Get a Job!
Get a Job!
by Dave Wright
My dad was a firm believer in the work ethic—the curse of
American capitalism—and he was determined to instill it into my brothers and me.
My younger brothers were early adapters. They were barely
out of grade school when they began farrowing sows and raising hogs at a farm
near town.
I, on the other hand, was a slow learner. Despite Dad’s
efforts to get me out of the house—say, by baling hay or assembling grain bins,
those jobs survived one outing—and I wasn’t invited back. Lucky me.
The day after I celebrated my sixteenth birthday, I passed
my driver’s test and lost any excuse for staying out of the job market.
“Where are you planning to work?” queried Dad. “I’ll provide
you with a car to drive, but I expect you to supply the gas.”
Having made no attempt to apply anywhere by the time school
started that fall, Dad found a job for me.
Watland Implement: Sweeper
“I’ve talked to a friend of mine who owns the International
Harvester dealership in town,” said Dad. “He says they’re looking for someone
to clean up the shop every afternoon. It’ll only take an hour or so after
school, so it won’t interfere with your social life.”
Unable to muster a coherent rebuttal, I was on the job the
following Monday. A buck sixty an hour, or eighty cents for part of an hour if
I had to clock out early.
While my buddies were flipping burgers or carrying out
groceries, I became the master of the push broom. Push. Tap, tap. Push. Tap,
tap. Repeat until it was time to clean the bathroom, a special treat when
Butch, the shop foreman, had been hit with a bout of IBS. Maybe it wasn’t IBS,
but the cigar that he chewed on from 8 to 5.
After the school year, the job as sweeper expanded into a
full-time gig: $12.80 a day, less Social Security withholdings. When Butch
found himself out of cigars, he sent me to the Clary Street Convenience Store
to purchase his daily supply: one nickel cigar—maybe it was a quarter. All I
remember is that the trip was a welcome diversion from the shop and that the
cigar was the cheapest one on the shelf.
While at Watland Implement, I learned the art of steaming
tractors, a procedure to clean used equipment that had been taken in on trade.
A boiler on wheels generated steam that sprayed through a nozzle at the end of
a hose. It cut grease easier than digesting a Big Mac. I often made the mistake
of positioning the wand directly into a spark plug fitting. Flecks of grease
and boiling water sprayed back in my face.
“When you’re finished with that tractor,” said Butch “you
can clean up the used combine that came in this morning.”
I started in the back under the hood where the combine spreads
the chaff on the field after it has been separated from the corn. There was
just enough room to stick my head between the hood and the fan blade. As I
blinked the dust from my eyes and gave them a moment to adjust to the dark, I
heard a scratching noise. The next moment, a mouse and her litter fled their
nest and scurried in my direction. The exit was right in front of my face.
I banged my head and followed them out, sweeping my hands
over my belly to feel if any of the little monsters had taken refuge in my
shirt. From then on, I stuck the end of the high-pressure wand into the black void
and aimed without looking. I would check my work after the dust settled.
About once a week, I was assigned to mow the lawn at the
storage shed in the middle of town. It was my favorite job. As I drove the Cub
Cadet mower back and forth across the lawn, I imagined what a perfect
night-time parking spot this might be—in town but remote, no traffic, no streetlights.
Perfect.
A few weeks later I was given my opportunity. Somehow, I
sweet-talked my date into touring the company holdings responsible for
financing the order of fries we had shared earlier in the evening. As soon as I
had pointed out the challenges of operating a riding lawn mower, I parked the
car next to the storage shed in a shadow away from the security light. I was
explaining the advantages of a Cub Cadet over a Torro riding mower, and we were
settling deeper into the bench seat of my parents’ Fury II, when suddenly there
was a wrap on the window.
A Big Beam flashlight flared in my eyes. Must be loaded
with fresh Eveready’s, I thought. I blinked at the smirking officer behind
the light. It was enough to dismember the libido of even the staunchest
hormone-addled teenager.
Fritz Roofing: Laborer
I returned home after my freshman year at St. Cloud State no
better prepared for employment than I had been at my sixteenth birthday. Preferring
not to take a job of my dad’s choosing, I began my search.
