[Music] welcome to ear biscuits I’m Rhett and I’m link thanks for joining us for this ear biscuit at the round table of dim lighting this week can you sense our guests here in our midst silently waiting to be introduced yeah yeah well there’s a cuz I’m one of them yeah I’m the other one it’s just us this week it’s a it’s another digital respite from interviewing anyone besides ourselves that’s right your guests are us threatened link you can you can get away with this did I seem apologetic I’m you know I’m not apologizing to you loyal listeners I’m just trying to be creative and telling you that we’re it this is awesome but you can get away with this when when you there’s two of you if you interview yourself as an individual then that seems pompous separate self-absorbed double definition especially if you’re asking the questions and then answering them but we’re not above trying that I’m not gonna say it’s it’s not gonna come to that but not today cuz today we are going to we’ve got some of your questions I think a few and then it we’ve structured this episode to be more of a reminiscing episode based on the fact that a milestone is approaching is that time of year again the summer so you know the funny thing is is a lot of times people you know you say things like summer’s here because you’ve done something like your school’s out or whatever and then there’s somebody’s like it’s technically not summer yet the summer solstice is not until Gen 21st or whatever that’s what it is this year and I’ve been in you know I actually found myself looking that up a second ago to figure out home witness summer you know summer is when school gets out it traditionally whether you’re in school or not even if you’re in year around school okay this summer solstice thing is overrated that happens halfway through summer vacation and can I can I take a second just to say take any seconds never you won’t never stop learning I mean just because school gets out or you’re not in school anymore or your brain is filled to capacity never stop learning you know it hurts my heart to hear you say that how did you stopped learning me a break did somebody tell you they stopped learning that’s what they were saying just now the voices oh the voices in your head you didn’t hear him no okay so this is what we’ve decided to do we’re gonna reminisce over our summer jobs summer experiences when it relates to occupational job the street well you know I gotta say we have a great job now I wouldn’t trade it for anything love what we do but it’s definitely you know summer rolls around and what is it’s just more the same I mean we just keep on trucking we keep making YouTube videos we keep doing ear biscuits we don’t have the on-and-off-again schedule that you have you know before you become an adult and it’s just there was just something about that schedule that you had you you had all these markers besides just a birthday every single year to mark your aging and make sure there were things happening with your body that may have embarrassed you a little bit and your voice was changing and cracking and those kinds of things there was all kinds of physical signs that you were changing but you had like a new grade right you’re like oh I’m in ninth grade now I’m in high school new experience and then in between each year you had summer vacation and then at some point somebody made the decision that oh you just can’t be a kid anymore you got to go get a job you got to make some money now luckily for me it wasn’t like I was I was being sent out to make money for the family I know a lot of people legitimately you turned like 12 and they’re like you got to bring home the bacon you know mm-hmm if for me it was just you’ve got to save up for a Nintendo game personally it was a very selfish pursuit when I first decided I’m gonna do this summer pay for the gas for your car type of a scenario yeah but I mean I job was pre driving though so it was oh yeah and yeah I I’m almost sure yours was well if you’re talking about mowing lawns yeah was my first job which was a summer job but it kind of it you know it went into the spring and went into the fall so I don’t I don’t call that technically a summer job but I was definitely an I had an entrepreneurial streak there and it and it moved it about the pace of a snapper ride riding lawn mower well that’s gonna mean because our mean boy 52 asked on Twitter is lawn mowing a good job for a first job when I lutely link absolutely I mean there’s inherent hazards I mean there’s a moving blade you’re heaven sakes so you shouldn’t be too young you got to know which side of the lawnmower to sit on not the bottom side so you got to you got to be a certain age and say yeah my my Papa Lincoln he got he got me lawns around his neighborhood to mow him again he negotiated the price and everything for thank you swim along but I I took his snapper lawn mower wrote it across the street and I would cut Miss Alice’s lawn and then I would cut where we’re talking about how much port for a lawn $15 that was pretty good back in those yes yeah like I said I mean when the chief of police negotiates your lawn mowing rate he was charitable I’m sure the shocking heat surely you weren’t doing that good of a job I was I was I was immaculate at this thing man that the lawns were immaculate I was immaculate everything was whack I mean I remember when my dad just tried to pass off mowing our lawn to me and my brother you know my brother was older so he was the first one to take over the job from my dad but I remember my dad out there with me with a push mower we didn’t have a riding lawnmower we had a push mower and he was had a small long he was trying to show me how to figure out where to mow next he’s like okay I’ll see I mowed right here and now I’m gonna mow the next strip and I couldn’t see the strip I couldn’t see where the grass had been mowed he got so mad at me said you can’t see where the grass has been mowed you know and it’s just like I think about how frustrated he was with me and then and it helped it helps me these days as I relate to my kids because I think we just can’t see the kids they just don’t see things like where the grass has been mowed even though it seems so obvious to us is that why you were held back a grade because you couldn’t see where like all right caught big I was held back for height actually no I was put forth I skipped a grade because of height not because of academic performance okay so the lies cancel themselves out right you neither went back or forwards in grades but yeah I mean I would I my business expanded quickly I had to dry this is before I have my driver’s license I drove that lawnmower across Main Street Lillington to get to lawns on the other side of town I remember seeing you from time to time most people would load the lawn mower up on the back of a truck and drive it to the places not I mean the lawn mower is a form of transportation take it so I’m I’m going across like a a production yeah big in it I was at our stoplight on a lawnmower and everybody 12 years old well yeah I mean this is it’s Lillington North Carolina though it’s not the rules are different at least at the time and like I said the Chief of Police negotiated all of these heels for me he didn’t give you a police escort did he no he didn’t but I did have a siren on that I did not my first job I