I just realized I’ve been working a long time. Almost 40 years. That’s enough, don’t you think? Of course, what I do now is so much fun that it’s odd to call it “work.”

The worst job I’ve had is “maintenance guy” at KMart. It was just really, really boring looking for things to keep you busy. I once spent 3-days cleaning the railings around the deli area.

The cheese factory was not much better. I worked at both Kmart and the cheese factory simultaneously. The factory was boring as well because it was so assembly-line type reptitious work all day long. And getting up at 3am didn’t help. I was in college at the time, but everyone else on my crew and the others that ate lunch at the same time seemed to be lifers there — and they all HATED it. All during lunch they would complain about how much their jobs sucked. Except one guy talked a lot about fishing; and for those of you who don’t know much about fishing there’s a surprisingly large amount of stuff to talk about it. This guy was sort like Forrest Gump’s shrimpboatcaptain army buddy.

There was one guy there named Kevin who I became pretty close with since we were both into music and recording. He had gotten a bacterial infection while working there that got into his blood and layed him in bed for over 6 months. I could never figure out why he would come back to work at the same place after something like that.

I worked in restaurants before college. Probably the most memorable thing that happened in the cook line was one night a customer kept sending his steak back because it was well done enough to his liking. For cases where a person wanted a bone-dry piece of meat we would put it on the grill and weigh it down with steel plates, pushing out all the juices. So here it is a weekend night and very busy like all weekend nights were and this guy’s steak comes back for a third time after the head cook had taken personal offence the first two. This cook worked in what we called “waffle stompers” then, which were sorta like army boots. When the steak came back this time, he grabbed it off his plate with his tongs and threw it to the ground and stomped down hard on with one boot, grabbed it back up, flipped it on the grill a few times, threw it on the plate and sent it out — it didn’t come back, nor did we hear any complaint.

For the most part, I’ve had great camaraderie at work throughout the years. Besides family, it’s where my longest-lasting relationships have come from. I’m probably not alone in that regard.

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