I read in the Worthington Daily Globe that Fritz Roofing was
hiring. I interviewed with Fritz himself, a squat man who looked like a bulldog
sitting behind his pock marked oak desk that was strewn with old newspapers and
roofing contracts. I shifted nervously in a worn-out leather chair thinking, I
hope this job pays more than minimum wage.
The bulldog eyed me suspiciously. “So, you’re John Wright’s
son, aye?”
“Yes sir.”
I could see him comparing John’s reputation as a model for
hard-working farm boys with the weak-limbed offspring cowering in front of him.
He looked at his office door behind me. No more applicants.
He shrugged and said, “Okay. You’re hired. Be here at 7 a.m.
Monday. The boys will train you in.”
After a year living in the dormitories at St. Cloud State, I
thought I had become an expert at cussing. I was only a novice. Every member of
this crew was proficient in profanity. Every part of speech was articulated
with the F-bomb—nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and others that would not fit
nicely into a sentence diagram. My training began with a chorus of explicatives
denigrating a college education and ended with a squeegee and a broom. “Take
these and git up on that roof.”
I climbed the ladder to the top of the building, and for the
next eight hours I spread hot tar and pea rock across an expanse of flat roof
the size of a parking lot. By the end of the day, I had accumulated a sunburn
and enough gooey roofing material on my boots to cover a chicken coop.
I went home dog-tired and prayed for rain.
Much to my dismay, day two dawned clear and calm. In the
middle of the morning, I was told to unload a barrel of tar from the back of a
flatbed truck. I was standing on the ground while a gruff crew member rolled
the tin-covered barrel to the back of the truck. I stood waiting to catch it. As
it rolled off the tailgate, it slipped from my grasp. It must have weighed over
a hundred pounds—and I only weighed 140. Rather than let it fall, I reached
behind it and smashed my thumb.
The foreman came over to examine the bleeding mess. He
handed me a band-aid and told me to sit on the back of the truck until lunchtime
when someone would take me to the clinic.
“Nothing broken,” said the doctor, “but you can’t go back to
work for the rest of the week.”
God answers prayers in many ways!
The rest of that week, I painted the hog house at home with
my thumb bandaged.
Friday, I turned in my resignation at Fritz Roofing and
applied for another job. The following Monday, I started working for Boise
Cascade Mobile Homes, which was acquired by Bendix later that year.
I didn’t hear from Fritz Roofing until I came home for
Christmas break.
Mom said, “There’s a letter on the counter. We haven’t
opened it.” The return address said Fritz Roofing.
What now? I thought. Am I getting reprimanded for
not giving notice that I was quitting until late in the week?
I tore it open. Inside was a check for $50. Workmen’s
compensation. What a windfall! Merry Christmas.
Bendix Mobile Homes: Electrician’s Assistant and Ceiling
Laborer
I worked the two summers after my freshman and sophomore
years of college at the mobile home factory. Bendix was a refreshing change
from Fritz Roofing because they seemed to value my education. They figured if I
was attending college, I could read a blueprint. I was assigned to the electrician
department, stringing wire and mounting receptacles and switches.
Daryl, my electrical foreman, was a wispy man with a wispy beard
and a cynical attitude. He was just enough of a company man to have achieved
the rank of foreman, but he scoffed at management’s goal of cranking out
numbers in lieu of quality. He had no time for the floor foreman whose bonus
was dependent upon us reaching the company quota.
The quota for standard-sized coaches (70 by 14 footers) was
three per day. But in the wake of the Black hills Flood of 1972, FEMA needed
housing for displaced Rapid City residents. Bendix came to the rescue by building
“disaster homes.” These coaches were half the conventional length, so the daily
quota rose to eight.
We employees laughed because these were, quite literally,
disaster homes. They were rushed out the door with the speed of Henry Ford’s
fastest assembly line. As long as we met our eight-coach-a-day quota, the
government got its homes, and the floor foreman got his bonus.
It didn’t matter that many of the mobile homes required
“rework” after they left the production line. I was often assigned to go out to
the lot after the coaches had been counted to fix a piece of paneling or
replace a section of ceiling tile. When we entered the hot, stuffy mobile homes,
our eyes would sting from the formaldehyde that had impregnated the plywood paneling.
