Ok..maybe the photo is over the top, but it certainly does connote the concept of work. We’ve all done it. Some of us more than others.
Any time a group of older guys are hanging around with time on their hands, the conversation, sooner or later, will turn to work. Work we used to do…in the good, old days. It’s in this game that he who goes first has no chance. The stories get grander as the conversational baton is passed. And no one ever wants to go after me. Let me tell you why.
In no particular order or weight are listed the jobs I’ve had: Lawn mower/flower bed weeder, carpenters assistant, computer programmer, grocery store bag boy, gas station attendant, door to door spudnut salesman, produce warehouseman, soda fountain clerk, sheep ranch hand (dauber and notcher), corporate board member, baby sitter, expert witness, vice-chairman of a Fortune 50 company house painter, pickle packer, soldier, retail trainee, department store clerk, super market checkout clerk, short order cook (pizzas), retail analyst, corporate executive, farmer, salesman, library clerk, bottle washer, truck loader, horse breeder, systems analyst, management trainee, collector and seller of clothes hangars, men’s clothing buyer, ad nauseum…
I’m sure there were others that I’ve forgotten, but you get the drift. Granted, I’ve been at it for the better part of six decades, but if you can find a life’s plan in the list above, I’d be surprised. I recall Ross Perot’s answer to the question of what kind of person he targeted on hiring. He didn’t hesitate. “I want someone who’s really smart, and is very proud just to have a job indoors”. I agree. For the most part, a job indoors is really good.
I was formed, in large part, by the work I did. Every work experience plays its part, but some seem to play a larger role than others. I’ll not bore you with all the details, but I must give you a little more color on some that loom large on my resume.
Spudnut Salesman: Some of you, well aged readers, may remember Spudnuts. They are basically donuts made with potato flour, and were invented by two brothers from Salt Lake City in 1949. By 1954 there were more than three hundred franchises in thirty eight states. As far as I know, only the franchise in San Angelo decided to (in today’s vernacular) develop a “door to door” channel of distribution. In the summer of 1952, I was the at the top of the heap in terms of volume of spudnuts sold door to door. As I recall, it went like this. You filled a large wire basket with spudnuts (packaged by the dozen), draped it around your neck and struck out in search of spudnut buyers. I think I made two bits a dozen, and it seemed like easy money at the time, but as I look back on it, what I really learned was the lesson that doing anything that required walking long distances with something hanging around your neck and knocking on doors was to be avoided.
Coat Hanger Collector and Seller: I’ll admit, this is not a normal job, but it was very profitable. I can’t remember if this was before or after the Spudnut gig, but I do remember how it came to pass. My mother assigned me the task of disposing of all of the coat hangars that had amassed themselves in our closets. You know they multiply faster than rabbits. There were hundreds of them. In lieu of stuffing them in the garbage, I wondered if the cleaners down the street might want them. Not only did he want them, he was willing to pay for them. Fifty cents per hundred. What a deal. I had no cost of goods, high demand, and only one customer to satisfy. All I needed was a source of supply. I greased the wheels of my Radio Flyer red wagon and struck off down the street. Door to door. (I evidently hadn’t leaned the rule about avoiding door to door stuff). Every house had hangars and wanted to get rid of them. I started thinking of charging them for taking them away, but finally concluded that would be a bridge too far. Lesson learned….look for a business model that allows your net profit to equal your gross revenue, no employees and limited customers.
Pickle Packer: Not many people get an opportunity to excel at pickle packing. I did, and I did. Actually I wasn’t a full time pickle packer; I was a relief pickle packer. That is to say when the regular packer was on summer vacation or refused to come to work, I filled in, so to speak, as a packer of pickles. This was in a restaurant supply house that supplied most everything that restaurants need to open their doors. They provided both sliced and whole pickles, but the slicing operation was a higher skill level than I possessed. I was, as you might have guessed, the low man on the totem pole in the pickle packing operation. My job was to scoop a ladle or so of pickle brine into a gallon jar, and then to stuff the appropriate number of whole pickles in the jar. I can’t remember now the exact number of pickles that went in each jar, but they were very particular about getting the numbers right. I wasn’t a bad job, as jobs go. The only negative was that after eight hours with my hands and arms in pickle brine, they tended to look like, well, a long skinny pickle. I didn’t eat pickles for several years after this particular job experience, and I can’t think of any important lesson that I learned from this job other than if you think you’ve got a crappy job, there are a lot more really crappy jobs out there.
Sheep Ranch Hand: This is the only job that I got through nepotism; although at the time I didn’t know what that was. My good buddy in San Angelo was part of a family that had more money than god, including a large sheep ranch west of San Angelo on the way to Ozona. It was because of him that I got the job….I guess it’s only a kind of nepotism.
