God

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that God exists. What do I mean by "God"? For now, let's just say I mean what the average American means when they refer to "God". We'll circle back to that eventually. In the article I will be referring to the Abrahamic God with an upper "G" and other deities with lower cases "g's". 

In the United States the predominant religion is Christianity in its many forms. Christians, as well as Muslims, claim to worship the same God as do Jews, who worshipped him first. Even people who aren't officially part of any of those three religions, who can in no way be considered religious, would default to the Abrahamic God when talking about "God". (We're specifically talking about the United States here, and even within the U.S. exceptions would include people who follow non-Abrahamic religions). Where did belief in the Abrahamic God originate? Is there anything to suggest that he really is the supreme creator of the universe? Or did he just have better press agents than all the other gods?

I doubt that there is any serious argument against the idea that every little tribe, every kingdom, every group of nomadic clansman had a god. I'm not going to argue about the probability that any of these gods existed in any real sense, but certainly people believed that they did. The people we know as the Hebrews and later the Israelites had a god as well. It's also certain that the Hebrews believed that there were other gods in addition to their God - just that their God was the best. Eventually the company line became that there was only one god: God...all the other "gods" were just demons in a different guise; but it's indisputable that early on (it's in the Bible, people) worshippers of God acknowledged that there were other gods. If we acknowledge that early followers of God believed that the gods of other nations were just as real, it follows that if we believe that God is real, then those other gods must be real as well. 

But what about the first few chapters of Genesis? Doesn't that say that God created the heavens and the Earth? Doesn't it say that he created the first man and woman and communicated with them? Yes, it certainly does. But every other tribe had a creation myth as well. Every other tribe had a story about how humans came to be. We still know what some of those were, and there are still people following the religions from whence those creation myths originated. 

We've already, for the sake of discussion assumed that God is real. We're further assuming that other gods are likewise real. Let's extend that assumption and assume that God talked to someone and told them what how creation came about which eventually got written down in the Bible. Wouldn't it make sense that other gods talked to their worshippers and told them their version of the creation story? From an objective viewpoint we don't know which of these deities is really the creator. Or maybe the various creation myths aren't meant to be historical records, and were written down by people who liked to tell a good story. It's pretty well established that no creation story is physically possible. So, at best what's written down in the Bible about creation is God bragging about how great he is and other sacred traditions are other gods doing the same. We can extend this to the other early parts of the Bible as well. The "Law"? Sure, God setting down rules and regulations. Fine, other gods had their own rules, why not God? The books of "history"? Why not? Later writers assembling a legendary history of a people. Doesn't even need God to be involved. Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon? Some good poetry and lots of talk about how different human beings viewed God. The Prophets? People trying to make sense of current events. Again, not the only people who wrote books about legendary times or wrote down their opinions about what the gods thought about various issues. 

Let's stop and take a breath here. We're still assuming that God exists. What we're not assuming is that anything that is written down about God is necessarily true. It might be, but it also might be just the opinion of one of God's followers. Or it might be the self-aggrandizing opinion of one god among many gods. 

Around 2,000 years ago a new sect of the followers of God sprung up. There had always been factions within the followers of God, who mostly were confined within the ranks of the people who were by that time known as Judeans (aka Jews). There were Pharisees and Sadducees, factions we know about from the Gospels, but also Essenes, Hellenists, and probably, like today, people who just got on with their lives and didn't give God much thought. This new faction centered around the figure that we know as Jesus of Nazareth. After Jesus' death and alleged resurrection, this faction, unlike previous iterations of Judean religion, aggressively proselytized, spreading their beliefs about God outside the bounds of their nation. At this time the various peoples within the Roman Empire still had their own national or tribal pantheons. But it was also a time when for various reasons people began to experiment with new and exotic religions from outside the borders of the Empire. 

Let's stop and take another breath. Remember, we're still assuming that God exists, but we're not assuming that he is the only God around, or that the book purporting to describe his will for mankind is in any way superior to the many other "holy" books or mythologies. There's a running argument about whether Jesus existed. I tend to follow the logic espoused by Bart Ehrman, a professor of Biblical studies and author of many books on the subject. He views the four Gospels as historical documents. Not in the sense of "true", but in the sense that they claim to describe events that happened once upon a time. I've been listening to a podcast about the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. One of the subjects that continually comes up is the reliability of the sources. Sometimes there is only one source for a period of time. That source is then analyzed for biases, compared with what is known from other writers as well as internal consistency. Sometimes the only source was written decades or even centuries after the events it purports to describe. The Gospels in this respect are similar. The earliest one was written around 30 years after Jesus lived. Historians can examine each of the Gospels and study them in the same way that a historian would study an account of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, looking for inconsistencies, points of agreement and many other points that I won't get into here. My point is that in addition to assuming that God exists, when it comes to Jesus, I'm reasonably sure that he existed as well, but with a lot more certainty.

So, we're now assuming that God exists, but only to the extent that he was one deity among many, but now we have Jesus, which we can assume with a lot more certainty existed. What does that tell us? Not as much as you might think. While we have historical documents attesting to Jesus' existence, and can reasonably conclude that a lot of what is recorded therein are things he actually said and did, we don't have any evidence that he was who he said he was or that his teachings really came from God. Which brings us to another issue. There are numerous contradictions within the Gospels regarding what Jesus taught and who he said he was. Each of the Gospel writers, not to mention Paul and the other writers of the New Testament, seemed to have different opinions about who Jesus was, what he taught and what the purpose of his death and resurrection was. Like the writers of the Old Testament, we can't be sure that the Gospels and Epistles weren't anything more than men's opinions about God. 

As the years and decades and centuries ran on, a lot of arguments were made and even blood spilled attempting to determine precisely what the Bible actually said. The doctrine of the Trinity was the result of an attempt to reconcile the various Biblical views of who Jesus was, with opinions regarding why it had to be a certain way were tacked on every few years. Factions multiplied in Christianity's early days, shrunk as power was centralized and multiplied again at regular intervals. Today there are thousands of Christian sects and denominations, some differing from others in barely noticeable ways, others hardly recognizable to each other as having sprung from the same roots. In addition to the myriad institutional variations of Christianity, there are even more personal variations on who God and Jesus are, what prayer is, and what a Christian is; people whose image of God conforms to nothing in any creed or holy book. 

And why should it? We act as if the Bible is an unassailable source of truth and that God's existence and his basic attributes are beyond argument. But if you're worshipping God, you're worshipping a tribal god who had a very good press agent and whose followers eventually pushed their beliefs outside the insular tribal ethno-state and out into the world. There's, of course, a lot of good in some versions of Christianity, and I believe that people who follow the more "love thy neighbor" strains of the faith are generally good people. But for myself I see no reason to ascribe to Christianity over that of any other religion, at least not on the basis that any of them have a lock on "The Truth"...or even "truth". I can be a bad person all on my own without justifying it with Bible verses and I can also "love my neighbor" without worshipping a Middle Eastern tribal deity. 

We're responsible for our own actions. 

Subjective Truthiness

Many years ago I got into a discussion about faith, how what one chooses to believe regarding a deity is subjective. That is, even if you are certain that your god has delivered this information straight to your brain, or was manifested as some analogue of a five-senses experience, you are the only one who was privy to this particular "revelation". Therefore, it's subjective. Even the conclusion that some people reach that nature, beauty, or the laws of physics are evidence of a creator (which even if true, hardly proves it's your version of a creator) is an opinion about the facts, not a fact in and of itself. You deciding that certain "evidence" is sufficient to convince you, is not in itself proof. An objective experience is one in which anyone could observe. If two people are having a conversation and I overhear it, even if none of the words were directed at me, that conversation has an objective reality. Religious experiences, almost by definition, occur outside of objective reality, in the hazy world of the spiritual realm.  Or they exist as interpretations of mundane events as supernatural, when an ordinary explanation is not only possible, but likely. 