(Limitations and warnings about the risk of formaldehyde were not put in place
until 1985.)
One Friday, the night watchman called in sick. I was invited
to take his place and put in a twelve-hour shift from 6 pm to 6 am. Blessed
overtime! All I had to do was sit in the office and make the rounds of the
plant every hour, on the hour. Time clocks were scattered around the perimeter
of the plant, and I inserted a key to indicate that someone had been there to
see that the place was not on fire.
Shortly after midnight, I sat in the office reading Fellowship
of the Rings when there was a knock at the front door. I peered out of the
office door to see who it might be at this hour. A red-faced man wearing a big
smile and a cowboy hat waved to me from behind the glass door. I looked closer
to see it was Walt, the plant manager.
“Hello, young man,” he said as I let him in. “Just thought
I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”
Happy that I hadn’t been sleeping at the desk when he
checked in, I said things were going fine and that I had just completed my
latest round of the building.
“Well, good for you, Dave.” Walt sat down behind his desk
and pulled a pocket flask from his back pocket. “In that case, you might be up
for a drink.”
“No thanks,” I said smiling. “I’m working.”
“Aw, come on,” he replied with outstretched arms. “I’m the
boss, and I say, ‘It’s fine if you’d like to join me in a short one.”
Is this his way of testing me? I thought.
“No thanks, sir, but I appreciate the offer.”
At that, he placed his feet on the desk, crossed his legs at
the ankles, and poured one for himself. He extended the glass. “You sure?”
“Thanks. I’m sure.”
We chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes. We made small talk,
and he asked about my college plans. I told him I was transferring from St.
Cloud State to the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota in the fall.
He nodded his approval and finished his drink, then left—I assume for home, but
I wasn’t sure. I still don’t know if he paid me a visit to see if I’d say no to
a drink, to make sure that his plant was still standing, or because he was
lonely and was just looking for conversation.
The plant was typically closed the week of the Fourth of
July to re-set the jigs for the new year’s models. As a summer employee, I
preferred to work rather than take the mandated company vacation. Another
student employee, a guy enrolled in chiropractic school, and I were selected to
drive out to Rapid City to complete rework on coaches that had arrived damaged.
We filled a panel truck with supplies and headed west on I-90.
Most of the work was superficial repairs—replacing damaged
paneling or ceiling tile that had shaken loose in the wind crossing South
Dakota. The structural defects would not be discovered until well after the new
residents had moved in.
The second summer, I was assigned to the ceiling crew. One
of the optional features offered by the company was the addition of “tornado
straps.” Mobile home parks are notorious for attracting tornados. This feature
was intended to reassure the buyer that their home would stay in place in the
event of a big wind. The tornado strap was a thin band of aluminum. Before the
exterior metal roof and siding were screwed in place, we ran the tornado strap
from one side of the coach, over the top to the other side. The straps hung in
a coil just beneath the foundation on both sides so that, once at the site, the
strap could be attached to a fence post in the ground.
I thought it was a joke when the strap was installed
properly, but on some of the coaches, we found that a strap would go from the
floor and over the roof, only to discover that a window prevented it from
completing its journey to the floor on the other side. When we asked the floor
foreman what to do, he scratched his chin and said, “Just screw the straps to
the studs under the windows. The siding will cover it up. No one will know the
difference.”
I suppose this was the origin of building codes.
By summer’s end, the threat of becoming a “lifer” at this
job inspired me to return to college.
University of Minnesota: Chimpanzee Cage Cleaner
I am including this excerpt from my book, “Oh, It’s You: The
Extraordinary Life of a Veterinarian” because it’s another employment steppingstone
to my veterinary career.
I first met Dr. Zemjanis while I was completing my
pre-veterinary curriculum at the University of Minnesota and was hoping for a
reference from someone at the veterinary school. Male chimpanzees were being
used in an experiment to determine if restricted activity in space would affect
spermatogenesis, the development of sperm cells. Dr. Z. was leading the
investigation, and he hired me to clean the chimps’ cages.
