Well, I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time
It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man
'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man
"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson
The next several jobs cover my time in Sidney and Kearney Nebraska from August 1980 through August 1981 when I was a Word Over the World Ambassador for The Way International. Details of this time can be found in my series So, You Want To Join a Cult. One of the rules of this commitment was to work only part time. Therefore, none of these jobs were "careers", since I didn't expect to be around more than a year
I don't know if I should count this as a job, but I did get paid. After being assigned to Sidney Nebraska as a WOW I caught a ride with a couple who owned an old yellow school bus. They were to take me as far as Grand Island where I would meet the other members of my team and continue on to Sidney. Unfortunately the bus broke down and needed a new engine. We slept in tent behind the garage near Adair Iowa for a week while we waited for a replacement motor. The garage had a side business cleaning up after wrecks on the interstate and I worked doing that for the week. Most memorable was a flatbed carrying a load of pipe that turned over, spilling it's load in the ditch on the side of the road. Carrying ten foot long pipes up the hill (with another guy) took all day. We got to Sidney about a week late.
Sidney, Nebraska is a small town of around 5,000 people that started life as a railroad town and is known as the original home of Cabela's, since bought out by Bass Pro Shops. The Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program that I was part of required that you arrive at your assignment with $300 - no more, no less, and secure a part-time job. As one might imagine, there weren't very many job opportunities in Sidney. It took me about a week to find a job, the last of the four in my group to do so. I spent my day going from business to business and finally found something at a carpet store on Illinois Avenue, Sidney's main street. The Pittam family owned several businesses along Illinois Avenue, including a diner. I think Ken Pittam felt sorry for me when he hired me, since it didn't seem like there was much gophering for me to do. I swept up, occasionally cut carpet for customers, and just tried to look busy! The only excitement was when I was able to work with the two glass cutters/installers. The taught me how to cut glass to size and familiarized me with with decidedly rural or small town speech patterns. "I can't feature what to do" apparently meant "I can't figure out what to do", I was also introduced to a use of the word "visit" that I was unfamiliar with. To me "visit" could be a verb: "I'm going to visit my grandmother"; or a noun: "We had a pleasant visit. In Sidney I encountered it as a synonym for "conversation", e.g. "Come to the office and we'll visit about your qualifications" was a usage that I came across in setting up a job interview. "Let's visit for a while" might be a prelude to a chat over coffee. That usage still sounds a bit odd to my ear.
The most interesting thing that I did was work with the glass installers when the local Safeway was being remodeled. We removed all windows and glass doors from the old building and came back a few days later to install all the new glass. I was learning a lot from these guys and was excited about learning a trade. But it was not to be. As I have outlined in So, You Want To Join a Cult, the town of Sidney was fortified against us and Mr. Pittam was pressured by his church to fire me. I'm sure he felt bad about it, despite giving in to his church he helped us out several times over the next few months.
Shortly after being fired we had some people over, one of whom had just left a job as a Nurse's Aide in a Nursing Home. He mentioned that he was the only male Nurse's Aide and that they were looking for another man to replace him. The next morning I showed up at the Lodgepole Plaza Nursing Home and was hired on the spot.
The residents of the home varied from fairly mobile and semi-independent to totally bedridden. I had a variety of tasks: serving meals, feeding those who couldn't feed themselves, bathing residents, emptying bedpans, and general cleaning. As part of the WOW program I was limited to part-time work - the schedule at the home, while technically part-time, was unusual. We worked a two-week schedule. The first week would be Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 7am - 3:00pm; week two was Monday through Thursday. In effect, I'd work seven days straight, then seven days off. Looking back, I wonder why the Way leadership allowed me to work a schedule like that, but I kept that same job until we were reassigned.
