There are things in life that still amaze me. Space flight. The 2011 World Series. Anytime anyone successfully merges onto Interstate 540 at 7:15 a.m.
The fact that people in northwest Oklahoma City can turn on their taps and actually get water to come out.
Of course, I had little or nothing to do with the first three of those.
Unless you count fervent prayer, pledges to live a better life in service to others and refusing to leave the spot where you were standing the last time the Cardinals scored, even though you really, really, really needed a bathroom break when David Freese was at bat in the bottom of the ninth.
The Oklahoma City part, well, at least some of that is on me. That’s because between June and August 1979, I spent the better part of my time at the bottom of a trench laying water pipeline as part of my summer job.
Now I’m not going to tempt fate and suggest it was the worst job I have ever or will ever have. I will suggest a worst job would require handling radiation with oven mitts.
But whatever the future holds for me, it’s probably not going to bump my three-month construction gig out of top two or three bad employment experiences.
It certainly wasn’t because we were splitting the atom or anything.
You’d have to go pretty far down the evolutionary scale before you found a primate not capable of being trained to stand at the bottom of a narrow ditch, swing the small end of a pipe into the large end of another pipe, walk 10 feet and do it all over again, all day. The fact that you can’t have a monkey do it, because that would constitute cruelty to animals, made it the perfect job for a group of college kids.
It was, however, just the right combination of back-breaking, equatorially hot, dirty and physically challenging work to allow us to suggest, while on our way to lunch, that we had the Worst Job in the World. At least until we turned the corner and saw another group of our friends asphalting a parking lot. Sometimes being No. 2 isn’t so bad.
And that’s the thing about summer jobs.
They tend, at least in our memory, to fall at either extreme of the employment satisfaction scale. They are either the very worst thing you ever did in your life and couldn’t be topped by an extended stay in the Cummins Unit, or are the most fun you ever had, and even now you wish you could spend your time making snow cones and balloon animals.
When it comes to bad summer jobs, I’m not alone. The Lovely Mrs.
Smith spent a summer filling refrigerator doors with foam (yep, an interior design major working in a large-scale mass production factory.
What could possibly go wrong there?). Another friend spent the summer replacing septic systems.
As one would guess, putting the new tank in is the easy part. Just a note: Anything that involves waders and isn’t duck hunting or fi shing probably isn’t something you’re interested in.
Whether it’s any manner of burger flipping, yard mowing, hay-baling or anything someone barely old enough to vote and not old enough to exhibit good judgment does between educational swings, they all follow a general rule of thumb for summer labor. Make the most money you can in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of actual skill or training.
They are also, at least according to our elders, supposed to provide us with great insight into “the real world.” I’m not sure that happened as much for me. About the time a breeze, what little there was, deposited more dirt on me at the bottom of the trench in the mid-afternoon Oklahoma sun, I became fairly certain any future employment wasn’t going to involve the (sub) ground-floor part of the construction industry.
It’s summer, which means it’s Summer Job Season. Over-tip your waitress. Don’t glare impatiently at the kid rounding up carts in the parking lot. Slow down in a construction zone.
Whatever you may be thinking, that’s someone’s son or daughter there, just doing the best they can with minimal skill or instruction. A few years ago, it may very well have been you.
And if you happen to be on the northwest side of Oklahoma City this summer and get a drink of water, well, you’re welcome. Small miracles still do happen.
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GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST LIVING IN ROGERS.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 06/27/2013