Each morning, I opened a welded-wire door and entered a
kennel. Four stainless steel cages were stacked at eye-level on my right. A
counter loaded with Purina Monkey Chow and cleaning supplies was on my left. As
I entered the kennel, the chimps rattled the doors of their cages and jumped
wildly in anticipation of the banana, the orange, and the cup of chow that they
were about to receive.
After feeding and watering the chimps, I was to unlatch the
tray beneath each cage floor, pull out the tray that collected their excrement,
re-latch the woven-wire floor, take the tray to the next room, close the
welded-wire door, clean the tray with a hose, and return the tray to the cage.
One morning I was running short of time and didn’t bother to
re-latch the woven-wire floor of the cage, thinking, I’ll only be a moment.
When I returned with the clean tray, one of the chimps had bounced his
woven-wire floor loose and was flying around the room like a trapeze artist.
I dropped the tray, secured the welded-wire door, and ran
down the hall to find Dr. Z. His office door was open, and he was hunched at
his desk already deep in thought. I knocked lightly on the door. “Dr.
Zemjanis?” The anxiety was obvious in my voice. “I’m afraid one of your chimps
has escaped.”
All he said was, “Humpf.” Without a glance at me, he
lumbered down the hall and entered the laboratory next to the kennel. He pulled
a blowgun from a cupboard, filled a dart with ketamine, entered the kennel, and
poked the blowgun through the welded-wire door. The chimp was still diving from
one side of the kennel to the other and was about to throw a handful of monkey
chow at one of his mates. When the chimp paused to look at us, Dr. Z. took a
deep breath and “Poof!” The dart caught the chimp in the thigh. A few minutes
later the chimp slumped on the counter. Dr. Z. grabbed him by the scruff of his
neck and below his rump, then returned him to his kennel. I rushed in to
replace the tray and clean up the mess.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I watched Dr. Z. return to his
office. “It won’t happen again.”
“No. I don’t expect it will.”
He must have had a short memory or was very forgiving
because he gave me a reference to veterinary school that allowed me to be
accepted.
University of Minnesota: Soils Lab Technician
I decided to stay on the St. Paul campus after my freshman
year of veterinary school. I was a member of FarmHouse Fraternity and had been
living in the house during the previous school year. Inexpensive rooms were
available for the summer, and there were more employment opportunities on
campus than back home in Worthington.
For the first time, all those chemistry classes that I took
to meet my veterinary school requirements paid off. I applied to be a lab
technician in the soil science department. When the graduate students who I’d
be working for saw that I had taken six quarters of chemistry, I became a
shoo-in for the job.
I was assigned to perform Kjeldahl reactions to determine
the nitrogen content in soils mixed with sludge, the slurry by-product from
wastewater treatment plants.
In those days, there were no simple, quick,
computer-generated chemistry assays. Computers were massive things using the
now obsolete Fortran language and required a stack of punch cards to operate. The
chemistry for a Kjeldahl reaction was complicated and required multiple steps: I
had to heat the sample with sulfuric acid, add a chemical to release ammonia
gas, and finally, titrate it to calculate the nitrogen content. It was
repetitive work, but it was fun to use what I had learned in those dreary
afternoon labs where I was paying for credit instead of getting paid.
The head of the soils department invited me to join him, his
wife, and his graduate students to a wine and cheese tasting party. Never
having been to one of these soirees before, I headed to the liquor store to
purchase a bottle of wine. “Something on the sweeter side without a screw cap,”
I remembering asking the clerk.
I showed up at the door with a bottle of Lambrusco. My host
never even lifted an eyebrow and invited me into the party. He placed my bottle
at the end of the table with the other, more elegant selections. He probably
thought it would be just the thing for a diabetic in need of a sugar hit.
In retrospect, at least I hadn’t arrived with a bottle of Boone’s
Farm, a box of Ritz crackers, and a jar of Cheese Wiz.
University of Minnesota: Venipuncture Specialist for the ALG Project
Just prior to my first week of veterinary school, Bob Mason,
a senior vet student, recruited me to help with a project at the U of M medical
school. ALG stands for Anti-Lymphocytic Globulin. It was an experimental drug
to be used to treat patients with leukemia and to prevent organ rejection in
transplant patients. Our job was to inject horses and goats with a suspension
of human white blood cells, wait several weeks for an immune response, then
harvest the plasma that carried the antibodies.