Some religions have attempted to address the lack of objectivity in various ways. In some religions it's the existence of scripture, a "holy" book which they promote as "The Word of God", the standard against which all opinions and subjective experience is supposedly measured. Others invest a "prophet", or other "holy" or "enlightened" individual with the responsibility for determining what Truth is. I'm sure that it's obvious that this isn't a solution at all. The faithful are expected to...well...have faith that the prophets, despite a lack of any objective corroborating evidence, really are getting the straight scoop from the top of the celestial food chain, and not just making it all up. Religions that rely on some version of scripture just shove it all back a few hundred or a few thousand years. They have faith that their books were written by prophets "back in the old days" who, despite a lack of any objective corroborating evidence, got the straight scoop from the top of the celestial food chain, and wrote it all down. And now, since it is written, that makes it Truth. 

What I find interesting is that the two largest religions based on books, Christianity and Islam, took a while to get their books together. (Of course the Jewish scriptures predated them both, with the Christians claiming them as their own) Neither faith had a book in their early years. Muhammed, the founder of Islam, never wrote down any of his "revelations". After his death his successors supposedly gathered the sayings that his followers had written down or remembered, and collected them into what became known as The Quran. Even then there were multiple versions in circulation. One of the early Caliphs solved that problem by rounding up and burning all the unofficial versions. The reason that this was relatively successful was that in the early Muslim decades there was a united political and religious establishment that could make decisions affecting all Islam, and enforce them, unlike the fragmented political and religious situation of early Christianity. (Yes, Christianity was the dominant and later official religion of the Roman Empire, but not all Christians were within the empire, and there was a lot of disagreement between the eastern and western halves) Today, religious Muslims assume, even though there's no evidence to support it, that Muhammed received his revelations from God (or through an angel), and further that everyone who provided their memory of what he said did so accurately. Even though there's a supposedly infallible written record, there's no shortage of disagreement among Muslims about the Quran's application.

Christianity also didn't have anything written down for almost a generation after Jesus lived and preached. His teachings and the stories about his life were passed down by word of mouth in the various Christian communities until they started to be written down 20-60 years later. The gospels that we have today were all written anonymously, but claim to have been put together from eyewitnesses. The man we know as The Apostle Paul wrote his letters from a different point of view - he very specifically didn't seek out those from Jesus' inner circle, even though they were presumably still alive, but claimed to get his information straight from God himself. Unlike the Muslims centuries later, the early Christians did not at first have a centralized source of authority. Competing views of what Jesus taught and what he did in his brief career circulated widely. Even when one group came out on top and many gospels and epistles were eliminated from the list of acceptable scriptures, they apparently didn't prune far enough, leaving many contradictions and inconsistencies.  

It's unclear whether Paul or the authors of the Gospels thought that what they were writing was inspired by God, but whoever wrote II Timothy (most biblical scholars agree that it wasn't Paul) apparently thought so, writing in II Timothy 3:16 that "all scripture is given by inspiration of God". The founders of the Protestant Reformation thought so as well, as do their modern day spiritual heirs. In theory they rejected the Catholic apostolic succession doctrine that claimed that there was an unbroken chain of bishops from original apostles to the present day who are uniquely qualified to interpret scripture. In theory they believe that the meaning of the Bible is self evident and doesn't require interpretation, yet there is no shortage of competing interpretations. What many "scripture alone" Christians don't realize is that in the early days of Christianity there was no scripture, and when various competing gospels and epistles began to proliferate, often pseudonymously claiming apostolic authorship, somebody had to decide what was "scripture" and what wasn't. The Bible we have today is a result of somebody making that decision 2,000 years ago. 

People who look to a book as their standard often look askance at those who don't, believing that those outside their circle have no standard for morality or Truth. They accuse disbelievers in their book or "making up their own morality". An honest conversation with just about any believer will reveal that, even though they have a written template for living, they have their own view of how their god operates and how that god expects people to conduct themselves that often is at odds with what's in their holy book. What the afterlife looks like is particularly subject to personal opinion. The Bible, as well as mainstream Christian doctrine, indicates that a believer is either ushered into God's presence upon death or "sleeps" until the end time resurrection. There is no "official" description of what that actually looks like, although just about everyone has mental images about heaven, including loved ones "looking down on them", not to mention the popular imagery of harps and angelic wings. Many believers also have ideas about God doing things for them that aren't guaranteed in any book of the Bible, and "know" that God, angels, saints, or departed family have miraculously intervened in some way. 

It's all subjective. 

Everyone seems to have an idea of what the supernatural realm is like and how it functions, an idea that cannot be demonstrated objectively. Even those who have a book are ultimately relying on someone else's subjective experience. 

The supernatural world cannot be objectively confirmed to exist. If believing in it helps you sleep at night, please continue to do so. 

The Alleged Afterlife

 I don't know the nature of the afterlife, or even if there is an afterlife.

And neither do you.

Yes, yes, maybe you say that you "know", based on your holy book, or you had a "seeing the light" near-death experience, or heard from a dead loved one in a seance, or in your dreams. What you're really saying is that you have settled upon a version of the afterlife that fits into your worldview, gives you comfort, and allows you to make sense of an extremely unfair world. You perhaps have chosen to view certain experiences as evidence to back up what you believe will be your fate after you draw your final breath. 

But no one knows. 

What people thought happened to the dead changed and evolved through the centuries. The Jewish Bible is pretty quiet about any sort of afterlife, other than a couple of places. Two people, Enoch and Elijah are described as having been received bodily into heaven, while the prophet Samuel, or his ghost, is temporarily brought back to the land of the living to give some advice to the soon-to-be deposed-and-killed King Saul. Jewish thought around the time the New Testament was written tended toward a belief in a bodily resurrection at "the end of time" when God would overthrow the existing order and institute a "Kingdom of Heaven". Jesus seems to be an adherent of this view - his moral teachings very clearly intended to get people "right" so they would be able to enter the soon-to-be-established Kingdom. (Which he thought would come pretty darn soon)

After Jesus' alleged resurrection and ascension, and the failure of the end of the world to happen, the Apostle Paul put forth his theories. In some places in the Epistles he seems to go along with apocalyptic theology, describing a bodily resurrection at some future time. At other places he is apparently teaching that a Christian goes right to Heaven upon death. He never mentions Hell, but does write about wrath and judgement in many places. This lack of specificity left it to subsequent generations of Christian theologians to devise descriptions of Heaven and Hell, although the way they imagined Hell was a lot more graphic than that of Heaven. 

Despite a paucity of official descriptions of what awaits us in Heaven, most people have at least a sketch of an opinion about what it entails. Usually a reunion of one's loved ones, living joyfully for all eternity. In my own experience, people envision their deceased family "looking down on them" and providing some kind of help, comfort or intercession while "up there". Like most religious beliefs, beliefs about the afterlife owe less to sanctioned dogma than to personal imaginings. 

Beliefs outside of Christianity aren't any more concrete than the dominant Christian beliefs: feasting in the Halls of Odin in Valhalla, the Summerlands, reincarnation, Nirvana, getting your heart weighed against a feather, they're all based on some ideas that someone who wasn't dead thought about what happened to the dead. It's interesting to me to note that the Greco-Roman conception of the afterlife before Christianity was pretty dreary. You just shuffled around as a shadow (literally) of your former self in some dank underworld. 

The truth is that if there is an afterlife, we don't know anything about it because it's not something we can investigate. 

Belief in an afterlife is usually pretty harmless. If thinking that your loved one who died is "in a better place", or happily playing in an amateur harp combo, free of pain, etc, gives you comfort, then I have no problem with it. Historically, people have been conned into accepting pain and suffering during their lifetime because it would all be better "later". Personally I take the "I don't know and it doesn't matter" position. I'm going to live my life the best I can while I have a life. If it happens that there is an afterlife that I can consciously enjoy, cool, if not, I'll never know, will I?