didn’t get paid to mow the lawn from my from my family I just did that on my own but my first paid job was for Hartman and Hartman Chemical Company number Hartman Hartman yeah HNH Jerry harm Jerry Harmons company yeah and outside of Buies Creek North Carolina is a clandestine operation like he had a big warehouse behind his house right now you know it wasn’t behind his houses helipad it was on the way to Benson it was past coats on 27 on the way to Benson and he just had a big warehouse and it was H and H he was him and his brother but never saw his brother it was just him and and and some other dude and then who wasn’t his brother and then me for a few weeks this job didn’t last long it was just like an introduction to what a job could be my mom dropped me off there because I think I was 14 but what what did you do well a teenage products was and maybe to this day was known for their air fresheners and when I say air fresheners I mean like a bottle with a little with some air freshener liquid in it and then a rope wick you know those old-school type air fresheners that you find in like the Shelf of a elementary school in like 1978 yeah and it’s like all hardened and you know what is this yeah all it is is there some perfume inside of a bottle like a little almost like a medicine bottle a little brown bottle and then there’s this rope wick that goes into the thing through some paper and then the liquid goes up the wick in it then it permeates permeating permeates into the air did did you mix the liquids – no no I had no contact with the liquids I was a wick man I was the wick man I had to cut the rope and fold it and stick it into these paper tops and then pour the liquid in there no no I I was too young I didn’t get the liquid there no no Rhett doesn’t get to touch the liquid refuse a wick man he gets to touch the rope and the paper and you do this like eight hours a day you twisting wicks cutting WIC it’s not even a twist it’s just a it’s a cut in a fold all right to this day I am really good at cutting equal sized pieces of rope if you ever need that if there’s a need around here you know give me 14 – inch long pieces of rope I’ll be back in 90 seconds and I’ll have them and they’ll all be the same same length and it but they won’t smell good because I was a wick man because you can’t touch the liquids but I’ll this was the kind of job that I lost heart really quickly early on every day and I was that a pun because it was hard man and Hartman I would I do a few and then Jerry would come back there and I need catch me just sort of daydreaming I mean lots of Daedric like staring at the wall yeah that was a daydreamer buddy and when y’all when you give a fourteen-year-old the wit man job I mean you wouldn’t expect too much right so no but come back there and yell at you he’d be like I read some wicks brother how you you’ve only you know you’ve only done 17 huh well just you know we’re gonna need we’re gonna need a couple hundred more today so did he fire you is that I’m hearing no it was a temporary position I think I was actually raising money for like a trip or something like when we went to Trinidad or something it really could have been it could have been related the money kind of went to charity uh well I mean I used it for like a trip you know so okay I had a good time but anyway yeah that was that’s the first actual work I ever did for money now you talk about staring at the wall one of my first jobs I became known as the kid with the brain farts that we didn’t call it spacing out my I worked for my uncle actually my my dad’s side of the family for one summer well they always were farmers and then one summer my dad worked with them and that meant that I also worked with them at farming tobacco okay that’s a real job now I’m talking and we called it Barney tobacco because the process is there’s people who pick the bottom at appropriate times you you end up picking all the leaves off the tobacco stocks but you do it over time when they’re ready start at the bottom the bigger ones bla bla bla bla it’s important to set the stage for people where we grew up North Carolina in rural North Carolina tobacco is the cash crop in it’s in it’s everywhere I mean on our way from from my house driving to high school you know was like a 10 mile trip and you would pass 20 large fields with nothing but tobacco in them nothing but tobacco now that’s not the case it’s going back home they’ve been replaced with soybeans and other things but that was the deal that was North Carolina so their tobacco fields everywhere right and I would I would drive over there but the crack of dawn be like 5:30 in the morning cuz it got really hot and you can work in the heat of the day in these tobacco fields but there would be a group of people that would pick the tobacco leaves throw them on a trailer they bring the trailer around to the barn and then I would be at the barn my uncle would be supervising my cousin would be there Ashley Jonathan my half-brother he was there it was like a family affair and then a bunch of employees too will be at the barn and you would grab big pieces of big groups of these tobacco leaves and you stack them in this apparatus that would like a rack a metal rack put them rack together and then pick this very heavy rack up I would say the you had to pick up the rack would like a a crane type apparatus like a small electric operated crane I’d say it weighs 500 pounds one of these things pretty dangerous in your held well I was 16 because I would drive I would drive there and we would put the you know you’d put the tobacco in the racks and then you pick up the rack with the thing and two people would feed it on to the shelf and it was then you would slide the rack Shh push it all the way to the back of the barn which is basically a metal box that had a fan at the back and it would slowly cook the tobacco over time it would cure the tobacco so you load it all a tobacco and I’m making my beef jerky but it’s a psycho yeah you would curate it but it goes in green it comes out brown and cured ready for cigarettes and then you can put it in some cigs but it was just so repetitive and you would be waiting around for your particular place okay once this is stacked I’m gonna help you pick this up so you have certain points in the process where you would engage and then the rest of the time my brain would disengage so I had these extended brain farts there would be no smell but it would be this is look on my face of total stupidity that my uncle Johnny just I said I he’s having a brain fart again and I would wake up and everyone would be laughing and then I would pick up something and move it because it was just so mine what were you thinking about those days I mean I don’t remember but anything but barn and tobacco I mean anything to get out of there mentally and you didn’t I mean what did you think of when you stared at the wall in the wick Factory you know all kinds of things man ideas I was thinking about that screenplay that we were trying to write gutless wonders you were probably thinking about the same thing you just don’t remember and girlfriends potentially you’re thinking about Anna yeah it might have been a Sarah John phase Oh think about Sir John huh yeah I really get that picking picking tobacco and thinking about Sir John but it was just a mindless type thing that I became