A job I never had
The premise was to talk about the best job I ever had. I’m gonna take a right turn on that one and go for the best job I never had. When you were young you apply for jobs without fully understanding what is involved. I was in high school and someone mentioned that the local pop company was looking for people to ride on their trucks. This was in the time when soda pop was delivered in glass bottles in wooden crates. Two dozen bottles to the crate as I remember. And the job for the guy on the delivery truck was to get those boxes off and back on again full and empty. I can only guess how much a full creative pop actually weighed. My own impression was that the people who did this for a summer ended up going out for the football team because they were suddenly much stronger than anyone else around them. Also I had this illusion that you got to drink all the pop you wanted. I never got the job so it still remains as an illusion. No big muscles and no lasting effects of drinking too much warm soda as the truck bounced up and down the city streets. I am guessing that you remained capable of burping better than anyone else around you. Jobs like that did not pay much. Minimum wage was still a dream so you were likely to get whatever the company imagined it could pay to the stupid child looking for a job. I did notice later in life that there are very few people who stay in that occupation for very long. I made it out without the lasting effects. I found other things to do. But I realized looking back that sometimes not getting a job is the best thing that can happen to a young person. Did I have other jobs when I was in high school? Not really. I did a lot of babysitting because I came from a large family. And I learned that your pennies needed to be counted if only to make sure you had enough to buy a single bottle of pop when you made it to the store. I could probably do the calculation knowing that the average pop bottle contained about 350 grams of liquid and the glass made that much again and then you multiply. But the truth is that on a hot summer day those crates weighed far more than you would want to lift by choice. And remembering the format used by delivery trucks you spend a lot of time lifting the crate over your head. That could leave you crippled for life.
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