Weather Magic

I'm defining "weather magic" as any method by supernatural (aka magical) means of changing or affecting the weather. If you don't believe in magic, or even the possibility of affecting nature through prayer or appeal to deities, this isn't a discussion for you. 

I'm going to look at weather magic from two perspectives, the practical and the ethical, and finally, discuss alternatives. I will be assuming, for the sake of this discussion, that nature can, in theory, be manipulated, either by the magical ability of an individual, or by intervention by supernatural beings. 

Weather in general, and storms in particular, are complex things that do not exist or function in a vacuum, nor is weather in one region isolated from that of other regions. Everything affects everything else. We've all heard of the Butterfly Effect, which postulates that the flapping of one butterfly's wings  has cumulative effects that can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. A bit overly simplistic, but true in principle. Therefore any weather manipulation is going to affect more than just the immediate vicinity. If you magically stop the rain that's ruining your picnic, where is that storm going to go? Will the intensity of the storm increase and cause unforeseen damage if it's moved? 

A typical storm has a lot of kinetic energy. See this encyclopedia article about the energy inherent in a storm. If you think that you have enough power to shift the incredible momentum inherent in a thunderstorm, why not try to nudge something smaller, like the path of your lawn sprinkler or the gentle breeze that's blowing a leaf across your driveway first? If you can't do that, you are out of your league when it comes to guaranteeing a sunny day for your softball game. 

The alternative to envisioning yourself as a powerful weather mage is to posit a god or goddess who has the power to do the weather shifting for you. Any deity so proposed can be as powerful as you want to imagine. There is no arbitrary upper limit to god power. An omnipotent pantheon dweller should be able to clear the skies, or water your crops, or melt the snow or whatever you else you might need. The energy of the storm is negligible for such an entity. But in this scenario we still run up against the reality that weather systems are global, not local and the storm has to go somewhere. 

Let's look at the ethics of magical (or divine) weather manipulation. Being that weather is global, stopping a tornado in your vicinity might mean that someone else gets it, or getting rain to water your crops if you're a farmer could result in someone else experiencing drought. What about if you really need the rain and you trust the deity of your choice to work it all out so that no one else gets hurt? I've addressed on a several occasions the ineffectiveness of prayer here, here, and here. You can follow those links, but they can be summarized as "prayer, i.e. the asking a deity to do or provide something, does not yield discernable results". So I guess we can theorize above the ethics of omnipotent being fixing the weather to your liking, but their track record is poor. 

I'm very much a disbeliever in the belief that things were "meant to be". That it's raining today because of some divine game plan that stopping the rain would interfere in. So my objection to weather manipulation magic, even if an individual or group would have the ability to work it, is that it's almost always self-centered and ignorant. Self-centered because it takes into account only one's own interests and ignorant due to a lack of knowledge of the wider effects of the changes wrought. If you're a magical practitioner, my current opinion is that the magic should be worked on oneself.

Look, I don't care if you're Aleister Crowley or Jesus in a boat on the Sea of Galilee you don't have the metaphysical watts to change climate, i.e. the changes that need to be made to reverse drought conditions or seasonal flooding. For most people it's the immediate weather circumstances, affecting them personally that offers a target for change. What if, instead of attempting to stop the rain from ruining your outdoor event after it's already on its way, you work on being aware (magically or otherwise) of what the weather will be like and plan based on what the weather will be rather than expecting the weather to change for you? Hone your thinking skills (magically or otherwise) to know what to do when dangerous weather comes to you. Magically increase your reaction time and eliminate distractions so that you can safely navigate that slick road during a storm. 

What more realistic? Magicking yourself  or the entire weather system of our planet?

Workin' Man - Part VI - More Newspapers and Stocking Shelves

 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

Bruce, my father-in-law, worked at an auto parts store on O Street. One of his regular customers was Jeff Schrier, whose family owned some grocery stores in Lincoln. Bruce introduced me to Jeff, who hired me on the spot at Food 4 Less. My first job at Food 4 Less was as a stocker on the night crew. My shift started at 9:00pm and would last until we were done, which varied depending on how big the truck was. Since it was only a part time job I needed to find something else in order to make ends meet. The Omaha World-Herald Lincoln office had a position called a "bundle hauler". Lincoln was divided up into five or six zones with a driver responsible for delivering papers to the carriers and stores in their assigned area, as well as filling the vending machines. My area was downtown Lincoln, which included the State Office Building and State Capitol, West O Street, and a slice of Lincoln bordered by A and O Streets and 27th Street. I initially started at 2:30am and finished up around 7:00am. Between the two jobs I was working around fifty hours a week. 

At Food 4 Less I started out being assigned to the aisle that held peanut butter and jelly, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and salad dressings. The first thing that we would do after clocking in was "run back stock". Back stock was product that had arrived on a previous day, but could not fit on the shelf. Some of this was items that the manager ordered too much of. These cases were placed on the warehouse shelving immediately above the shelf location. There was also items that we had in large quantity, usually items that had been ordered in bulk or were in the ad. These could be found in pallets in the back room, which we called "the warehouse". When the truck arrived the pallets were unloaded in the warehouse, which unusually for a grocery store, was huge, almost as many square feet as the sales floor itself. Every stocker then went into the back and pulled items from the pallets that corresponded to their assigned aisle. We then "strung them", i.e. set them on the floor in front of the proper section of the aisle. Once this was accomplished it was time to start stocking the items on the shelves. 

Food 4 Less was a "box store", which meant that you cut the top and front off the case and put the box on the shelf, making stocking marginally faster than if individual units were removed from the cases first. Once all the newly arrived stock was placed on the shelf, it was time for "facing". This involved removing excess cardboard and pulling all the product forward. (I always pulled all the cans or bottles or boxes forward, later in my grocery career the standard of just pulling forward a couple of rows predominated. This made the aisles look full, but on a busy day the shelves quickly became raggedy, with all the remaining stock pushed to the rear of the shelf. On top and bottom shelves there could be plenty of stock, but since only a few items were pulled forward, they looked empty). I usually faced each section as I stocked it, although some stockers started facing after all the stocking was done. (In stores where stockers were timed on how long it took them to stock an aisle, it made sense to face separately, even though the combination of the two tasks took long being done separately) While this was going on the more senior stockers filled displays or built new ones. Once all of this was done the stock crew clocked out and the manager and assistant manager swept the floor and ran a floor scrubbing machine around the store before heading out themselves. 

Unloading trucks at this store could be a dangerous proposition. A ramp connected the floor of the warehouse to a docking station at the level of the floor of a standard trailer just outside the delivery door. We'd remove pallets from the truck with a pallet jack and descended down the ramp, which was at a very steep angle. Gravity quickly took over and often two guys guiding the pallets down to the floor level had to do all they could do to keep the pallet from getting out of control, sliding downhill at high speed. At the bottom of the ramp you had to quickly turn either left or right or crash into a wall. More than once we'd take that turn so fast the whole load would tip over. Since we didn't have any forklifts or powered jacks and sometimes the level of the trailer was slightly lower than the dock, getting a pallet out of the truck required utilized all available muscle. One night we got a pallet of canned goods over the hump and I ended up running over my foot, cracking a couple of my toes. 

After a few months my assignment was changed to dairy stocker. I liked this a lot better since all of my stock was in one place, rather than spread out among multiple pallets. I could organize the cooler the way I saw fit and eventually they let me do my own ordering. Typically in grocery stores the dairy products arrive from two different sources. One was a dedicated dairy supplier, like Meadow Gold or Roberts, which primarily provided milk, but also sour cream, cottage cheese and dips. The grocery warehouse was the source for everything else: eggs, cheese, margarine, yogurt etc. The night crew stocked what came in on the truck from the warehouse, day crew stocked the milk. 