known as mr. brain fart but and then one day I got tobacco poisoning if the tobacco is wet in it and it comes into contact with your skin skin for a prolonged period the nicotine and I don’t know what else from the tobacco starts to soak in through your you know you know your skin and I was I felt deathly sick for about a week I couldn’t get out of bed you’re kidding no how come I don’t remember this tobacco sickness it’s basically like you vomiting if you had to just smoked a bunch of cigarettes yeah having never smoked like my body smoked six packs a day you see you smoked cigarettes the way a frog would smoke cigarette right through the skin right it was vomit now frogs do tobacco they just hold next to a tobacco leaf they do tobacco I mean that was a that was a tough job but I think it’s you know you know you got to take part in like a cultural moment in history yeah it is pretty cool to know in which tobacco was being grown as a huge cash crop in North Carolina being made into cigarettes that everyone around us was smoking wasn’t that by that point people had a lot of people had stopped smoking just falling out of oak a little bit uh and they were beginning to send a lot of it over to China where everybody was smoking in China that’s what a lot of the farmers were doing but it’s just interesting that we talk in nineteen ninety-four it’s just sounds archaic it’s like yeah I worked in tobacco fields I’ll never forget I mean you had to invent things to do in order to occupy yourself and so whenever we would take a break my cousin Keith who was a lot older big guy big beard big belly big everything he only wore shorts and like Teva sandals and I’m very for pickin toboggan he made fun of me for being a soccer player oh yeah you’re a dork he was um Bruce he was a football player like big like linebacker type dude he always make fun of me and he didn’t call me brain fart he just called me soccer player and what he was a it wasn’t more great it wouldn’t call you soccer boy or anything not that I recall you know soccer player but he was like and one day he was like man you think you need endurance and speed to run soccer man me being a linebacker I bet you right now I could beat you in a sprint to daddy’s house uncle Ross his dad its Keith still around somewhere he’s living but I’d I’d he’s he’s fine he’s not an ear biscuits listener he’s not at all thing you know it and I’m not the competitive type and am i okay Annie and so we go we go out to the dirt road in front of the barn that we’re burning tobacco and he any scrapes is scrapes his foot and draws a line start lines like alright and he said he tells my cousin Ashley he’s like actually I want you to count down from three and then we’re gonna go and I’m gonna show him what’s what and he’s got on Tevas what do you have on like Sambas tennis shoes in shorts I mean it was it’s 110 degrees and I’m kind of nervous because like I said I don’t like to compete and like I was literally if it wasn’t so hot I would have started sweating my armpit so I was getting nervous I was like man I guess I’m gonna try and it she’s like three two one and boom I just take off like foam I’m just giving it all I got and and I’m like I’m like Hussain buh buh leaving the line and but after about five Carl Lewis would’ve probably been there right reference at the time five five steps I’m like going full speed and I just happen to look over my shoulder you know and as I look over there keep his taking his first step and he’s buried as Teva in the sand and fallen flat on his face like the first step he’s the one who issued the just stop that you could recover from yeah mercy it’s like that MMA fight this going viral now where the guy was beating him so bad that he just tapped himself out out of out of pity for the guy there’s a video going around that’s what well that’s what happens anyway you know you had to do things to invent ways to on brain fart yourself did he ever did he ever say a word talk about it didn’t say a word he never challenged you again didn’t say where when he got up there was no conversation we just went back I mean he was still a huge guy I wasn’t gonna make fun of it oh yeah he was like about falling down I don’t Caroline he shocked a boy chocolate player over there you worked one summer I had a pretty epic job I did I had a couple of epic you know heat of the South jobs pray tell the summer after my sophomore year in high school I started working for Trent’s dad Frankie Hamilton construction mm-hmm and you know Frankie was a man who owned a lot of properties and was building a lot of homes he’s a construction business and then he had a lot of rental properties he’s sort of a you know a bigwig in the Lillington area and of course we were good friends with his son Trent one of our best friends did all kinds of stuff with Trent what Trent was cool cuz he had everything oh you Frankie being so well off as a home builder Trent was like the first guy with like the souped-up computer with the Internet he was got rooms he was the only guy with this thing called the Internet right in his own like widescreen TV in his room in his own bathroom in his own bedroom well and I remember him saying you know I’m gonna be working for my dad this summer and I was thinking this seems like a good deal you got you know Trent working for his dad you know he’s not gonna make him do that much I’m in on this he’s probably gonna pay yes great because he’s got all this money so yeah I’m in on that and then I show up my first day and I’m ready you know we’re gonna we’re gonna build things we’re gonna change the world and I won’t do nothing and get paid you know I say so what what what’s my job and they say you’re going to be the guy who goes to our homes that we just finished building and you’re gonna clean out the crawl space so let me just paint a picture here like literally the space that you have to crawl in under a house yes it’s crawl space yes so in North Carolina very few people have basements and I don’t know what it’s like where you come from but in North Carolina and most of the South you have the foundation of your house and you’ve got this two to four-foot area underneath the house right now as the house is being built the construction workers usually just throw whatever it is that they have on their person when they finish their meal from McDonald’s or they finish their Pepsi bottle with a bunch of child juice in it that’s tobacco juice they just throw it into the foundation because they know that some dillweed named Rhett is going to be personally responsible for picking up every single piece of trash and then putting plastic down underneath the whole house it’s a confounding is just a convenient trash receptacle I mean they they wouldn’t like make to write in there anything I smelled urine from time to time I did but I got to tell you if I was already six foot five at the time so I you know I’m a little over six six now six six and a half I was already six five by the time I was 16 years old that this is a large person to be going up under houses and I and they were like you got to watch for snakes under there because this makes the black snakes and the copperheads will get up under there you know never saw a snake but spent the summer squeezing around in this cave alike place underneath houses totally dirty at the end of the day is one of