Worst job ever?

Not sure why, but I was invited to attend a "senior men's breakfast" sponsored by our community education department last week. I guess it was in case they needed someone who could cut up some old geezer's pancakes if he couldn't do it himself.

During the breakfast the conversation turned to "worst jobs we've ever had." These ranged from walking beans to cleaning bathrooms to manual labor of some sort. But I think I won the worst job ever contest...

The summer between graduation from college and starting my first teaching job, I worked as a "rod and chain" guy for a local surveying company. On the whole this was a very nice job. Light work, outdoors, a variety of locations, and very little stress. I basically helped the surveyor measure distances and altitudes of different lots and locations. But one job was, um, special.

Outside the town of Royal, Iowa, there was a very large cattle feeding operation. And the manure generated by all those cattle was contained large holding ponds. Every now and then, the depth of those ponds needed to be determined. This was done by two members of the surveying crew getting into a small boat and rowing to various locations in the very fragrant, very thick pond where the surveyor would stand and push a measuring rod down into the depths, cautiously maintaining balance as the boat rocked from side to side. It was my job to row without splashing and to note the depths of the lagoon.

As I remember, my coworker's comment was "If I fall in - just let me drown." Yeah. Oh, and we were teased mercilessly for days by the rest of the staff in the office.

For most of my career, I was blessed with rewarding jobs that I looked forward to each day - interesting problems to solve, good people with whom to work, a sense of making a contribution to the world. The only exposure I had to excrement was dealing with a lot of bullshit. But before I could get these (professional) jobs, I had my share of low-skilled, manual labor stints.

• I gathered eggs from aggressive hens which scared my 5?-year-old self senseless.
• I scooped and scarped and spread a lot of manure on my dad's farm where we raised hogs and fed cattle.
• I walked beans all summer.
• I spent time in a 120 degree haymow stacking bales.
• I stacked bags of seed corn for a seed-corn plant one summer.
• I worked as a hod carrier for a masonry company, mixing "mud", stacking brick and block, and setting scaffolding. (Losing 15 pounds in the first two weeks on the job.)
• I delivered furniture and cleaned the furniture store showroom.
• I delivered and washed nursing home laundry - including diapers.
• I cleaned the swimming pool and hallways as an assistant manager of an apartment complex.
• I cleaned surgical instruments at a hospital from 3-11 during my grad school days.
• I worked second jobs when teaching as a night motel clerk and a gas station attendant to supplement my meager teacher pay.

As old men are want to do, we at the breakfast bemoaned the fact that today's youth may not have the experience of performing these distasteful jobs that we felt, of course, built character and an appreciation for the less physical careers in which we landed.

I am not so sure.

Both my grandsons, ages 13 and 18, will have summer jobs in 2019. The younger will be a day-camp counselor and the older an intern for a medical software developer. While not having the glamour of rowing across poop-filled lagoons, I suspect both jobs will present their own challenges to these young men and they will learn some life-long skills as a result. And perhaps at a breakfast 50 or 60 years from now, they be saying, "By god when I was a kid, I had this job..."

What was your worst job ever? Did it shape you?

BFTP: Minimum wage and education

Warning to anyone under 50: This starts as one of those old fart's "when I was a kid we walked to school uphill both ways" stories. But it does eventually make a point about today's educational system...

I was a beneficiary of the minimum wage laws. When I was earning my undergraduate degree from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley from 1972 to 1976, I was also earning about $1.65 to $1.90 an hour as a laundry worker.  In addition to taking 12-14 hours of classes, I would work from 2pm to 9pm, six days a week either driving a van that picked up dirty linen from nursing homes up and down the Front Range - or stuffing that laundry in 400 pound capacity washing machines. For a year, I was also the assistant manager of an apartment complex, vacuuming hallways on the weekends, getting my apartment rent-free.