For around the first two years I also worked a part time job at the Omaha-World-Herald, which meant I had to leave by 2:00pm. I started picking up some extra hours coming in early to run back stock as early as 6:00pm, which meant I was working close to 40 hours a week just at Food 4 Less. 

As I stated earlier, shortly after starting at Food 4 Less I picked up a second job as a bundle hauler for the Omaha World-Herald newspaper. That job started at 2:30am and generally went to around 7:00am. I was assigned Bundle Haul 4 which stretched from N 27th Street all the way out to NW 48th Street on West O Street. Our office was in the basement of a strip mall at around 40th & O Streets, but we picked up our papers at a gas station on 9th Street across from the downtown Denny's. One Bundle Hauler was assigned to hand out our assignment sheets, which indicated where we were delivering and how many papers each stop received. After we unloaded all the papers from the truck we took what we needed for our route and headed out. My first few stops were at the State Office Building and the State Capitol. I especially liked the Capitol, where I delivered to the snack bar on the second floor. It was fun walking through the abandoned hallways and listening to the echoes of my footsteps. My third stop was to a guy named Bob. I viewed him as an "old guy", but in retrospect he was probably younger than I am now. He lived in a ramshackle downtown apartment building - every morning I was supposed to enter his actual apartment and wake him up. I was in mortal fear every night that I'd go in there and Bob would be dead. Looking back, I can hardly believe I agreed to do it! 

Things usually went pretty smoothly. But not always. One morning, after loading all my papers into the car and going through my daily route changes, someone banged aggressively on my window and told me to move my car. Apparently I was in someone's preferred spot. When I told him that I would be a minute he started kicking my car door. When I jumped out to confront him I found myself staring at a handgun pointed at my chest. Despite growing up in New York, this was a new experience for me. Despite being terrified, I put on a show of bravado and asked him what he planned to do with that gun. He lowered the gun and started laughing. We were already almost nose to nose, so it was pretty easy to punch him in the face without having to move any closer. He went down like a felled tree - I didn't wait around to find out if he was conscious before jumping in my car and starting my route. When I got back to the office when I was done, Vic the supervisor was waiting for me, having heard what happened from the rest of the team. I told my story and Quick Draw McGraw was fired. 

Most of the other haulers drove pickup trucks or vans. I drove a Chevette. If you are unfamiliar with Chevettes, they are small cars. There were days, especially Sundays, where I had to pile papers on the hood of the car to get even the downtown stops done. 

Like the grocery store job I started picking up extra hours. To ensure that would be on the clock until 7:00am I would take on "down routes". These were routes that didn't have a carrier and were assigned to Bundle Haulers. There was also a position called "Miss Runner". Customers would call in if, for one reason or another they didn't receive their paper. The Miss Runner would call in periodically to get a list of call-ins, usually working until around noon. Some days I would start at 6pm and work until noon the next day between both jobs. I wasn't getting much sleep but I was paying my bills. This went on until I was promoted to Night Manager at Food 4 Less and was able to quit my job as a bundle hauler. 

Start with Part I

Working Man - Part V - More Dishwashing, Some Pizza and Vacuum Sales

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

 I was still part of a Way "program" and had made plans to enter their leadership training. Since I expected to leave the state for that training in a year, I was not looking for anything long-term. Nonetheless I started out my time in a new city with a job already lined up. The Country Kitchens in Kearney and Lincoln were owned by the same company, so I started my life in Lincoln ready to start work. As I stated in Part IV, my job was a dishwasher, but they referred to me as a DMO - Dish Machine Operator. I worked Monday - Friday, 7am - 4pm. I have no idea how I managed to avoid evenings and weekends, but wasn't about to complain. Tim, one of my roommates, worked a similar schedule, so I always had a ride to work. I'd start my day cleaning up the horrendous mess that the closing shift left for me. The sink would be full of pots and pans, silverware and dishes, and, an accident waiting to happen: knives. I don't recall ever cutting myself, but I ranted about it just about every day. If I had stuck around I might have worked my way into a waiter or cook position, but as I was still heavily involved in The Way, and had planned on entering their leadership training program in a year, long term career goals were not a priority. 

Around this time I met Pat, the woman who I would eventually marry, which influenced what my next job would be. In February '82 I had been reassigned to a different part of the city by Way leadership, which made it difficult to get to my job at Country Kitchen. Pat's ex-husband Dave was a manager at the Domino's Pizza Commissary, the location where the pizza dough and toppings were prepped for all the Lincoln and Omaha Dominoes. It was located within walking distance of my new home, so she asked him to hire me on. It was another Monday - Friday job, starting at 7am with varying end times. We’d start the day making giant piles of dough that we would cut up and weigh. These would become pizza crusts and put in trays to be delivered to the different stores. Next we’d cut up various toppings - onions, peppers, mushrooms etc., and bag them up. This was all according to orders called in from the various stores in Lincoln and Omaha. 

Back in those days I wasn’t very safety conscious. On two different occasions I tried to unclog the vegetable slicer and sliced the end of a finger. The first time I put a Band-Aid on it and it healed just fine. The second time one of the owners was present and insisted that I go the urgent care and get stitches. I can still see the scar from that one. (Years later as a certified Level 4 Food Manager & store safely coordinator, I understood the owner's point of view!)

After a few months I was entrusted with driving the delivery truck, first to the Lincoln stores, and then to Omaha, driving the big 10 speed manual transmission rig. This was a part of the job that I really enjoyed. It was a few hours every afternoon, just me and one other person, driving and unloading at each of the stores. On one of my trips I got stuck in a narrow alley and tried to back out, the bumper got caught on something and was bent back. I “fixed” it by pushing the bent bumper against a telephone pole to get it back in position. I thought that no one would notice! 

That summer I found out that I would not be entering leadership training, and Pat and I got married. I was far from employee-of-the-year, but I’m pretty sure marrying the boss's ex-wife was what got me fired. (Although Dave was not happy that I called the owner after Dave regularly showed up late for work, leaving the whole crew standing outside, unable to clock in.) This was the beginning of a long stretch being unemployed, other than a brief stint selling vacuum cleaners. 

Vacuum cleaner salesman was the shortest and probably the most ridiculous job I ever had. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but I think I answered an ad that was fairly vague, but promised big paychecks. After sitting through a training class I found out that I’d be selling Rainbow vacuum cleaners for commission. I was very bad at it. We were supposed to generate leads by giving potential buyers a case of soup to get in the door. (Yes, a case of soup) After going through our spiel and attempting to close, we were supposed to call our district manager and have him talk to our lead. This didn't work very often, it usually just annoyed people. These vacuums were ridiculously expensive, but a ridiculously high percentage of the cost was the commission, so you could make a pretty good living selling one or two a week. I only sold two or three in the month that I did this, but I made enough to keep our heads above water for a while. 

I ended up being out of work for about four months, I didn’t pay rent that whole time. Our landlord was a Way person who lived in Minneapolis. She was pretty angry about us not paying the rent, but I managed to avoid getting evicted until I found another job. I got really good at figuring out how long I could avoid paying a utility bill before getting cut off; we signed up for food stamps and WIC. There was always food on the table though. I managed to hang on until I was able to get two part time jobs - stocking shelves at a Food 4 Less from 9pm - 2am, then delivering Omaha World-Herald newspapers from 2:30am - 7am. 

Start with Part I

Continue to Part VI

Managers Part V - Expert Power

We have looked at several sources of influence that a manager has over subordinates: 

Legitimate Power - the power that comes from a title or job description; 

Reward Power - that which comes from bestowing promotions, raises, coveted schedules etc; and 

Coercive Power - the ability to influence by inflicting or withholding punishment. 

Next we will be looking at Expert Power - the ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills.