Let me digress a moment on being rich. Granted, my standards were a bit different then than now, but I knew if you had both a trampoline and swimming pool in your back yard, you pretty much had it made on the moolah scale. We had neither at my house, so I was suitably impressed. It was dinner that really got me though. Bub, that was my friend, invited me, and with more than a little trepidation, I agreed. The table was in a dining room about the size of our house with a very large elongated table with seating for twelve or so. Their were only five of us including Bub, his mom and dad and little sister. His dad had a suit and tie on. I’d never seen this before, but chalked it up as a mild idiosyncrasy. What really got me was that there was no food on the table. There were large glasses of ice tea and salt and pepper but nothing else. Then Bub’s father, the one in the suit, picked up a little silver bell and rang it, and bob’s your uncle, in came a lady in uniform carrying a platter of fried chicken followed by mashed potatoes and gravy. Now that’s rich. So you can see why I didn’t hesitate when the opportunity presented itself to be a ranch hand on their sheep ranch for the summer.
My first gig at the ranch was as a dauber on the shearing crew. Now, you may not know this, but a sheep shearing crew is a thing of beauty. Eight or ten guys working in perfect harmony at a extremely high rate of speed. Everything in motion. I was at the end of the line and all the newly shorn sheep had to pass by me to get their inevitable shearing nicks daubed with pine tar. There were two problems. They could shear a helluva lot faster than I could daub, so the sheep tended to stack up at my station, but more importantly, every newly shorn sheep, when doused with hot pine tar had exactly the same reaction….they sh*t. Not just a little, a lot. Every sheep for eight hours. At the end of the day I was more than knee deep in sheep sh*t. So much for a career on a sheep shearing crew.
My second and last gig was as a notcher. Baby sheep were born in the spring and gathered in the summer for treatment. By treatment I mean getting notches on their ear to identify them and mark the year of their birth. If they were males, they also got a rubber gasket placed over their…..well, maybe that’s more than you want to know. Notching wasn’t hard work. All you had to do was stabilize the squirming yearling sheep, squeeze the edges of their ear together, then, using a tool that most resembled tin snips, cut a snip (or a notch) out of the ear. You won’t believe how much blood can shoot our of a little notch in a sheep’s ear. We wore a bandanna over our nose and mouth to keep from…..well, you get the idea.
That about summarizes my sheep ranching experience. Several weeks standing in sheep sh*t and several more weeks being soaked in sheep blood. You can probably guess what they served for dinner. Believe me, all of this came back to me when I heard Perot say that he only wanted boys who were proud to have a job indoors. I knew I was gonna get me a job indoors.
So you can see why no one ever wants to play “can you top that” about jobs we’ve had with me. I think I learned something from every job I’ve ever had and left feeling that I had actually done something of value. I can only think of one possible exception.
Vice-chairman of a Fortune 50 company: As far as I can recollect, I’ve never heard any just graduating from college type admit to having as his career objective being a vice-chairman of a large company. There’s several good reasons for that, although the pay is often very good and the hours are usually short. The best thing I can say about it is that you get to go to a lot of meetings; some of which may even be interesting, but not normally. And if you want to, you can travel, because big companies are likely to have offices in lots of different places. The travel isn’t as good as you might imagine, because you have to go to a lot of meetings and there’s never time to see the place that you’ve traveled to. If you like to talk, which I do, it’s perfect, because a vice-chairman gets asked to give lot’s of speeches. It doesn’t really matter what you talk about so long as you talk loud, look good, and use big words.
As vice-chairman you also get to have a obscenely big office, but since you have a big office you have to have lots of meetings to justify the big office. My office area even had its own bathroom. Think of it. You never have to risk running in to a disgruntled employee while you’re doing your business. How good is that.? See, there’s lots of details about being a vice-chairman that you didn’t know. The best thing, however, is that you never have to take the blame for anything. If something goes wrong, you do two things. You take a long trip to Asia, and because of the time zones, it’s hard for anyone to find you there, and you find other people to blame the bad thing on. It’s hard to blame it on your boss, because he knows what’s going on and is probably doing the same thing you are. The very best thing though is that you get to take credit for everything good that happens in the company. Say for instance, a really big deal gets done, you can claim credit for it because, if you’re doing your job right, you were probably hanging around the hoop waiting for the shot to go in. Or say the stock goes up a couple of bucks, you can claim credit because you had just been to Wall Street and had a few meetings last week. See what I mean.
The only problem is that unlike being a pickle packer or a dauber, you can really never tell if you’ve really done anything as a vice-chairman. From time to time I get to drive the tractor on my farm. I’ll pinch hit in raking or baling hay. When I relate this to some of my cynical big city friends they express incredulity that I would do such a menial task. I quickly explain that first of all it’s pretty technical plugging in all of those hydraulic hoses and whatnot, but I enjoy doing it above all things because it’s the only thing that I’ve ever done where I can look behind me and see exactly what I’ve accomplished and how well I did it.
Thoreau put work in context when he said, “live your life, do your work, then take your hat”. I’ve got my hat.
