I was emailing back and forth with an old friend from my 'music store days' earlier this week, and it got me thinking about my current occupations as a web designer and photographer, and what I did in the years before.

My music store days in Dallas are my version of "One time, at band camp...", hardly a week goes by I don't make some mention of those seven years. But hey, they were fun, though not prosperous, times. I also sold cars for about six months in Big D. 

In college it wasn't so bad. I worked as a night manager at the student union building on campus. I did several semesters as a stage hand in the auditorium. I delivered pizzas for about one week. For a great semester I manned the front desk of a girl's dorm on campus. I scooped ice cream and flipped burgers for about 3 months at a fast food joint. And near the end of the college days I pumped gas. That was right at the time of the first gulf war and I remember when we changed the price of gas to over $1.50 per gallon.

Then came the sketchy jobs. After college I worked at a furniture rent-to-own store. This job made me feel dirtier than the later jobs in construction, hauling dirt, stones and cement around in wheelbarrows. One day a temp agency had me at a nice new facility that was being built for Tyson's Chicken. I assumed it was offices. Then they had me caulking the seems in all the walls of a large white room. Turns out it was a death room. Yup. They would bring racks of little baby chickens in that room and flood the room with a toxin-of-the-day to see how long they lived. I will use that as my excuse for not liking chicken.

I drove a dump truck for a day through a field of used tires. Sort of like the tire dump on The Simpsons, but the town had required them to clean up the mess so we would load the back of the dump truck with tires, then bind them together for shipping to some other field full of tires.

Then finally there was my three weeks at the baby wipes factory.

It was at this time I was feeling most down about doing all these jobs AFTER graduating college. Then one day a young lady about my age at the time was on the line next to me. She had just graduated with her Master's degree. I felt a little better.

We would rotate around the factory doing different jobs, loading the wipes into the plastic carriers, applying the proper labels (they made pretty much all brands of wipes), folding shipping boxes. The worst was Smurf Day. One particular brand of wipes shipped in a bright blue box. By the time your twelve hours were over folding these, every part of you was blue from the transference of ink.