I got my first summer job thanks to the 80’s hair band Ratt. This is amazing because I was not a fan of Ratt and not a fan of summer work. My musical tastes are absurdly eclectic (translation: moody) but I never got around to enjoying “Round and Round”. As for work, I was too much of a fan of loafing, in the Larry Darrell sense, to seek out summer work.

Instead, for reasons I don’t remember, I volunteered to help out my mother’s sorority who, I think as part of a fundraiser, were managing a concession stand at the Bicentennial Center during the concert. I apparently managed to impress one of the men working there because I was offered a job at a local liquor wholesaler.

Although delivering booze to liquor stores seemed, at least at the time, a noble cause, and did earn me some initial brownie points in my fraternity, there were a couple issues.

1) I would be driving.
2) I would be driving a van.
3) Driving a van would often involve backing into small spaces.

I am, at best, on a good day, an average driver. I never took to cars the way many of my friends did. Cars were merely transportation from point A to point B and a way to spend money on something other than myself. Driving in reverse in what, at the time, seemed like a giant vehicle was intimidating.

Once I got past that, I had a good time in the job. I became a slightly better driver and learned how to pack 150 boxes into a van with enough space to hold 120. I also got to know the locations of all the liquor stores in Salina, a couple in Abilene and one in Concordia. I learned which store owners deserved business; which were assholes who didn’t deserve business; and which needed business enough to sell to someone underage. (For the record, when I started working at the wholesaler, I was old enough to drink watered down beer. By the end of the summer, thanks to Kansas’ goofy drinking laws, I was no longer old enough to drink. Legally, that is.)

I didn’t go back to that job, not that they would have had me–hey, I only tried to knock out a roof support once whilst backing up the van–and eventually ended up working for a Peace Corps-esque project that sent young K-Staters to small towns to do development work and, for a while, a place where I built and smoked toxic disposable buildings.

I also ended up making pizza and tacos. That’s another post though. Time to loaf.