those days where every single day I came home I had those dirt boogers you know what I’m saying you’ve been does buggers he just been next to this dirt all day I would get all this nasty trash all the stuff that the construction workers are just thrown into the foundation I would package package it up and put it into the convenient dumpster that was still on the site that they could have been using the whole time but they didn’t Oh and then I would roll out the plastic was bent that summer Trent was off it would doing stuff on the rental properties so that summer we didn’t spend a lot of time together okay that was that was a difficult that was a difficult job but the next summer rolls around and I’m like okay I’m gonna go back and work for Frankie I I don’t all the details but I know that I had worked it out with Trent that I wasn’t going to do that same job and in transit no no you know what we’re doing this summer me and you and mr. Fred are building a house I’m like what he says yeah me and you to seventeen year olds and mr. Fred a 65 year old man are built the three of us are framing a home he was like yeah okay so out there in Lillington there was above your paygrade what you think I had barely swung a hammer and so the I’m not it almost seems like I’m making this up but I’m not making it up so we show up and there’s a foundation and this is a like a ranch-style home a two-bedroom smaller home mm-hmm and kind of about like that the size of the house that you grew up in in in Buies Creek over there so like you know that’s our own carport size home and he says okay here’s I’ve got the blueprints so this is how I don’t know how home building works now but the way it works you never even build with Legos as a kid know why I did a little bit take her toys yeah that kind of thing mr. Fred says all right here are the blueprints there’s the wood let’s go and we look at the blueprints and we start building the walls he’s like here’s how you build a wall you take you put a 2×4 on the ground and then you nail it together and then you do this and you do this and and all right now this lifts it up and now I’m gonna nail it into the foundation and the whole summer we just every day we just showed up at this site and at what point did it all fall in on itself well there was one moment where we got to a place where the blueprints became became a factor when we got to a closet and I was like walk-in closet became a broom closet I was like I don’t know what we did wrong but this closet is about 12 inches deep yeah they’re a decorative door one of the bedrooms ended up with a very shallow closet and you know I think that’s just par for the course it’s something had to give it in literally the closet Gabe at one point we got to at the end of the room and we had put it all together and it’s like after that you’re like well I guess it’s just gonna be they’re gonna have to have some they’re gonna put the shirts sideways hanging up the shirts aside six of them and I don’t know if mr. federber went back and kind of made up for that but yeah we it was it was all the way to Western Harnett on the road that your your mom lives on now 27 okay so use it so you this house is still there oh yeah I the house is someone is someone who’s using the closet right now you know Kirsten that closet every day and it sits out there and it was on a it was a foundation out on some land that someone had and there was a only thing I remember is there’s a fig tree and we would eat the figs off of this fig tree huh so if you live between Lillington North Carolina and Western Hornet High School on 27 and there’s a fig tree in your backyard and you have a one foot deep Closet in one of the bedrooms in your home I built that house I mean an old man rep build your house and you’d like to come hang out this Christmas when he comes back on okay we underscore al 457 asks did you or Rhett ever get fired from a summer job no but I came pretty close and this job that I had is gonna sound like potentially a really fun maybe one of the best summer jobs yeah I’d like to have that job but I’ll tell you right now it turned out to be one of the most difficult I’ll just say it worst jobs I’ve ever had and I worked in tobacco for a summer in college I spent one summer in Santa Cruz California and I worked at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk as an amusement park ride operator there were different sections to the park and I got assigned to a section that had some kiddie rides and then it but it had a couple of those spinning rides and you could she had cups it was kind of like teacup so they couldn’t say that because well teacups are patented Walt Disney wouldn’t like you know run him out of business or something so every day you would come in and you the supervisor would assign me to my ride are you gonna be on the ladybugs with the four-year-olds and you’re gonna be on the imitation teacups spinny things kind of like a spider spinning thing to it one memorable day I was assigned to this spin ride and the way that it works is you have to put your foot on a foot pedal in order to prove to the ride that there is an operator there and at that point you can press the Go button and the stop button safety mechanism right they just don’t want someone to press go and then walk away so you get a C on that but the the way that you would stop it there actually there wasn’t a stop button you would take your foot off of the thing and then you take your foot off the pedal and it would hat it would take a while for it to come to rest because everything was spinning so fast and so there was an art to stopping the thing subject to people looking like they were getting sick so there’s not a predetermined length of ride there is a predetermined length of ride but people are prone to get sick because they’re so dizzy and then you have to try to make the ride as long as possible but cut it short maybe to cut it short if somebody’s gonna vomit so that that was interesting there was a challenge involved in that because they told you this on the like the orientation no I learned this myself oh really I learned it the hard way people vomited on my ride and then you realize I’m gonna start looking at these people’s faces whenever they come around and when the face it turns blue and the cheeks are getting big I better learn to anticipate that to take my foot off of the pedal it was enough time for it to stop and so they can get off and vomit in the bushes now did we when someone vomited on the ride are you personally responsible for cleaning it uppers or like a dude the vomit man nope it was me and they had installed us repository had a rolled-up garden hose so this dude is vomiting I can’t stop the ride people start vomiting you take your foot off the pedal and it’s still spinning oh gosh and then when he gets on somebody else they vomit no get the movies at least this particular this particular time just that one guy I think a girl when it stops she got off a ran and vomited in the bushes but you know I have to say okay I turned everyone waiting in line I’m like I’m sorry this ride is now closed I put up the side all the people in line go away they don’t want to get on the ride anyway at this point and then I have to get the garden hose and just start hosing down everything hosing the vomit off of everything oh gosh and it just so happened