Dodging the worst job of my life

Yard work for minimum wage is right up there.

Back in high school I spent a dreary summer pulling weeds. Contract labor. One of my partners was a Black kid who ran track for his Big Ten college team. He was good, too, and had the medals to prove it. Know what he did with them? He sold them for $5 apiece, or $10 if it was a gold medal, though not actually gold.

Next summer I trimmed trees on a giant Christmas tree farm. The trees were about as tall as me, or taller. My job was to whack them with a machete, starting from a point at the top, down and away from me, to a wide skirt at the bottom. Waltz around the tree like that and try to make it symmetrical.

Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Except it’s 95 in the shade and pine trees have needles and leak sap, so by lunch break you’re not only tired, thirsty, sweaty and bleeding a bit from needle pricks, you’ve got sticky pine sap all over you and your filthy uncleanable clothes. But you wear those sticky clothes all summer — long sleeves in the heat, of course, because even though it’s 95, you’re better off with long sleeves. Trust me on this.

The next year I learned that a better job was to be a caddy at a country club. Gravy. Pure gravy.

Then came college. One summer I worked the graveyard shift at a Mystik Tape factory. I was a bar loader. You want to know what that is? No, you don’t.

That wasn’t a bad job, except for the hours and the unremitting boredom of performing the same actions hundreds of times over for eight hours: lift and load, lift and unload and unspool, lift and load, lift it again …

But I did learn an important lesson that summer: Black ladies are the salt of the Earth. Even my hillbilly cracker co-workers — and there were plenty of them — consulted the Black ladies if they had a personal problem, and they’d listen to them too.

One woman I worked with told me on a lunch break at 4 a.m. that she couldn’t enjoy her life.

“It’s a pretty boring job,” I had to admit, thankful I would soon be out of it.

“Oh, no,” she said, “I can enjoy my job, I just can’t enjoy my life.”

Another lesson learned.

I’ve lived a privileged life. I know that and I’ve always known it. If the worst thing that ever happened to me was to pull weeds or trim Christmas trees, or be bored working for minimum wage — plus the 10-cent an hour graveyard “bonus” — I’ve got nothing to complain about, and I’m not complaining. I’ve been lucky, and here’s why: I never did work the worst job in my life, because when I saw it coming, I quit.

The year was 2004 and I somehow had become editorial page editor of a medium-size daily newspaper in Southern California. It was a Republican newspaper.

I know: Newspapers are not supposed to be Republican or Democratic in this great republic of ours, but come on, grow up.

President George W. Bush was running for reelection, and I knew the publisher was going to ask me to write an editorial endorsing Bush. So I quit.

Now, I don’t think the publisher would have fired me if I’d refused to write that editorial. He’d have got someone to do it. But I saw the way my life was heading, and I didn’t like it.

Don’t get me wrong. He was a good publisher but had bosses to answer to, too. I still consider him a friend. I doubt he even voted for Bush; I never asked. But he knew that if we endorsed John Kerry we would lose subscribers, and we both knew that if we did that, The Corporation would fire him. And he had a wife and family to support.

More and more, this is what you have to do to keep your job today. Especially if you work for the government. Or even work for a newspaper. Maybe it’s always been that way.

I’m a lucky guy because I’ve had choices to make, many choices, which billions of people in this groaning planet do not, and never did, and never will.

I never had to do the worst job in my life. That’s how I learned, in my long, fading life, that there are a lot of ways to have luck.