Management is a skill in and off itself that does not necessarily derive from the ability to do the job that your subordinates are doing. For example, a manager in a manufacturing plant may have assembly line workers, janitorial staff, accountants, and salesmen on the payroll. It isn't reasonable to expect that the plant manager knows how to do all  of those jobs. However, most people tend to listen to managers who have demonstrated a proficiency in a particular area and trust their judgment in that area. For example, in my last job my immediate supervisor had almost 40 years of experience and has expertise in multiple areas of the department. She knew the rules, regulations and laws that apply to all aspects of the job, and as such, commands a lot of respect due to her extensive knowledge. The influence that can be wielded by being an "expert" manager is going to vary from industry to industry and from position to position within an industry, but being an expert will only be an effective source of management power if coupled with other skills (to be discussed later).

One's status as an expert however, doesn't necessarily mean that person is management material. As I stated earlier, management is a skill in and of itself, somewhat separate from any industry in which it functions. Oftentimes, an expert's skills in their area of expertise leads to a promotion to the ranks of management where they find that they are completely unprepared, never having earned the craft of managing, having concentrated on the skills that were being managed. This problem is exacerbated by how in many businesses the only path to promotion is into the supervisory or management ranks. In these fields someone who is looking to earn a greater rate of pay starts applying for positions that they are unsuited for, and end up being promoted because they were good at their previous job, even though they had exhibited no leadership qualities. Most non-managers have no understanding of what a manager's responsibilities are, thinking it's nothing more than either telling people what to do (what they think is a bad manager) or simply doing the same job for more money (what they think is a good manager). The truth is often quite sobering.

Start with Part I

Working Man - Part IV - Cutting Glass, Emptying Bed Pans, Flipping Burgers, and Washing Dishes

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 Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador 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 tents 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 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 as a gopher at his carpet store, 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 verbally. 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 instead. The manager, instead of caving like my previous employer, not only defended me, but pointed out that that Steve, who they so strenuously objected to, wouldn't have had to come in if whoever was supposed to be there had shown up. And then she 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, since the local nursing homes weren't hiring. 

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 started coming for things you missed. It was chaotic!

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 an hour 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. Probably the biggest headache was the night shift throwing all the end-of-night dirty dishes and utensils into the sink and filling it with water to "soak". It was my job to get it all cleaned up in the morning. I'm amazed that I never cut myself on any of the knives lurking in those turbid waters! 

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. 

Start with Part I

Continue to Part V

Working Man - Part III - Shrimp, Trucks, Plants and Stocks

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

My uncle John Hudacek was a chef at either The Metropolitan Club or the Gramercy Park Hotel (he had worked at both at various times, I don't recall which one he worked at during this time period). When he was at home Uncle John was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken guy who was usually overshadowed by his wife, my mother's sister Marion. I was quite surprised to discover that when he was at work, he was General Patton. He was a chef well before the days of celebrity chefs, but nonetheless, he was the king of the kitchen. I wasn't there long enough to learn much about how the kitchen worked - it was understood to be a temporary job - but as low man in the food chain, I got the low jobs. The one I remember with the greatest clarity was prepping shrimp. My memory presents a trash barrel quantity of shrimp which needed to be deveined, with the heads and tails removed. If I remember correct the "veins" were reused somehow, but the rest were disposed of. I swear cats were following me home that night!

After about a month I took my trip to Ohio, and shortly after returning home I found another job, this time as a stocker a Pergament Home Center, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. Pergament Home Centers was a family owned chain of hardware stores scattered throughout Long Island. The one where I worked was fairly close to home, just outside city limits at the south end of "Snake Road" which was what we called the winding, southern portion of Brookville Blvd. It was nestled in a little strip mall that included a May's Department Store and a grocery store. I was hired as a stocker, which meant I would mainly be unloading trucks and filling the shelves. It was one of the few union jobs that I have had. 

Unloading a truck at Pergament was not easy. There was no loading dock which trucks could back up to and remove pallets using a pallet jack. We had to hook up a "roller" to the back of the truck and toss individual cases of product down the rollers to be restacked on empty pallets on the floor of the stockroom. When a pallet was full it would be moved out to the sales floor where a second team would manually price each item with a pricing gun that disgorged small adhesive price tags and then place the product on the shelves. If this wasn't labor intensive enough, we sold carpet, paneling and lumber. Paneling was manhandled by two of us and slid down the roller to be placed on what we called a U-Boat, a cart with high sides that would be wheeled out so the plywood could be placed in a display rack. Lumber was gathered up in armloads and thrown off the back of the truck, aimed with great optimism at a U-Boat. All of this was back-breaking labor. Nonetheless we competed among ourselves - the stockers on the truck trying to roll down stock faster than the stockers on the floor could keep up. This process took hours and was often not completed before the store closed at 9:00pm. Being a union shop, we didn't stay late to finish the job, but locked up the truck, locked up the store and went home. Or somewhere. 

One of the more dangerous things we did was to tie customers' purchases of lumber, carpet or paneling to the roofs of their cars. This of course wasn't dangerous to us, but was potentially dangerous to the customer. First we would stack their purchase on top of the car. We'd then tie some heavy duty twine to the front bumper, over the top and loop it around the back of the paneling and back to the front bumper. This would theoretically prevent the load from slipping off backwards. We'd then do the same to the back bumper tying it in back and looping it around the front to prevent the whole load from flying forward when the driver hit the brakes. For good measure we'd run rope through the open doors to secure the whole pile. I don't recall anyone complaining about losing anything on the way home, but I did see someone fail to make it out of the parking lot once. We didn't even get them to sign a waiver.

Like most jobs it was the people who made it interesting. There was a lot of drinking and pot smoking after work and even during breaks. A lot of us socialized after work, hitting the bars and even forming a softball team. The most "out there" was Mike Morgillo, the senior stocker. Mike had a unique way of meeting women. When we were out at a bar, he would sit a few stools down from an attractive girl and start crying. He'd then start muttering "I'm garbage...just garbage". More often then not he would attract the girl's attention and sympathy as she tried to comfort him, and end up leaving with him. It sounds unlikely, but I witnessed this happen many times. (At work, his nickname became "Garbage", it may have even been on his name tag.) Mike's Casanova ways had a limit though. A woman from one of the other stores took a shine to him. She was tall, approaching six feet tall, built like an Olympic swimmer. Pretty enough, but she intimidated the heck out of Mr. Garbage. She showed up at a bar we were all hanging out at one night and he ran out the back door to get away! 

One time our store manager noticed that we were missing quite a few of our shopping carts and asked us to see if we could track them down. A couple of us had girlfriends who worked in the nearby Mays department store, who informed us that Mays was using our carts to store and stock merchandise. Mike and I, along with a couple of others, deputized ourselves as "Pergament Security". Mike got us fake security badges and we raided Mays' backrooms, shouting "Pergament Security - we're confiscating those carts" and brought back all the purloined property. 

Pergament Home Centers had a softball league that played games on Sunday, when the stores closed at 6:00pm. Our store fielded a coed team. We weren't really any good, but managed to win most of our games, due to our enthusiasm, and possibly alcohol and cheating. Our pitcher, Azard Hussein, who was from Trinidad and Tobago, had never played softball before and pitched cricket style. I think he scared the opposing team with his running overarm delivery. Other members of our team included Richie Pergament, our sixtyish store manager who was cousin to the company president, and his 10 year old son. One of our signature moves was to all don cowboy hats at some point during the game and howl or chant, or just make a lot of noise. I suspect that many of our wins could be attributed to our opponents just wanting to get away from us.  After the games, retaining the cowboy hats, we retired to a local bar, telling everyone we were a country band called The Worthless Brothers. I believe my name was Cuthbert Worthless. 