that there was a hotdog stand right next door to my ride which is stupid they should put that on the other side not only because people were eating and get sick but because the it turns out that the diameter of the hotdog is slightly larger than the diameter of the drain holes in the bottom of the teacups hmm hmm meaning I had to garden hose everything out and then I was left with just nice bite-sized chunks of hotdog somebody swallowed a hotdog pretty quickly I mean that’s how you eat a hotdog you just bite you bite a bite it’s Wallace Wallace while I do I don’t know what he did but I’m well trained I mean I can eat hot dogs really quickly I mean I was spraying the the water pressure like I was really trying to get it to go down in that drainage hole and I couldn’t get him to go through that I had to scoop him out rubber glove I don’t recall that I don’t think we had rubber gloves did you have a special surety sure I had a rubber glove I had out on like a tropical theme shirt oh well scooping out with a glove I’ll say I just I have to have thought I had a glove I have to think I had a claw scooping out hot dog remnants now that’s bad and then the next day you get assigned to the little ladybugs and four-year-olds are peeing and you got to use Windex and clean that oh this is not a fun job so and then you’re not talking anybody people don’t want to talk to you I just want to get on the rides and so it’s kind of this I mean there’s cute girls at the theme parks there was this one about it you got to perk up a little bit I just I was I guess I was in brain fart mode but I would I was miserable I hate it I would just stare off into the distance and one day my supervisor comes up to me and she’s like are you okay I’m like yeah she was like no what you seem like something’s wrong have you received really bad news it’s something going on personally that you don’t want to tell me about like no no and I didn’t want to tell her that I absolutely hate my job she was like well it just seems to me that you absolutely hate your job why don’t you just go home and I was like what she’s like you know why don’t you just go home and I was like well I live in North Carolina she’s I mean just no for the day so like I left it way back to where I was saying an hour it was like it was a walk of shame I was kicked off of my ride and I had to I I came to work the next day and I was like I’ll have a better attitude I apologized and everything but that was absolutely embarrassing like I did my friend something they’re like why you why you off work so I got a bad attitude I had a bad attitude I get kicked off of my ride soccer ball about it but did your attitude really improve it seems to me you’ve just brushed off and just gone right back to it for a couple of days I had you know I’ve really tried every try but I mean you you know a couple more days of pee a couple more days of vomit I mean it just wasn’t for me well it you know the people you want somebody who’s opera you’re having a good time you know everyone else is having a good time that’s the point we’re so close to people having a good time but that’s the art that’s the art of being in the amusement business you know when I went to Disney World recently there was a guy who was orienting everybody to one of the things it was like the Haunted Mansion or whatever and mmm I know that he was saying exactly the same thing that he’s been saying all day but he was fresh he seemed so into it and I was like you know what I got made me feel like he just said this just to us in this group that’s the kind of person you want to run into not soccer boy yeah I it’s you know it’s one of my biggest regrets in life I mean it’s you know what you can protective you could be operating a big-time roller coaster at Disney World now if you had to just follow through ya blew it face perspective you know I I didn’t have I didn’t have perspective okay and it seems like the coolest job I could have had I mean I could tell you about some of the other ones but I think that that is assuming that we are not going to have summer jobs anymore I mean maybe after retirement they’ll be like I’m gonna go like Fred I’m gonna go buy the H & H and I’m gonna be like I hey WIC man’s back wit man’s back the end strong maybe there’ll be something like that but assuming that we’re not gonna have summer jobs again maybe many of you who are out there listening maybe you’re about to start your summer job I think the thing is is that it’s what you make it there’s a 99.9% chance that the job that you’re about to go do this summer will have absolutely nothing to do with the job that you’re going to do in your life you know your career and it’s going to be the subject of stories maybe a podcast that you that you have years from now and do you have more oh yeah give me another one yeah well my point what are you want me to say say the point to the end I thought that was the point sure saves a point to like teaser well I was gonna say real quickly well come back because there’s another job that you had that you forgot about okay that will come back too but I’d say my first job where I was in the corporate America so to speak even though it wasn’t really corporate it was a government job was working for the Department of Transportation oh yeah so every summer while I was in school and NC State University my summer job was to work at the d-o-t so the Department of Transportation you know it’s a big government organization in that every state and in North Carolina there were a number of divisions but I was in the pavement management division is it exciting as it sounds just by virtue of being a civil engineering major well actually what ended up happening as my dad ran into the guy who was the head of this division at some golfing event or something and he was like oh yeah my son’s majoring in civil engineering was like well tell them be done to apply for a job but with us in our department we have making dreams come true have a number of students from NC State University that come in and help us out every summer and the pavement management unit pavement management so what does that mean well first I was hoping that it meant I got to be the guy who held the slow stop sign out on the street because every time I see that guy I wish I could I could do with his job just for you know a summer I mean the guy he all I got to do talk about brain farts I mean this is a job where you you can’t you are very tempted to have brain farts but brain farts could lead to people dying head on collisions you know you if you see they’re slower stop and you better know which one it is but it wasn’t an outside job I think I never wore an orange vest I never wore a hardhat it was an office job it was a desk job in a cubicle and what the pavement management division was responsible for was determining which sections of road throughout the state needed maintenance of course it’s basically just determining priority of roads right and so there’s a few things that contribute it to to priority how many people travel in this road how bad the conditions are really that’s the main two things right how bad is it and how important is the road so I don’t know why this wasn’t something that I mean I’m sure today this is the kind of thing that they just have the map of all of North Carolina in a computer you think but in 1998 I’m