Unlike other jobs, none of my fellow employees stand out in my mind, however, the residents were a colorful and interesting bunch. One memorable gentleman had been an optometrist before retiring. He was pretty mobile and could usually be found flirting with the women - residents and employees both. What was surprising about his Casanova-ish activities is that due to an unspecified malady, he'd had his penis removed! One afternoon he told me that he wished that he could pee standing up! Another resident was George, who was a big, burly, retired farmer who no longer communicated. We had to do everything for him. To bathe residents like him we had to strap them into a chair which would be hydraulically lowered into a bathtub. On one bath day as his chair was at the high point in it's trip to the tub he kicked me in the face. I came perilously close to blacking out. I was always careful around George after that. Etrulia was a feisty old lady. I was assisting a female aide to clean Etrulia up after an accident when she objected to a man seeing her naked. My coworker told her that she didn't have anything I hadn't seen before, just more wrinkled. There was also a lady whose name escapes me, who would regularly announce that she was leaving. She'd slowly head toward the doors, pushing her walker ahead of her, until someone would gently turn her around and she would had back the way she came.
As much as I'm trying to make this about my jobs, and not my involvement in The Way, the good citizens of Sidney made it very difficult to separate the two. Sidney was a relatively small town, Nebraska certainly has smaller towns, but it was small enough that the presence of four outsiders who represented a cult was noticed. I came to work one day to find an article on the break room bulletin board from the local newspaper decrying the cultists in their midst. Management received the same pressure to fire me that my previous job had. A delegation of local church leaders came to complain in person when my roommate Steve came in on a Sunday morning to lead a nondenominational church service for the residents. Every Sunday a different minister would lead a service, but on this particular Sunday the assigned pastor was a no-show, so I called Steve, who was our designated leader, to do it. The manager, instead of caving like my previous employer, not only defended me, but pointed out that it wouldn't have occurred if whoever was supposed to be there had shown up and threw them all out. She then convened a staff meeting and let them know in no uncertain terms that I was a valuable employee and that she didn't care about my religion as long as I did my job. Anyone who didn't like it could quit.
This was a job where I felt I was making a difference. I thought about making it a career when my WOW year was up. I worked at the nursing home until February when The Way decided that Sidney was a lost cause and relocated us to Kearney, a college town centrally located in the state. I quickly found a job at a Burger King.
My Kearney Burger King stint was my one and only experience working in a fast food restaurant. The road leading from the interstate to downtown was referred to as "restaurant row", virtually every chain eatery known to man could be found along 3rd Avenue. Due to its proximity to the interstate a large portion of our business was out-of-town travelers, including busses. The arrival of a bus was an all-hands-on-deck situation. During slow periods it was easy to make everything to order. Monitors above our stations would let us know how many hamburgers and whoppers we needed, including modifications (it was "have it your way" after all), and the cashiers would call out the number of fries and drinks over the loudspeaker. (No self-serve drink station back then). But when you were getting dozens of orders at a time, you just kept making burgers, bagging fries and pouring drinks and hoped for the best. You'd sort out the details when second calls for things you missed started coming.
I'm not in fast food places much these days, but I believe the uniforms tend toward t-shirts with a silly slogan on them and baseball caps. In my day we wore uncomfortable polyester shirts in the Burger King colors topped by a paper hat. My daily reminder of my time at Burger King is a faded scar on my forearm, the remnant of a burn that I received from a hot fry basket.
One of the worst things about working in fast food was the schedule. I could be scheduled for 35 hours one week and 10 the next. It was impossible to budget (as if I budgeted my money back then). One week I had written down the wrong schedule and showed up for work late and was subjected to a lecture from the shift manager. I threw my polyester shirt and paper hat at her and walked out. Possibly the only time I left a job without being fired and without another job already lined up. But this was restaurant row. I walked across the street and was immediately hired as a dishwasher at the Country Kitchen.
My stint as a dishwasher, or DMO - Dish Machine Operator - wasn't too bad. The hours were regular, I started early and was home by lunch time. The owners fed the staff a shift meal and it definitely was a team atmosphere. Outside of work things were very unsettled, but work was a haven from the chaos of being a WOW Ambassador. My year was up in August, but I had volunteered to be part of another Way program and was assigned to Lincoln. The company that owned the restaurant owned another Country Kitchen in Lincoln, so I was guaranteed a job when I arrived.
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