Speaking of sports, when I was working at the store I was in my last year playing roller hockey. For many years I played pickup games in local schoolyards and even on tennis courts (we managed to severely damage the courts' surface with out metal wheels and were banned from the park) and the occasional hockey league. The last few years a bunch of my friends, my brother and cousins formed a team that played in the Grant Park Roller Hockey League. Most of us were in our teens, and due to the fact that the other teams were composed of grown men, we got beaten, and beaten up, pretty regularly. I was not very athletic, and was not a very good player but we did have some decent players, my brother Mike and friend Anthony among them. My father was our coach. Since I was not very adept at scoring goals I took on the role of enforcer, clearing the path for the better players to get the puck in the net. My number, five, was known throughout the league as the guy most likely to spend time in the penalty box. My final game came after I had stopped playing actively due to school and work commitments. I had stopped at the park to watch my former team play. My friend Anthony hurt his hand badly mid game and had to sit out the third period. I put on his uniform and skates and took his place. I was recognized as "that (expletive) number five" and got involved in a bench clearing brawl. I think we won the game!

We were inventive (or maybe cruel) when it came to pranks. One of our regular truck drivers had recently gotten divorced. One of the areas of contention was the many cats that his wife had brought into their home. Mike would meow at him when he came to deliver a load, and one time found a stray cat and put it in the cab of his truck. We'd tie a stack of pallets to a truck with a long rope, causing a parade of pallets to follow the truck down the road. Most of the trucks had signs on the back that could be changed to reflect what was in the truck. One of them said "radioactive material aboard". That got the driver pulled over. We were pretty cruel to the manager's son who worked with us when he was on break from college. We convinced him that catching a load of lumber in his arms was a safe way to unload it. 

I ended up getting fired from Pergament for an act of vandalism. My coworker Jack and I smoked some pot on our lunch break and came back to work in no shape to make rational decisions. In fact, we decided to take an axe and pop some holes in the side of the truck we were unloading for ventilation. We had enough presence of mind to throw the axe in the creek than ran behind the store. When the truck arrived back at the warehouse, of course it was noticed that there were holes in the side of the truck. An investigation was launched, but since there were no security cameras and no one was talking, it didn't look like we would be caught. Until Derek, the only Black stocker on the crew, was accused of the vandalism and it looked like he would be fired. This was probably a ploy to smoke out (pun intended) the real vandals, so we confessed. Since we were unionized I received a check for all my unused vacation and sick time. 

I quickly found another job. It was in the same strip mall, in the Mays department store where I had previously repatriated our missing shopping carts. I wasn't there very long. If you've followed along with my series So, You Want to Join a Cult, this was after I had been involved in The Way for over a year. I had planned on going out as part of The Way's missionary type program (Word Over the World [WOW] Ambassadors) in August of 1979, but changed my mind. In anticipation of leaving the state I put my Toyota Corona in storage in a relative's garage, so I had no means of transportation. I ended up working at Mays for about a month or so, running the Garden Center, even though I knew nothing about plants. I managed to quit this job without getting fired, assaulting anyone or engaging in vandalism. Sorry, but no amusing anecdotes from my time at Mays, although it was ironic that I was in charge of plants, an assignment that I would reprise many years later at another job. I was moving out of my parents' home and into a house with several other Way people. Without a vehicle, I needed to find something either near my new home in Queens Village, near the Belmont Raceway, or something where I could take advantage of public transportation. I ended up with a position as a clerk in the stock brokerage form E.F. Hutton & Company in downtown Manhattan. 

This was the fall of 1979. Computers existed, but personal computers did not. My job consisted of tracking the buying and selling of stock by the company on behalf of clients. I reviewed reams of green bar paper and microfiche images and entered the information on forms that were forwarded to our data entry team on another floor. It did not pay well and wasn't very exciting. I have a vivid memory of there being pneumatic tubes in the office, like those you see in bank drive-up windows. When we would finish filling out a form we would tube it to data entry. Sometimes we'd include a bag of M&M's if we needed a rush job. At the time, not knowing that I would eventually decide to leave New York as a WOW a year later, I viewed it as a stepping stone to a more responsible and better paying position. I was also attending night school at the time. After graduating high school I enrolled at Baruch College, a unit of the City University of New York, but dropped out after two years due to poor grades. I took a year off and went back in 1979. My job was in Lower Manhattan, not far from Battery Park and college was a little further north. Monday through Friday I'd take the train to work, and then after my work day ended I'd take another train uptown to attend classes. The work day may have been grey and uninspiring, but what went on outside was interesting. 

I saw the high wire walker Phillippe Petit walk a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center. I saw the Pope's motorcade drive by our office. But lunch time was the most interesting. The corner of Broad and Wall Streets was an historic corner. The New York Stock Exchange was on one side of the street with Federal Hall, which had at one time been the seat of government of the United States, was on the other side. Trinity Church, an Episcopal Church that boasted many of the nation's founders as congregants, was down the street. But what made it interesting was the street preachers. Several years previously, when working a summer job I became familiar with many of the regulars. It had been my first exposure to the fundamentalist and evangelical strains of Christianity. Being a little older and bolder and thinking I knew something about theology I engaged many of them in discussions that, as religious discussions often go, went nowhere. 

In the Spring of 1980 I had again decided that I would go out as a WOW for The Way. But first I would travel to Rome City Indiana to take their "Advanced Class" over two weeks in June. So I quit my job and temporarily moved back in with my parents. Amazingly I was able to leave another job in good standing sans violence. I attended the class in late June and headed to New Knoxville Ohio for a week before shipping out to Sidney Nebraska and my next adventure in employment.

Start with Part I

Continue to Part IV

Working Man - Part II - "The Getty"

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

 My Uncle Richie had a buddy who owned some gas stations where he worked on Saturdays to make some extra cash. When I turned 14 he got me a job at one of them - a Getty Oil station on Sunrise highway near the Green Acres shopping center. Eventually my brothers and cousins ended up working there as well. I ended up working there for five years. 

One of my first Saturdays working I got off on the wrong foot with one of the shift managers. The full-timers all had uniforms with their names stitched on the shirts. As a part-timer, I didn't rate a uniform, but wore my own clothes. Getting set to leave for the day I saw a uniform shirt in what I thought was the trash. I picked it up, took it home and washed it, and unstitched the name "Red" from the shirt, pretty proud that I had my own uniform shirt.  The following Saturday, after reporting for work I found myself facing down a very angry Red, who was grabbing me by the front of "my" shirt and was demanding to know why I was wearing "his" shirt! I learned that day about the concept of a commercial uniform laundering service. I didn't have to deal with Red for much longer though. He and some of the other full-timers were selling drugs from the station at night and were caught by an undercover Nassau County cop. 

Back in the seventies credit card transactions for minor purchases were rare and debit cards didn't yet exist, so the majority of our customers paid in cash. The guys on the pumps were given a "bank" - a wad of singles and fives, as well as a roll each of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. The manager would take readings off each of the pumps, where a dial logged the number of gallons and dollars sold. At the end of the shift another reading would be taken and the difference between the two readings would determine the amount of money we should have to turn in. In addition to fuel, the station also had a small store where cigarettes and cases of soda were sold. Later a refrigerator was added and gallons of milk and cold drinks were sold. There was no cash register. There might not have even been a calculator at the counter, you added it all up in your head!. Purchases of items other than gas were tracked on a sheet of paper and added up at the end of the night. At the end of each shift the manager was responsible for adding everything up and balancing the cash receipts with the various hash marks indicating sales. There was a calculator in the back office - one of those museum pieces where you pulled a lever like on a slot machine to get your total. The back office itself was a converted bathroom. The manager's "chair" was the old toilet!