sure it wasn’t a computer somewhere but I never saw the computer all I saw were these huge 3 foot by 4 foot maps of the entire state now I’m not getting 3 feet by 4 feet this is a large map that barely fits onto a desk yeah and it was a map that had been printed on somewhere but then what we were supposed to do is we were getting updates to there would be red lines on the maps of like new roads that had come in like printed red lines yeah no somebody had drawn like these new roads in and I don’t know if these were then going to be incorporated into like the new somewhere on a computer it was being done it was being updated like so many hand drew somebody had come in and said like hey here’s a new road that’s been plotted or built and and of course there would be all the other roads and then our job was just to go to intersections and circle them and then number them call them nodes so the way that you reference any section of road in North Carolina is you say it is node 4 4 8 3 2 4 4 8 – that’s a section of road and so that’s classified as a section of road and then it’s prioritize so if you missed one did you have to go back and erase all the nodes and then renumber them for 4 8 3 4 4 8 4 it was so it was so first of all it was the most boring thing it was worse than Wieck man it was worse than wicking the the air fresheners and there were 13 of us doing it all on one map no so I I do think that a few of the people in our division we’re doing some other things but most of us circling intersections and writing a number yeah in elementary story first of all I worked there for three summers and I probably got through four maps you’re kidding me you know I was doing the rest of the time talking just just three briefs yes just sitting there talking to these other guy other people who were college students were they cool people yeah that’s not a bad job then no I don’t sound like a job at all I made some good friends I was like you were on a break but it just I was I was struck you know ever since this job I’ve had kind of an informed opinion when I hear that not to get political but when I hear that the government is attacking a problem or is trying to work on a problem mm-hmm I always think was it like the Department of Transportation because I worked there and it was the most inefficient operation I’ve ever been involved with I mean what did you know your supervisor was like hey suckle some knows yo this supervisor would sleep really under her desk I’m not kidding really I don’t know how often this happened but there was a rumor going around and it had been confirmed by several of the people that I work with that occasionally the door would close and they would be like so you never saw when we we know but I knew her well enough to know that this isn’t it was not unexpected behavior apparently when the door was closed and it was quiet in there and the light was off it meant that she was sleeping under the desk they said one time we went in there and she’s like she was hiding no she’s just sleeping yeah she’s laying down on the floor I mean she’s in a kind of a small office and you can gotta kind of get under the desk there and sleep so this is there was a pervasive attitude kind of from the top down of a lackadaisical let’s make this a break air and no one ever really came to check and see what we were doing is there a really pretty girl that worked there I remember that’s all you told me about was it was like a hot girl circling nodes mm-hmm you know I’m sure yeah I mean there was a couple of girls that I was you know I like to talk to I like to bring my map over next to their map how’s the baby how’s that no settling going but yeah it was it was just I was amazed and I and I’ll say this too I’m probably I’m probably getting people into trouble but this has been um it has been 15 years ago so it’s probably all different people another thing that happened was water under the bridge to use a civil engineering another thing that happened was as I said okay we have this fleet of cars crowned victorious by the way one of my favorite vehicles of all time and you know your typical government-issue car that it’s a lot of cop cars but it’s also just a lot of government cards you’ll see in North Carolina you see these Navy Crown Victoria cars with yellow tags you know that’s like the government issue car well our division had a fleet of cars and what they were used for is they would send people out to different places different intersections and you know you count traffic that’s how you that you know that sounds like fun that’s a piece of data that goes into the system that lets us know what road needs to be worked on because if you’re like okay this certain section from node X to node wide okay you’re losing me did you drive in the cream come Victoria I’m just saying you people go out and count traffic with little clickers did you do that no I did not count traffic but what they said is in order to justify us keeping a certain number of crown vics or Ford f-150 pickup trucks in our fleet we have to log a certain number of miles on vehicles please and so they were like go out and drive around the Beltline really so I would guess to Rack denial of the odometer I would just go out I would take the Ford f-150 or the Crown Vic along with another guy and we would just drive around the Beltline around Raleigh just yeah again just shooting the NASCAR race yeah really yeah just driving I mean it’s not it’s not a bad job I think that’s a pretty good job professional I was a professional driver for the d-o-t your tax dollars at work I was in a domitor spinner what what’s the job that you told me that I forgot about chicken houses well I’m not I didn’t work in the chicken houses I’ve worked at like uncle Johnny had some chicken houses and I worked around there oh but here’s here’s what it was but you told me about the chicken pit oh yeah they had I mean I was around them but the tobacco fields were around there oh that was a did that was causing keys in there and he was you know he’d like to be mean to the chickens that’s as far as I’m gonna go okay he thought it was funny but it was cruel and it was I’d rather not bring it up or continue to talk about it but there were there was one summer when I didn’t work for my family and I work for will Thomas’s family oh and they had a lot of pig houses what are they called pig farm and it was these big long you know barns full of pigs and what I had heard I was I knew I was assigned to work with him because we’ll was gone that summer so was like hey can you do my job with my family and make some scratch and so our first day I went and met his his uh actually his uncle’s name was Keith different guy pig farmer and I had heard that you know they they they make the pigs they well they don’t make the pigs they inseminate the pigs okay you for some reason you have to do it for them yeah yeah you have to like you have to take matters into your own hands it early so to speak and I was that’s all I was thinking about was okay if I work in this pig farm I’m not gonna have to do this this is gonna I can’t do this about how am I going to tell it wills uncle Keith that I’m just I just can’t I cannot do this I can’t I can’t be here for this and I get in private medium that I meet him that day and big strapping man big beard and he he comes out front he meets a really