Bob knew me because he had worked with Dr. Zemjanis and assisted
him in taking testicular biopsies from those chimpanzees I mentioned earlier. Bob
also sold me a used Olympus microscope which was required for every first-year vet
student. I doubt that Bob ever practiced a day in his life. He knew how to buy
low and sell high—a natural-born businessman.
On my first day on the job, Bob told me to report to the floor
of the veterinary diagnostic lab. Two of the horses Bob had purchased for the ALG
project had tested positive to Equine Infectious Anemia or EIA. That means they
could not be used for the project and needed to be euthanized. Watching from
the corner of the lab, I leaned on a stainless-steel table as Bob and another senior
veterinary student stood on both sides of the horse holding 60cc syringes full of
euthanasia solution. On Bob’s command, they simultaneously inserted the needles
into both of the horse’s jugular veins and drew back the plungers.
“Ready?” said Bob, as dark blood flowed into the syringes. “Inject…then
step back.”
No sooner had the plungers reached the end of the syringes than
the horse dropped to the floor in a dramatic thud.
I stood wide-eyed as Bob checked the horse for a pulse.
“Okay. We need to do the same to the other one.”
So, this is one of the realities of veterinary medicine,
I thought. I’d better toughen up.
We used the stocks in the veterinary hospital to collect
blood from the horses, so we scheduled the work after clinic hours or in the
afternoons when there were no treatments or labs. The job was flexible as long
as we finished the protocols any time on the scheduled day. Sometimes we would
go down to the teaching hospital to begin work at 10:30 pm.
We restrained the horses in the stocks, clipped and scrubbed
the jugular furrow on the horse’s neck, placed a twine string around its neck
as a tourniquet, and threaded a 10-guage, 3” needle into the vein. (That’s a BIG
needle, but the bigger the needle, the faster the blood flowed.) As soon as we
got a good stream of blood, we attached a plastic tube to the needle, which was
connected to a plastic sterile bag containing an anti-coagulant. When the bag
was full, it contained about a gallon of blood. Then we released the tourniquet
and pulled the needle.
Once the blood had been taken, we hung the bags on a stand
and let them sit for an hour or so. This allowed the red blood cells to settle
to the bottom of the bag leaving the plasma on top. When there was an obvious
separation between the red cells and the clear plasma, we snipped a tube at the
bottom of the bag and allowed the red blood cells to drizzle into a sterile
container of saline. All that was left in the bag was plasma.
Once we harvested the plasma, we attached a rubber tube to
the top of the jug of red cells and saline, inverted the jug, inserted a needle
into the horse’s jugular vein again, and re-infused the horse. We did this to rehydrate
the horse and to ensure that it did not become anemic. The final step was to
drive the plasma to the Minneapolis campus laboratory for processing.
Early in my blood-letting career, I was watching the bags
fill up with blood when suddenly one of the horses dropped to the floor. I
panicked, released the horse from its lead, and ran through the halls in search
of a clinician. Dr. McClure, a cocky resident who looked like the Marlboro Man was
sauntering through the halls.
Out of breath and flushed with excitement, I gasped, “Come
quick! I was taking blood from one of the horses on the ALG project, and it
just dropped to the floor!”
Without breaking stride, Dr. McClure calmly asked, “What’s
the horse’s temp?”
“I don’t know. I was in a rush. Can you come and take a look?”
“What’s its pulse?”
“Sorry. I don’t know. It all happened so fast.”
I’m sure he had diagnosed the problem as soon as I nearly
tackled him in the hallway. He casually continued down the hall to the horse. When
we arrived, he asked me to help him tip the horse onto its belly. The horse
immediately got up on wobbly legs.
“Hypovolemic shock,” he said. “As soon as you get those
fluids running into him, he’ll be fine.”
Embarrassed, I learned that I must never panic. Assess the
situation and do a physical exam. Then act.