There was no such thing as a self-service pump. Three or four of us were out in all weather conditions. We were not welcome in the office or the garage, but we did have a little shack that we could find a little shade in the summer and get us out of the wind in the winter. In the winter we did our best to bundle up, but there was a limit to how heavy your gloves could be since we were handling money. The standard solution was to wear two pair of cotton work gloves and warm our hands on the tail pipes of the cars. When sweat and condensation started to make the gloves damp, we'd switch them out with a pair that we had warming up on the furnace in the back of the garage. Just before opening, a guy with a small snowplow would clear the lot, but we had to deal with customers who would brush all the snow off the roofs of their cars. On at least one occasion we shoveled it all into the back seat of one such inconsiderate bastard. Some customers thought that emptying their ashtrays onto the ground was good idea. I don't know how many realized that we were scooping up the butts and depositing them back into their cars, but they eventually stopped!   

"The Getty" featured a colorful collection of characters. When I first started I rode to work with my Uncle Richie (known as "Dick" - when his son, also named Richard came to work, they were known as "Big Dick" and "Little Dick", which my cousin wasn't at all happy with). Later I caught a ride with John S, one of two Armenian brothers who lived around the corner. There were seven Tonys working there. One of whom, Tony Z, didn't have a surname starting with "Z" and wasn't actually named Tony, but was hiding income from his ex-wife. There was Tony Beard, the assistant manager who I remember most for stealing the girlfriend of Tony C. The head mechanic was also named Tony, who we referred to a "Wire Brush Tony". The nickname came about due to his tendency to exaggerate what was wrong with a vehicle in order to jack up the cost, which we called "fucking the customer with a wire brush". Jack, the other mechanic, got his son Jack Junior a job in the garage. Jack Junior was usually high - my most vivid memory of him is seeing him comb his hair with a fork after eating lunch. Another father son team was yet another Tony and his stepson Rob. For the longest time I thought Rob's last name was "Ramsey", but found out later that the other guys were really calling him "Ramesses", a brand of condom - a clever way to call him a "scumbag" without him realizing it. The aforementioned Tony C, along with two fellow Italian Americans Dino and Gino, were habitués of the Long Island disco scene. When not at work they could be seen decked out in polyester suits, wide collared shirts open to the navel and plenty of gold chains, and of course perfectly coiffed hair. One Saturday afternoon Gino taught us all a disco line dance in the midst of the gas pumps. An unsavory aspect of Dino and Gino was the way they viewed women. They were both engaged to "nice" girls who we never saw. They also both had girlfriends on the side, Dee and Betty, who would hang around the station when the boys were working. One night my own girlfriend stopped by to say hello. I was "counselled" by Dino and Gino that I shouldn't "allow" her to come to the station, because it wasn't a place for respectable girls. 

As befitted an operation so awash in nepotism, the regular night manager was a ne'er-do-well uncle of the owner by the name of Rocky, also known by the pump jockeys as The Raisin. (Rocky had recently moved north from Florida and was well tanned and very wrinkled). Rocky didn't do much. He'd sit in the back office all night doing who-knows-what, paying little attention to what was going on outside. My brother Mike would sometimes shut the station lights off early, making it look like we were closed, leaving only the light outside the back office lit. We'd loaf around and drink beer and Rocky never, ever, noticed. Two girls from the movie theater next door would come hang out on break, whom Rocky would flirt with. We christened them "The Raisinettes". But the most interesting of all was Station Manager Al Kramer.

Al Kramer was a six-three former Marine who liked to yell. He intimidated the Hell out of us younger guys and we did everything we could to avoid his wrath. We just called him "Kramer". One of Kramer's pet peeves were people who parked on the station lot without buying gas, blocking the pumps. When he saw it happen he would emerge from the office, the door banging against the outer wall, almost coming off its hinges, as he bellowed at the poor soul who unknowingly violated Kramer's rules for parking. One early Saturday morning we found a man sleeping in his car on the side of the building. Instead of waking him up and asking him to move we told Kramer that we had asked him to move and that he refused. Kramer stormed out, started kicking the man's car door and screaming at him to get his car off the lot. We had to find our amusement wherever we could. As mean as he could be, Kramer always stuck up for us if a customer complained. I was once accused of shortchanging a customer, a quick reading and a count of my cash on hand cleared me, but the customer wanted to know how Kramer knew I didn't pocket the money. Kramer asked him how he knew he wasn't about to get a boot in the ass. 

Somewhere along the line the elder generation of employees started leaving for "real" jobs, and Kramer started giving some of us younger guys, including me and my brother Mike, responsibility as shift managers in the evenings and on Sundays. One of the first of the new generation of night shift managers was a guy named Gino (different guy than the other Gino, who actually was named Eugene, or Gene). Gino II had a habit of leaving work in the middle of his shift to visit his girlfriend (since "nice" girls don't come to the station!). One evening, while Gino was off romancin', he left me in charge. Kramer must have suspected something was up; he called while Gino was gone and wanted to talk to him. Thinking I could cover his absence I told Kramer that Gino was in the bathroom. Kramer surely knew I was lying and said he would wait. This was decades before the ubiquity of cell phones, so there was no way I could reach Gino. Fortunately, after a very uncomfortable 5 minutes on the phone with Kramer, Gino showed back up. Shortly thereafter Gino was no longer scheduled for manager shifts and I was. 

This was my first management job. I don't mind telling you, I wasn't very good at it. Working there at the time were two brothers, John and Steve VS. Their last name was Socci, but the "VS" was due to the fact that they lived in the town of Valley Stream and we already had a "John S". Steve and I, for some reason, didn't get along. It was probably due in part to my inflated sense of being in charge and Steve's resistance to being told what to do. (Check out my series on management - I thought my title was sufficient for receiving unquestioned obedience) One afternoon at shift change we got into it. At the end of shift everyone had to turn in their cash to whoever was working the counter. This involved tedious counting of change. I don't remember all the details, but I vaguely remember that there was a line of customers buying cigarettes, several workers trying to cash out, and Steve had a line of quarters stacked up 4 high each strung across the counter. Something ticked me off, I can't recall what, and I knocked over all of Steve's carefully counted stacks of coin. Steve vaulted the counter and proceeded to beat the crap out of me until some of the other guys separated us and made me sit in the back room until Steve left to go home. I had a few other run-ins with other workers, in retrospect probably due to my overbearing approach to supervision of people who didn't really need to be supervised. For some reason they still scheduled me as a shift supervisor. 

My brother Mike did a much better job as a shift manager than I did, mainly because he realized that as night manager, all he had to do was count the money at the end of the night and let everybody do whatever they wanted to, as long as people who wanted gas got their gas. One of the things that Mike liked to do was change people's names. They had hired a kid named Mike to work with us. My brother proclaimed that he was the only "Mike" and renamed the guy "Ed", which became his name for as long as he worked there. "Ed" had a girlfriend whose name I forget after 50 years, but she was renamed "Trixie", after Ed Norton's wife on The Honeymooners. A lot of guys had their names changed, but the  most long term change was a guy named Denis. Since there was already a Denis, Mike renamed him "Sid", which became the name his friends called him even after he became a wealthy businessman years later. As far as I know he's still called Sid. 

One of our ongoing pranks involved "sticking the tanks". When a delivery tanker would show up, we had to insert a ten foot pole into the tank to determine the level of the gas in the underground tanks. The openings were on the side of the building. New guys were told that the tanks were across the heavily trafficked highway! The sight of a newbie dodging traffic while shouldering a ten foot long ruler never got old! 

We had a lot of private jargon among the pump jockeys. "Rubberhead" was a favorite insult to customers we judged to be stupid, as well as "pork nose", which we applied to the usually obese, arrogant, assholes who we felt treated us poorly. One of our competitors, I think it was Exxon, had the slogan TFGB (Thanks For Coming By). We decided GTFO (Get The Fuck Out) was more appropriate to our attitude. Someone made a sign with the letters GTFO on it and tacked on to the outside of our little shack. Occasionally a customer would figure it out! We also had a couple of first generation Italians working at night, who would insult customers in Italian, but do it with a smile on their face so the customer was (usually) unaware of the insult. We all competed at telling people that they were idiots without them realizing that we were telling them they were idiots. It was a skill that would have a lifetime of useful application. 