nice guy he’s like link thank you for taking wills position here this summer while he’s away but I got to break it to you we don’t need you here at the pig farm and my heart like leaps for joy it’s like I need you to go with my brother to to secure lands for so that the ATVs don’t get on the Carolina power and light property so for the for the rest of the summer I wrote around and we were drive for like four hours and I would just fall asleep in the passenger seat and we get out extended brain fart with you know with this this cable cabling that was about two inches in diameter and we would cut it with torches wrap it around trees where people were taking four-wheelers into the woods on a private land in order to keep the ATVs and the four-wheelers out of private property exciting stuff it was it was uh it was riveting you ever run into a full you know somebody on a four-wheeler he wanted in no we didn’t have any altercations but we had to go down one time and clean up all this trash off of the land and someone had dumped literally about overtime about 400 old visions on private property I mean back out there and you know in the in the sticks people would just make any old piece of land a landfill oh yeah and seeping I wanted to clean it up and the the the glass on the front of these televisions can get it as much as an like half inch thick or more and but then they would dump them out so it would be the shattered glass that would be thick and I had to pick it all up using like trash picker uppers and just with my hands cut my hands a lot right on that one but that that was not a good job either oh but you didn’t but there’s no like epic I went to the emergency room I lost a finger no I as you can see I still have all my fingers but I didn’t have to mate pigs artificially no yeah anything’s better but you know what happened there you were originally slated to be the the man they make the man handler but he saw it my saw in your eyes was like I can’t put this do it put him out on the trail you know there is one other job that is the only job that I can think of on all of our summer jobs that we actually did together you think about the grok yeah now that I so this was probably our first job ever because this is basically before we got summer jobs in the summer we were on opposite ends of Buies Creek we would ride our bikes to the middle of town in Campbell University in the middle of Buies Creek and there was a little grocery store called the grok on the edge of towns not there anymore sense but but that was kind of our halfway point roughly our meeting spot when riding our bikes to meet up we’d meet there we’d play pinball it was a Gilligan’s Island pinball machine there and then we would we’d go on our summer escapades out around Buies Creek for the rest of the day but we got to know the guy and here’s a he was a very creepy creepy dude ran the girl ran the croc back then probably he’s probably 40 years old and he’s like hey boy you want a job but he looked like a character off of The Simpsons you know he had a hit he’s kind of swarthy yeah like a pirate and and he actually did he sounded like he wasn’t from around there goes like this was he like this I’m not from around here I’m from The Simpsons gharlane’s would you like to you like to make some scratches Krusty the Klown no and he did say hey guys I’ll uh I’ll pay you to sort baseball cards and I do think this is pre H and H I think this is this is the first job ever but this was there’s no contract and it was probably a violation of child labor laws because we were probably 12 13 years old baseball cards were a big deal he would they were on display out there and people all the I guess high like grade school and high school kids would come in for like different camps at Campbell and they would come over and buy baseball cards but in order to know if you had a whole set you had to you had to order them by number to be able to sell a complete set and that’s what he said do you want to order baseball cards literally just take piles of baseball cards and order them by number up and I mean a set could have a hundred and fifty cards and then you would start over and build a new set so he could sell it so I’ll give you a dollar an hour a dollar an hour each there was at 50 cents each it was a dollar and we said yes we did it we like never told our parents that we like hey that’s what we were doing and he put us in the back room he said just go back here and it would like he would throw all these baseball cards it was like it was like child labor type scenario yeah anyway we totally illegal mean honestly spread all these baseball cards now that I think about it another think about it we we could have been in danger you know we didn’t know adults knew where we were we were just like this guy that we by clearly Canadian from and play the pinball machine in this little weird grocery store he’s got us in the back room sorting baseball cards I mean we weren’t nothing never happened no he never came back there I mean there were some some magazines stuffed in the in the pool table that gave us quite an education on the human anatomy yeah that seriously expanded our perspective but other than that I mean it was hey give me my dollar I’m a $5 and we all we only did that for a four I’d say a couple of weeks or so but you know that’s only time we ever worked together until we’ve reunited yeah that was our first answer but the entrepreneurial spirit the seed was was planted at that we could have been come expert baseball cards husband say smugglers but sorters but we moved on to other things now I should say my dominant summer job I have to tell this one you know just because this is the one I did the most my dad he did work on the tobacco farm that want that one summer but for most of his life even even now he is a house painter and carpenter and tile artiste kind of a guy he’s got multiple employees working for him now but for many summers I was expected to be his right-hand man so I was always painting with my dad and it was always very frustrating because my dad would do this thing where he wouldn’t he would give directives like a mime like Enki it’s like he would be telling me to do something and then all the sudden all the words would get jumbled up and you psyched up and then he would it wouldn’t be English and he would start pointing and gesturing and expected me to understand I want you to take this specific color mix it with this specific color go up this ladder and only paint the front of the trim like he would communicate all of that with Jessica with hand signals grunts in grunts just because and I don’t know why and he I don’t think he really realized it was happening was he was it seemed very obvious to him what he was communicating and I would really very frustrated okay and and so what has happened is I now do this right all the time not all the time no I would say that it is not it is not uncommon especially especially if there’s something physical like we’re moving something or building something and there’s like some sort of and yeah and you’re just like and you do you do the same thing it’s mind-blowing yeah and it’s extremely frustrating for them mumbling grunting and moving of hands and then extreme frustration when I or anybody else who’s in the room doesn’t know what you’re talking about and I won’t you