As I remember, my after-tax take home pay 40 years ago was about $75-$85 a week. Not only did my stay-at-home-mother wife and I live on it, we paid my full tuition, books, and fees; paid off the doctor ($600) and hospital ($600) bills for my daughter's Caesarean birth, and even had about $1000 in savings when I graduated.

Yes, we were very frugal. Our apartments were small, uncarpeted, and unair-conditioned. We drove a $400 used car. The only time we saw the inside of a restaurant was when a relative took us out for supper. There were no cellphone, Internet, or cable bills. But we did not starve, go naked, or feel deprived - at least that I remember. Why?

• Apartment rent was $80 a month, including utilities.
• Groceries ran about $20 a week.
• Full tuition was $140 a quarter. (Thank you taxpayers of Colorado for subsidizing me.)
• In the 70s a new car was $3000 and new house was $10,000. Gas was $.30 a gallon.
• We had no health insurance, but could afford to pay doctor visits and dentist appointments upfront.
• Seems like chewing gum, candy bars and small bags of potato chips were all about a dime.
• I bought a new b&w 19" TV for $80 and a stereo turntable/receiver-amplifier/speakers for $300 (Big fight over that one, but boy, did Maria Muldaur singing "Midnight at the Oasis" sound good!)

So here is my point: I estimate that the cost of living has gone up by 1000% since my days in college. Today's apartment rents are $800, cars $30,000 and candy bars $1.00. 

Yet the minimum wage is nowhere close to $16.50 or $19.00 an hour. 

I don't think anyone doubts the correlation between poverty and poor performance in schools. And while politicians love to tell stories of "welfare Cadillacs," the reality is that most of our parents can be counted among the "working poor" who often work multiple part-time jobs still unable to make ends meet.

This is why, that if one truly believes in improving education, one needs to be knowledgeable and active in political issues beyond school. Whether you believe the solution to poverty is a higher minimum wage, fewer welfare "benefits," better job training programs, or something else, one must believe that poverty needs to be addressed - and work at it politically.

And maybe we'd see more kids be able to put themselves through college again as well.

Image source

Original post 1/18/14

Digitizing personal archives

Why should you marry an archivist? The older you get, the more interesting they find you.

One of my newly acquired roles on our state school library/technology association board is that of chair of the archives committee. Well, it is a committee of one. I believe I was accepted because I am the oldest living member of the organization and therefore can relate to historical documents better than the younger set. Or it could be that I was the only volunteer. You never know.

One of my tasks is to find a new home for the ITEM (MEMO) archives. There are multiple boxes of them that have been graciously stored at a state university library for as long as I can remember. The boxes each have a table of contents. I have never seen them. The university no longer feels it can archive these materials, so I have been in contact with the Minnesota Historical Society. They seem willing to at least consider taking them. I have yet to imagine a doctoral student so in need to a dissertation topic that he/she would study the history of our organization and need to access these old minutes, conference programs, by-laws and ephemera, but I can't take the chance of not seeing they are properly housed. Must be the librarian in me.

I am also engaging in a personal archive project. Sitting in my home office closet are several shelves filled with old documents and physical photographs. One of my major retirement projects is to get these things digitized and organized and clear a space in the closet for other unnecessary stuff. 

The photo above is one which I had scanned a few years ago and stored in my photo archive, SmugMug. It shows my father, Darrell Johnson, as a kid. The older people in the first photograph are his maternal grandparents, the Fyfes, whom I very vaguely remember from my own childhood. I am blanking on first names. This photo is a prime example of why uploading photos and documents is not enough - they also need to be labeled in some way.

I am not terribly sure who or why anyone in future would be interested in my digital archives. When I showed some of these photos to my son not long ago, he politely stifled several yawns. I don't know who or why anyone would want to see my old 10K running records, my college diplomas, the sales documents on the several homes I've purchase, or my old unpublished childrens stories, let alone scrapbooks my mother kept of my high school activities.

But at least my children will simply be able to "move to trash" via computer this stuff rather than have to haul it to the dump. Or give it to the Minnesota Historical Society.