Not having worked with a lot with horses in the past, I had
plenty to learn. We kept the horses that were scheduled for injections or blood
collection on campus, but the ones that were waiting to get on the schedule
stayed on a farm outside of Stillwater that was owned by an equine
veterinarian. It was there that I learned how to restrain a cantankerous animal,
how to float its teeth (rasp the molars), and how to pass a stomach tube.
In those days, in order to de-worm a horse, we had to pass a
stomach tube through the horse’s nostril, manipulate the tube until it
swallowed, and at just the right moment, slide the tube past the epiglottis,
through the esophagus and into the stomach. The first few tries inevitably
resulted in a bloody nose. Most of the time the bleeding came from irritating
the mucus membrane lining the nose, but on rare occasions, the end of the tube
bumped the vascular-rich ethmoid turbinate in the back of the throat. That
caused a gusher. The advice I was given when that happened was to lead the
horse to pasture—out of sight of the owner—and allow the bleeding to stop on
its own.
It was a steep learning curve, but it was good to get many
of my mistakes out of the way before I was under the critical eye of a client.
Goats were also used as plasma donors. They resided in an
outside pen with a lean-to attached to a beat-up barn with flaking paint on the
east end of campus. In the spring, the pungent odor of Billy goats overpowered
the fragrance of fresh grass.
A single-goat stanchion stood on the cracked floor of the
old barn. An ancient centrifuge, surrounded by dusty hay bales, sat in a corner.
Since goat blood does not settle out with gravity like horse blood, we needed
the centrifuge to separate the red cells from the plasma.
Collecting blood from a goat was time-consuming, but while we
waited for the bags to fill, we might be entertained by the barn’s tomcat. He
would patiently crouch beside one of the cracks in the floor—sometimes for a
half-hour or more. When a mouse popped its head up, Whap! With one swipe the
mouse was plucked from its home under the floor and into the cat’s mouth.
The ALG project was the brainchild of Dr. Richard Condie and
Dr. John Najarian, the noted transplant surgeon at the University. Long after I
had been affiliated with the program, I learned that the federal government had
charged Najarian and other ALG associates with fifteen counts of shenanigans—illegal
sales of ALG and its byproducts, inadequate reporting of all data
(including some side effects), and others. Najarian was eventually acquitted,
but the University suffered a blow to its reputation. ALG was never granted
approval from the FDA, and the project was discontinued after twenty-five
years.
My association with the ALG project, distant as it was, gave
me a legitimate reason never to run for public office.
Thank God.
More Jobs Than I Could Handle
During the summer between my sophomore and junior year of
veterinary school, I had three jobs: lab tech at the soils lab, the ALG
project, and summer business manager at FarmHouse Fraternity.
The candidates for Princess Kay of the Milky Way stayed on
the upper floor of our fraternity while they attended the Minnesota State Fair
and waited their turn to have their images sculpted into butter. At the end of
summer, one of my jobs was to move our upstairs’ residents into rooms on the
lower floor and clean the house. As the girls chattered and lugged their bags
into their rooms, I was surprised at how young they looked. They never looked
like that when I first moved to campus four years earlier. Were they getting
younger, or was I getting older? Hmm.
In addition to my workload, every weekend was filled with
social events, primarily the weddings of my fraternity brothers.
My body finally cried out, “Enough!”
My tonsils grew to the size of golf balls, my throat became
raw, I shook with fever, and I could barely get out of bed. A trip to the university
medical clinic revealed that I had strep throat and mononucleosis. Too bad contagious
kissing was not the cause. I was given a prescription of amoxicillin and
prednisolone, and a warning to take it easy. I sacrificed a fall trip to the
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness but recovered in time for my final two years of
veterinary school.
Ready for a Career
Each job taught me something: how to work with a variety of
personalities, the importance of quality over quantity in my work, how to cuss
fluently (just kidding), how to puncture a vein, and many others. Each job was
a steppingstone to a rewarding career in veterinary medicine, which became
something far more than just a job. Every day was a new adventure. I loved it.
I was slow to adopt my dad’s work ethic, but now it has
become ingrained in me. Even in retirement, I find that I am most content when
I can look back on the day and see that I have accomplished something.
I am rarely asked for advice, but if someone wants to make
their life more meaningful, I can always suggest, “Get a job!”
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