haven’t said anything but mentally have a hand water you inherited that yeah I mean and I don’t think I learned it I do think it is a genetic thing at a certain stress stores probably but the you know the funny thing I worked for him for all those summers and it was fine except for the Poynting and when you know I would eventually figure it out and I would do the right thing but when I was in let’s see after I was married there was there was like this career transition thing happening there was just one summer where for a few months I wasn’t working as an engineer and eventually they hired me back as a contractor kind of to like bridge the gap between my like career transition but there was a point there where I called it my dad and I was like dad I I just don’t have anything dude can I can I come back and help you and I wasn’t I wasn’t a high school student I wasn’t a college student I was a grown man with a wife and like I just left an engineering job and I’m back working with my dad painting houses and he was he was doing some more intricate tile work than so he would teach me how to do the tile work so I would go outside and cut the tiles to fit and of course he would tell me how to cut the tiles using only hand gestures I mean he’s not a mute he can speak just like me just like normal but whenever it gets really frustrating it has to go to the hand signals and I remember this one time you know being a full adult if things got really frustrating I would I went in the house and I took him into the tile and and he’s like no no no I got it I really need this corner cut off and in the Poynting happens and then so I go back out and I take a little bit more off and then I go back in there and it’s still not right and by this time I’ve cut too much off I gotta start over I go back out for a third time and then I go back in there and I don’t remember what he said that there time it wasn’t a hand signal but there was something that was said and then I just I had had it like I could not get this piece of tile cut how he wanted it no amount of hand signals or words could help me understand what I needed to do and I don’t remember exactly what he said but it was like the it was kind of harsh and I I backed away slowly basically ran outside and I was gonna cut the tile again and I started crying my dad I was a full-grown adult Oh married made you cry and I I was so frustrated that I was like crying in the front yard of this house in Lillington did you tell him I don’t remember exactly what happened it afterward but it was that awkward moment of like I’m so upset I’m crying and then I’m so embarrassed I’m crying and then boy this is funny and I was kind of laughing at myself and then you know we we stopped for a break and like we’re eating our oatmeal cookies and you know drinking our Mountain Dew like we would like like we always like painters do like painters do and we did have a conversation about it and cleared the air and it was it was a good experience yeah I need you to use your words it’s like well that’s what we used to say we say that to my children now use your words it was just so frustrating in that particular moment and I don’t think I’m certain that I contributed to the frustration and probably deserve most signal talkers talk trying to try to communicate with each other it’s probably what you don’t realize is that you were also so you were like three three minutes into a signal only conversation there’s not a whole lot that can be communicated unless you actually know American Sign Language or any other sign language yes I mean that’s that’s the last time I’ve that’s the last time I’ve cried I don’t believe that that’s that’s that’s my defining summer job moment yeah you can finish what your application with your teasing – well I was gonna say you know you’re doing this job if I could go if I if I could go back and talk to my self I would do anything differently I think I probably would have like stood up and questioned a few things in the d-o-t that’s it that’s that’s one thing I might go back and do and be like well should we be driving the cars around the Beltline and maybe we should be working more efficiently but you’re doing something like folding a rope and making a wick or standing there waiting for tobacco to be shipped to China or whatever is gonna happen with it or or cleaning up hot dog chunks I would just say if there’s any way at all possible that you can just be engaged you know I think the story here is that neither one of we were just kind of along for the ride right it was just like a brain fart waiting to happen you’re like holding the brain fart daydream waiting to happen one of the things I’m trying to teach my kids now is just I just remember how like not present I was hmm and so I was just kind of always off somewhere and just didn’t care about much stuff and maybe it’s just I think it’s just something you have to kind of come into but I’m just trying to I’m trying to somehow impart just be in the moment you know like if you have an opportunity to do something just do it and do it right and do it well and take some pride in it because you don’t want to get sent home from the boardwalk you know you don’t want Jerry Hartman to come in there and question how many wicks you’ve been through or you don’t want to be brought to tears as the 22 year old by your fault right and if your cousin Keith challenges you to a race don’t hesitate run the race and when he falls down on his face after taking one step don’t turn around keep going going keep running run to the run to daddy’s house and then the first one back for lunch and then then point and laugh at him I didn’t say that I kicked dirt in his face well maybe if some dirt accidentally gets on his face as you’re running like Carl Lewis to daddy’s house so be it I don’t really know what the application is but it’s just you know you know and if an older swarthy gentleman asked you to sort baseball cards for a dollar an hour in the backroom of a creepy grocery store say no or just at least say well dollar fifty and don’t look at the magazines that are stuffed into the pool table pockets stay away from those mm-hmm no good can come from that okay but a lot of good came from this year biscuit I feel like I’ve reconnected with my youth and with my summertime sometimes some some summertime feelings about getting a summer job on the side now now that we talked about this let’s do it man I’ll uh I’ll sort some cut baseball cards if I had to go back and do one one of those jobs I build another house I’d like to go back and do that again I get the closet right this time thanks for hanging out with us in this ear biscuit leave us of your view on the iTunes that’s helpful also hashtag ear biscuits us and let us know what you think about this particular episode tweeted us maybe I’ll talk about something else you want us to talk about something else we’d be glad to do that this one you know is kind of reminiscing a little bit but if there’s just something you guys want to know about there’s something the industry related or whatever we’re willing to talk about it and next week we’ll have another ear biscuit interview just like we do every Friday thank you for being a loyal listener yeah with a person who is not us so is there for that yeah listen to you next week or you to us you know I’m trying to say [Music] [Music]