But all good things come to an end. For me it was my adherence to Kramer's "don't park at the pumps" philosophy. A customer, who was not gassing up, blocking the pumps to go in and buy some cigarettes. I asked him to move. He ignored me and attempted to go inside. I stepped in front of him to block his progress - he poked me in the chest and told me to move, whereupon I hit him. And I hit him a couple of more times. Of course I was (rightfully) fired. Not the last time I was fired for an act of violence. A few days later the Nassau County Police came looking for me, since my victim had filed a police report. The shift manager Rocky referred them to my brother, who declined to give them any information. When he got home and told me that the police were looking for me, my father, an NYPD officer, took me to the police station and made me turn myself in. I wasn't charged, probably out of professional courtesy to my father - the closest I have ever come to being arrested.

This was during the summer of 1978. It was my first year involved in The Way and had agreed to go to their annual international get together in Ohio, helping to drive in a "caravan" of Way people. Because of this commitment I wasn't ready to take on a permanent job, so I went to work for my uncle John, who was a chef at a hotel in Manhattan to earn some money to get me to Ohio and back.

Start with Part I

Go to Part III

Working Man - Part I - Paperboy

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

Workin' Man, that's what I am - I started out delivering newspapers in my neighborhood. Had a few summer jobs, one in the police department and one for a Wall Street firm in the mailroom. I worked in a full service gas station through high school. Unloaded trucks at a home improvement store and sold plants in the garden center of a department store. Did data entry for a stock broker. Apprenticed as a glass cutter and took care of old folks in a nursing home. Washed dishes and flipped burgers. Worked in the back room of a pizza restaurant cutting up toppings and making pizza dough and drove a truck driving the supplies to different restaurants. Stocked groceries and managed the night crew. Supervised paper carriers. Was an auditor at a big newspaper and was called a "paper pushing, number crunching son of a bitch" by someone I took to court. Back to stocking groceries and worked my way up to store director. Finished up as a senior revenue agent working for state government. Now retired!

My first job was as a newspaper carrier for the Long Island Press, an afternoon daily with Long Island, New York circulation. Back in those days, and up through at least the eighties, newspapers were mainly delivered by grade school kids riding their bicycles through their immediate neighborhood. My memory is a little foggy, but it seems like I had around 40-50 customers. There was a little distribution office, not much more than a shack, near the Long Island Railroad station on Francis Lewis Blvd just north of North Conduit Ave. You'd bike up to the "office", which was about 10 blocks from our house on 255th Street, and pick up your papers and head over to your route area to deliver them. A lot of paperboys walked their routes with the official canvas newspaper bag slung over their shoulder; I had a wire rack attached to the front of my bike that held all my papers. It clamped onto the handlebars and was stabilized by two struts attached to the front wheel. It could easily hold 50 rolled-up and rubber-banded newspapers during the week, but since Sunday papers were so gargantuan, it usually took a few trips. One morning, after loading up my Sunday papers, my bike tipped over from the weight!

Customers were not billed through the central office, as they are today, but carriers were responsible for collecting, in person, from their customers. The price of seven days of home delivery was 90¢. That broke down as 10¢ per day Monday - Saturday and 30¢ for Sunday. I had a little book where I would keep track of my customers and what service they received (Daily Only, Sunday Only or Daily-Sunday) and marked down when they paid each week. Most customers gave me a dollar, which included a 10¢ tip - with the big spenders forking over $1.25! I had one particularly grumpy customer - Mrs. Diamond - who was very particular about where I left her paper and usually paid me in nickels and dimes - never any tip!

Newspaper carriers then as now, are considered independent contractors. We bought our papers from the Long Island Press distributor and paid him per subscription. The paperboy (or girl) was the only contact that the customer had with the newspaper. Nobody was calling to get you to renew your subscription or take advantage of their special offers. And of course there was no "online" option. I have no memory of what we paid or what our "profit" was, but I must have thought it worth it to do every day (no days off!). We were supposed to pay the distributor every Saturday after we did the bulk of our collecting Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. After my first week I pedaled up to the office to pay my bill. The distributor's assistant was there. In retrospect he was probably around 17-18 years old, but he seemed pretty intimidating to me. When I asked him what I owed, he asked me "What do you have?". When I told him, he said that was what I owed. I reported this conversation to my dad, who took me back to the office to confront the guy. As it turned out, the amount of money that I had on hand did coincidently correspond to what I owed for the week. The distributor explained to Dad and me how the bill was calculated, so in subsequent weeks I would be able to calculate for myself what I owed. 

Eventually the Long Island Press went out of business and I got a paper route in the same general area with the New York Daily News. There were a few differences, the main one being that it was a morning paper, so there was no sleeping in during the summer and I had to get my route done before leaving for school. Our papers were delivered to our driveway (by this time my brother and at least one cousin also had routes) and the distributor came around every week to collect. I was moving in to my last few years of grade school (our Catholic School was grades 1- 8; we didn't have a junior high or middle school) and, not to put too fine a point on it, I was pretty lazy. I didn't like getting up early, I didn't like having to go around and collect money from people. I would put off collecting, and only go around when I didn't have enough money to pay my bill. If the weather was bad I would dump my papers somewhere rather than finish delivering. I had a terrible work ethic. 

Overlapping with my last two years before high school I worked summer jobs in Manhattan. The summer I turned 13 my father lined me up with a summer job at the New York City Police Department. (Dad was a NYPD officer at the time) I was employed as a clerk in the Pistol License Division, which was responsible for issuing and renewing handgun permits for "Special Patrolmen" (SP's), i.e. those who had jobs like security guards which required them to be armed. For the officers in this unit, it was far from a prestige posting. In fact, it was called the "Bow and Arrow Squad", because all the cops in division had their guns confiscated for various reasons and were consigned to desk duty. I spent my days going through files of index cards, looking for SP's whose licenses were expiring and making appointments to get them renewed. When I called SP's I always identified myself as "Tom Joyce, calling from the New York City Police Department". My voice had recently changed and over the phone I sounded like an adult. People calling back would ask for "Officer Joyce", which caused much hilarity among the actual officers. It was far from exciting, but it was my first "real" job. It was minimum wage, which then was $1.65/hour, but I received a "real" paycheck, worked with grownups and commuted to work by bus and subway from our home on the fringe of Queens to One Police Plaza in Manhattan. 

The following summer our neighbor around the corner lined me up a job as a mailroom clerk in a financial services firm, Alliance Capital Management, a subsidiary of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, a major player on Wall Street. Still not exciting, but with delivering mail, making copies and functioning as an overall gopher, I stayed busy. Auggie DiBiasi, the  full-time mail room clerk, made things interesting. Long-haired, with muttonchop sideburns, he was as hippie as you can get while having to wear a tie at work. Throughout the day he had music going in our little mail room - he convinced me to buy Quadrophenia by The Who, which remains one of my favorite albums. 

What was more interesting than the work was the lunch breaks. The office where I worked was just a few blocks from Wall Street, and I could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center from our building. On my lunch break I would often wander down to Wall Street where there was always some street theater to be had at The Federal Building. One of the regulars was an elderly street preacher called Crazy Willie. He would park his big Cadillac in front of Federal Hall across from the stock exchange and stand on the hood, preaching incoherently. I found out from my father that the same guy had been preaching at that corner 30 years previously, when Dad worked in Manhattan. This was all pretty interesting to me and was my first real exposure to non-mainstream religious thought, craziness notwithstanding! 

I'm not certain whether this job was in my first summer after my Freshman year of high school or the last summer before I started high school. At any rate, once the summer was over I started my first permanent, full-time job, pumping gas at a Getty Gas Station, which I did for around five years, through high school and into college.

Go to Part II