters per floor, all running loose. As Zipsaw says, the air was bad, especially in the winter when it was too cold to use the fans much. We had to wear the cartridge masks. When I wasn’t gathering eggs, I worked on the farm crew and did vaccinations, loaded birds into cages and loaded the cages onto tractor trailers, cleaned out barns, etc. As dirty a job as you can imagine.
My last two summers in school I worked in the woods, cutting timber for sawlogs, pulpwood, firewood, fence posts, etc. Of all the things I’ve ever done, nothing gets me sweating like running a chainsaw, and its not even close. My partner and I were in the woods by 6:00 am and out by 3:00 pm, and I would drink about 4 gallons of water a day.
After that (having graduated with a BSc in Forestry) I worked for a summer in Denver for a tree care company. I went down with a bunch of other students under the impression that we’d be doing arborist work, but when we got there they informed us that we’d be spraying pesticides all summer. That was physical work, but not remotely difficult compared to what I was used to.
Aside from that I worked for a short time installing woodstoves, chimneys and also cleaning chimneys. Shimmying across the 35′ ridge peak of a Victorian house with a metal roof in work boots with no safety harness would always sharpen my concentration, but luckily I wasn’t scared of heights.
I had a job being a rod man on a survey crew for awhile building a new 4-lane highway. Very loud and dusty.
I did timber cruising for about 5 months one fall/early winter, doing the stands that the company’s summer crews had considered “inaccessible”. Lots of walking in bad weather.
I did a stint being a floor mat delivery/pick up guy. Nothing says status like asking businessmen entering a bank to step aside so you can roll up the 3’x12′ floor mat, saturated with slush, salt and dirt.
Now I work in an office and chuckle under my breath whenever I hear someone complaining about “how hard” their job is.
That’s what I’m talking about.
I can hear the pride in your voice just by reading the words.
i went to work at age 13 in the family ice plant. Weighed about 100 lbs. Had to load 56 ice cakes (300 lbs each) per truck. On a hot summer day, 25-30 trucks loaded. My twin brother and I had to work together pushing and pulling to move the ice. Hands got bloody by day 2, callouses by week 3. By age 15, I could do anything with a pair of tongs and ice. Hard work and long hours. Parents put all the wage money in the bank for future college expenses. Had to work a second job for pocket money. Often worked 80-90 hours a week. Left there at age 19, believing I could handle life and most of it would be easier than what I was leaving. I. Was. Right. Thank God and my parents for the crash course in reality.
Awesome memories for you!
By the way, I assume you’ve seen the classic Three Stooges skit of the boys as ice delivery men.
Had the typical fast food restaurant job in high school.
Worked through college doing the following jobs all in South Lousiana:
Car muffler repair shop. Summer before college. Welding etc under cars. Had my own 5 gallon water cooler that I would drain during the day.
Plumbers helper 2 years. Thankfully, new construction so I only rarely had to tie into new sewer lines. Dug ditches for underground plumbing, ran copper in walls etc. Some freakin’ hard work in the summers.
Worked in a beer distributorship. Unloading tractor trailers sucked. They used to run over I-12 around Slidell, and it would tip pallets over. Hundreds of dead Miller Ponies in the back of a trailer in 95 degree heat, you get the idea… Had to unload kegs and stack them in the cooler etc. Never lifted any weights very seriously, but years later my sons friends in high school thought I was some kind of freak. Attribute it to hard labor…
As a poor country boy, I had to do it all too. Got to mention the strong ammonia smell in chicken houses; Jacksonville City Blacks would refuse to go in and would just stand around; they also refused to clean toilets at the Junior College. Slaughter and rendering houses smell good in the summer; milking is hard work. As an electrician’s helper, I had to go into the attics and it felt like A/C outside when I’d come down. I’ve been a mule unloading freight train cars and semi-trailers; carried everything builders needed up ladders and stairs; carried steel and cement building bridges. Working in the hot summer sun is hard whether it’s harvesting a field of something or building something; very few city slickers can do it, especially their silly liberal pussy youth.
I was ‘lucky’ enough to get a job in hi school doing tires of all sizes. From wheelbarrows to 980 loaders. By the time I graduated I would do a set of 10 on a dump truck in an hour by myself. That was back in the day of split rims only. Beat them with a bead axe, pull and stuff the tubes in. The shop was busy enough that I worked ten hour days. That didn’t include the loading and unloading the warehouse and stacking them ten high by myself.
The first year I went to university I ate every meal like my last and due to the fact I wasn’t playing sports or working I put on 50 pounds. Lost 40 of it the first month back to work.
I used to work hard. Only did it for 30 years. Management/sales for two of the biggest companies in the world. Extreme travel, long days, big paychecks. I generally enjoyed my work very much and understood how hard others worked for a fraction of my wage.
Now I await a 1st in person SS disability hearing – 28 months after initial filing and summary dismissals. Have suffered with chronic pain (statin induced) for 12 years as it gets progressively worse. I wish I could work like I used to, but that is not up to me.
Enjoy your good health and do not take it for granted.
Ragnar- Disability pays a little better than SS if you are near the age of drawing a check. It is my understanding that you can keep the disability payment in lieu of SS if it is higher. Reason 101 not to take statins.
The lagoon / swamp water hazard at the local golf course. I was about 12 then and discovered that I could sell retrieved golf balls to the golfers passing by. There was a lake in the middle with a reed island in the middle of that, covered with golf balls. To reach the water you had to traverse the ring of floating reeds around the perimeter of the lagoon. Easy to fall through and get stuck in the mud. Without a good staff to pull myself out, I might have stayed in till the next drought, when the course parkies might have found me.
So the deal was all the easy retrievals were done and I decided to swim to the island. The first time I got about 75 balls. More leeches, though. I removed about a hundred. Went out a few more times and the pickens became slim. So I would dive the mud at the bottom of the lagoon and found more that way (both balls and leeches).
We used to skate this lagoon in the winter and occasionally someone fell through the ice. We’d pull the kid out and bring him home before he froze to death. One winter day, a kid fell through and died. He went down there alone and had no help to get out. Times were different back in the day.
Robert (QSLV[img
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Did my part time stretch hustling wood cases of quart bottles of soda , home delivery every Saturday morning for 2 years and a paper route for 3 then gas jockey for 2 all over laping generally always 2 part time gigs . After 1 year of lifting soda cases when I went out for football it paid off LOL . The man that had the route gave it up to a father son group and he became a cop and retired a detective . I kept going with a work ethic that never failed me . But times and employers along with regulations are all different . A 13 year old boy riding in a stepvan with the doors open holding on to the grab bar seated on a fold down jump seat would not go for snowflakes today …