Saturday, October 27, 2018

My Work Experience – Part 1



As with most teenagers, I had a variety of afterschool jobs.  While I didn’t have my own car so did not use the income to pay for the car, insurance, etc., they did provide me with spending money and savings (which eventually went toward college tuition). 

My first paying job (at about age 10 or 12) was bagging charcoal at the “charcoal pit” at the end of the road.  A local neighbor, Mr. Seery, who owned the land, would cut down some trees, put the logs in an enclosure, light it, then seal the entrance so as it burned it would turn to charcoal.  My cousin Dave and I would use a shovel, minus handle, to scoop up the charcoal, fill sturdy paper bags and wrap a wire twist tie around the neck.  We got paid so much a bag.  It was dirty work, but both Dave and I were hard workers and it was good pocket money.  Not sure how my mother felt about how black I got doing this, but it kept us out of trouble and taught us good work ethics.

My next paying job was working with my uncle on the state forest fire crew that he ran.  Most paying jobs require you to be 16, but since he was the crew chief, I and my cousin Dave started a few years before that.  We would ride with my uncle to the closest road access to the fire, don heavy Indian Tanks and take either a rake or broom (not a garden rake and a household broom, but ones designed for this job) as we trudged back into the woods to fight the fire.  I had a pair of heavy red rubber boots that I wore for this.  The volunteer fire companies relied on these state crews for anything that they could not reach with their trucks and hoses.  We got paid the princely sum of $1/hour at the beginning (later raised to $1.25).  If we missed meals, then either the Red Cross or the Salvation Army had a food truck and would come out close to us so when we got out of the woods we had sandwiches and cold drinks.  (Because of this, I have continued to make periodic donations to these organizations that were so kind to me all those years ago).  One of the “benefits” was that if the fire was during the day we were allowed to miss school to fight the fire.  One pair of fires is especially memorable to me.  We were called out on a fire on a Thursday night and didn’t get back home until early morning.  While I could have missed school on Friday, I had a teacher who didn’t believe in any excuses and if he gave you a make-up test it was bound to be so hard as to be unpassable.  So I went to school anyway.  Just after getting home, there was yet another fire and so I went out again.  This was a fairly big one and although we got all the flames out we had to “baby sit” the fire location for several hours, putting out all the embers under the stumps.  I finally got home late on Saturday – after having been awake for about 60 hours.  I had a quick shower and went right to bed where I slept around the clock plus.  My parents didn’t even wake me up for church the next morning.

I had several other part-time jobs that lasted anywhere from a few months to over a year: driving a delivery van for the local radio/TV store; working at the local PikWick grocery store where I was a stock clerk and responsible for all the bottle returns; washing windows and cleaning up the store at a Fanny Farmer candy shop.  All these taught me the value of work.



While all the above jobs were fine, none of them provided the steady work that I needed to earn money to pay for college.  After I graduated from high school, I found a job working for a small business that sold and recapped tires (while they also handled car tires, they mostly concentrated on truck tires).  I was a skinny 17-year old who weighed perhaps 155 pounds.  The guys who worked in the shop didn’t think that I’d last two weeks.  But I continued not only the entire summer, but came back the next summer as well.  It was 55 hours a week, nine hours a day and ten on Saturday – with overtime that was 62.5 hours pay at $1.60/hour or a gross of $100/week.

