Have you ever been fired?

My StoryWorth question for this week was "What did you learn from your parents?" I thought that was a pretty boring topic. So I selected an alternative: "Have you ever been fired?" It was kind of fun to write and I hope some Blue Skunk readers might share their experiences in this department...

While I have a pretty good professional work record, I was fired twice from jobs I had in college. I’m not exactly proud of that fact, but not real embarrassed either.

The second semester of my freshman year in college in 1971 was spent at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. My wife had a grant to attend there, so we both took classes that term. I washed dishes in the dining hall during the semester, but needed a full-time, better paying job for the summer. The $4000 I had saved before leaving home was running low after living on it for nine months.

So I got a job as a silage truck driver. Silage is just chopped corn stalks that are fed to cattle. The Vermillion area was rural and they had a big silage plant just outside of town at the bottom of a very long hill. My job was to simply drive a big dump truck to the fields where the corn was being cut, wait for it to be filled, and drive it back to where the contents would be dumped in a conveyor for processing. And repeat all day.

I drove grain trucks quite a bit for my dad on the farm, so driving the truck was not a new experience. And the first day went just fine. But midday on the second day, the brakes on the truck went out when I was about half way down that very long hill. I am guessing I was riding the brake too hard instead of downshifting and the brake fluid evaporated. The road made a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill, and I did not make the curve, instead going off the road and across three sets of railroad tracks, demolishing a small building before coming to a complete stop. I managed to drive the truck back to the plant where I truthfully described what had happened.

I was fired on the spot. 

I went home and told my wife the bad news. Later that day there was a knock on the door of our apartment. It was a police officer who said I was being charged for leaving the scene of an accident. So Sue immediately called her auntin Ft Collins and her uncle offered me a job as a hod carrier in his masonry business. We rented a U-Haul, loaded our stuff, and left Vermillion the next day. (We did not own a lot of stuff.) That’s how I wound up going to school in Colorado. There may well still be a warrant out for my arrest in South Dakota.

I worked for Uncle Paul for about nine months, but his jobs dried up during the winter and I was laid off. I was sort of glad since it was the most physically demanding job I’d ever had. I soon found another job working for a large furniture store delivering furniture and doing general custodial work. The next summer, we moved to Greeley where I enrolled at the University of Northern Colorado (now at instate resident rates!) and worked for the same furniture store chain that had a branch there. 

I’d been working at that store part time for about six months when my boss hired a new delivery driver. He was a big rather dumb character who only had sight in one eye. It seemed after he started helping me, we managed to scratch or dent about every appliance and piece of furniture we delivered. (Once he flicked a cigarette butt out the window that blew back in the panel delivery truck and set the packing blankets on fire, but the boss never found out about that.) 

After one angry customer called in to complain about a scratched washing machine, the boss started to chew me out. But I’d had enough and said, “Well, you are the dumb sonofabitch who hired that one-eyed idiot. Don’t you know a person doesn’t have any depth perception unless he has two eyes?” I found out later that the boss and the other driver were relatives.

I was, once again, fired on the spot. 

I soon found another job working for a commercial laundry that did sheets and diapers from nursing homes all around the northern Colorado area. I kept my job there, working full time while going to college, until I left to do my student teaching back in Iowa in the spring of 1976.

Since that time I have had a number of jobs from which I had rather hoped to be fired, but I never was. I’m not sure if there is any lesson to be learned from these experiences, but they do make a pretty good story.