As I am nearing my 31st birthday I can't but think about my worst birthday of them all, my 21st one. I was already home from college and got my first job working at a temp agency. I was told to go to work for Albert Moving and Storage as a moving man, getting paid something like $5.50 and hour. If you want to talk about hard jobs, try moving refrigerators and washers all day. We even boxed up peoples stuff. I had to take a class to be a certified mover as well. I don't like to talk about it because people invariably say - ah your certified, want to help me move? So every night I would call up the moving place and they would tell me what truck I had to take at 5:30 in the morning. Yup you heard right. On my birthday I was told to take a truck with a couple of guys and pack and move 3 different people in town. I thought, "great, this is going to take all day." I had my scheduled party for that night, I knew it was going to be hard. So my friends all gather at my house at 8pm. Then it turns 9pm, then it turns 10pm. Finally I think my mom calls the station and gives my boss a piece of her mind. It didn't matter. I got home at 1:30 in the morning, exhausted. Then I had to go back to work the next day at 5:30. I really started not liking that job. I was so thankful when a couple of weeks later I never got assigned to a truck for 3 days. Finally I called up and the temp agency said the job had just "ended". I was never fired, my jobs just "ended". My next job I did demolition at the local united supermarket. I tore down a wall with a sledge and a mini-jackhammer from 11pm at night to 7am in the morning. That job lasted a week and then it just "ended". I think they might've not liked my many water breaks or my excessive sweating. Then I got a job painting a steel factory office building on the outskirts of town. That was an interesting job. I was given a Mexican cohort who kept me entertained by singing Dolly Parton songs in his Mexican accent. However, he got let go first, cause the boss pointed at his painting of the locker rooms and was disappointed. So in the end it was just me painting. Somewhere under all of that paint lies the carcass of the largest spider in the world. I was up 30 feet in the air painting the ceiling and there in the corner lay a 3 foot long daddy long legs. I am serious, it was 3 times the size of my foot long paint roller. It's head was maybe half and inch long, but its legs spanned all 3 corners. I had to paint the corner and there was this enormous huge spider in my way. Thankfully my paint roller was on long stick. So I decided it was time to give the spider a good painting and quickly, I mean quickly, jabbed the spider with paint roller and then proceeded to drop the paint roller 30 feet to the ground. I then quickly, I mean quickly slid down the ladder in case the spider was still alive and was still up there. I think I ran away into the other room laughing hysterically. I finally got the nerve to go back into the room and discovered that the spider carcass was now on my paint roller with its legs sticking out of it. I didn't dare touch it, so I went back to the top of the ladder and proceeded to paint with the body still attached to the roller. I suppose it was fitting, being put back into its home in various pieces. That job somehow "ended" as well. Towards the end of the summer I got my favorite job, delivering pipes to construction sites. It was 80% driving. I wanted to stay on there but I messed up that one too. I accidentally backed up the truck onto an air conditioner box. The owner was like,"you might have just bought yourself a new air conditioner." Luckily when we opened the box it was ok. A couple of weeks later that job "ended" as well, luckily school was about to start anyways. Ah the good old days, wait, nope, I like these days much better.

Thought of the Day

"Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year's gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, each flicker of the candles on the cake we know it's not to be. That for the rest of our sad, wretched, pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably. Happy birthday? No such thing."
- Jerry, trying not to be funny, in "The Visa"

// posted by Brian @ 5/26/2006 10:49:00 AM