Recapping truck tires is a tiring, tedious job.  Step 1 – mount the tire on a buffer that slowly turns the tire past a set of spinning blades that chew off all the outer surface of the tire, even out any flat spots, etc.  Step 2 – spray a temporary adhesive on the buffed up surface, put the new raw rubber around the outside and stitch it down (stitcher is like a thick pizza cutter but with a ribbed edge).  Step 3 – put the tire on a spreader which has one set of paddles holding each of the two tire beads, then use air pressure to spread the beads apart which shrinks the overall diameter of the tire (don’t stand in front of the tire as if the paddles slip they will kill you – there was a hole in the cinder block wall at the opposite side of the building from one such slippage!); put an aluminum band on the tire that has the new tread on the inside.  Step 4 – put on a heavy metal rim, put the whole thing on a round table with another round table over it, clamp it all together, inflate the inner tube, then run high-temperature steam through the tubes around the outside of the band.  Step 5 – “cook” for several hours, then remove everything and you have a newly retreaded tire.  It was generally 90% humidity and over 90 degrees, so with the black rubber dust that you quickly get coated with, you sweat a lot – making the black dust stick even more.  It was hot, hard work, but I came to appreciate this experience over the coming years.

After my second year of college I decided to try something in my field of study.  A family friend from church was a computer analyst for Uniroyal in their Eastern Management Information Center.  They never had hired a summer college student, but he convinced them to give me a try.  My interview included taking the IBM Programming Aptitude Test – a kind of mini-SAT geared to the thinking skills needed in this new technological field.  It was in several sections and all were timed.  The manager’s secretary set me up in a vacant office down the hall, gave me one section, and said she would be back when my time was up.  I was done so fast that I was back at her desk before she even got much chance to sit down – ready for the next section.  Totally blew everyone away, got a higher score than any of their current employees, and was so fast that they had trouble believing it.  The manager, Roy Peterson, then interviewed me.  He had originally wanted me to do some conversion of some old Autocoder programs to RPG.  But since I had done so well he instead gave me a project that he had planned on doing himself – as he didn’t think the other programmers in the department had the necessary skills to do it.  (Note that in those days few people had actual degrees or even college backgrounds in the field (Roy had a BS in Math).  So most of the department had no college background but had come out of one of the other departments – areas like payroll or production scheduling).

The program I had assigned to me was for the production scheduling of all their footwear (one of the divisions of Uniroyal was US Rubber, maker of US Keds).  Had to take the inventory of “lasts” (the metal foot-shaped forms that shoes are formed around), spread the initial production schedule over the available lasts, round down to the nearest dozen/half-dozen pairs, then take the unused lasts and re-spread the unsatisfied production over the residual lasts.  All this was done for each shoe size, noting that often a men’s size X was built on the same last as the women’s size Y.  This process used so much CPU time that it would read in the schedule and inventory for one style from tape, then be CPU-bound for a while before it spit out the results on another tape.  The computer had a “wait light” that went out when the CPU was busy – usually indicating that the program had gotten stuck in a loop.  So I had to put a note on my run deck that said, “This will shut off the wait light, do not cancel the program when it does.”  At the end of the summer they gave me a sarcastic “glad to see you going” party and a Cross pen and pencil set – one that I carried with me for a couple of decades before they finally wore out. 

The following summer I worked for them again, this time on a corporate funding model.  The program had an income statement, balance sheet, and source and use of funds sheet for each country that the corporation did business in.  Using several years of history and a sales forecast it forecast the sales, etc. for several years in the future and made assumptions about where excess cash could be used, where borrowing or repayment of debt was appropriate, all while keeping cash from flowing back to the US (where it would be taxed).  These days that would all be done on a multi-sheet spreadsheet, but doing it by computer back in 1969 was long before PC’s existed.  At the end of the summer I presented the results to the corporate finance folks and the VP of Uniroyal International at their offices in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.  When they realized that I had done what had been taking them many days of calculations on paper spreadsheets, they got very excited.

These jobs paid for my tuition.  But during the school year, I had a few other odd jobs to earn spending money.  These included: (1) cleaning the apartment for an older couple each Saturday – vacuuming, changing bedding, mopping floors and cleaning the toilet, etc.  (She was blind and he was disabled and I enjoyed working for them.); (2) shoveling snow for a business complex on the next block; (3) tutoring in mathematics for a middle-school student; (3) reading textbooks for a blind graduate student while she took notes in Braille.  A variety of jobs and all very different from each other.



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