My worst job ever: A sleepless night of workplace Hell

      My worst job started at 9 p.m. in the windowless workshop of my boss. Nine sleepless hours later, he fired me. No question, he made the right call. 

      This took place sometime in the fall of 1972, a month or so after Kathy and I moved from Stamford, Ct., to Denver, Colo., a move that at the time was the closest I’d managed to come to a career goal. 

      I’d been an English major at Haverford College and met Kathy the summer of 1968 when I worked as a bellhop and desk clerk at Grand Lake Lodge on the western entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park. She was an ”older woman,” 10 months older than me to be precise. So, when I graduated in 1971 and we got married, we’d settled in a boxy, one-bedroom apartment near her fifth-grade teaching job in Greenwich, Ct.

      I hated living in the burbs of Connecticut and quickly burned through two jobs.  

      One lasted three days at a commissions-only employment service. I walked out for good at lunch on the third day when the place set off a fire bell to celebrate the success of one of my fellow employees finding someone a job.  

      The other was at a toy store in what then was the ghost town of downtown Stamford. I gutted that one out for months though I was convinced the place was a Mafia front dedicated to money-laundering. 

      One of the two owners only came in to check the books in the back room, where he sometimes was joined by a series of large, square-jawed heavies. He was smooth and wore camel-haired sports jackets. The other owner, who actually ran the place, had awful breath and dandruff so bad that it cascaded onto the shoulder pads of his loud jackets. 

      “Selling ‘em the sizzle and not the steak,” he’d counsel me on how to approach would-be customers. 

      His “sizzle” was to rush up to the very occasional customer who’d come in in to buy high-end educational toys like Creative Playthings for kids or grandkids and try to foist free wood airplanes on them.

Some would literally turn and flee to get away from him and more than once we closed the register at day’s end having sold barely $100 worth of goods. After rearranging the store’s stock just about every week so that it was next to impossible to find anything, I quit again.

      Colorado beckoned, even after I had enough success as a substitute teacher in Greenwich elementary schools to be offered a fifth-grade teaching job the following year. I declined. Kathy gave notice.  

      And in June, we emptied our water bed out of our second-floor apartment window in a rainstorm and headed to Colorado with all our earthly possessions packed into our car and a U-Haul van. 

      The trouble was, neither of us had a job, though we didn’t let that bother us. We unloaded all our possessions in the garage of a friend’s parents in Aurora, east of Denver. He, a doctor, and his rather proper wife, were not thrilled. We said we’d be back soon and headed north through the Rockies for six weeks, eventually ending 400 miles away in Canada near the town of Jasper before heading back. It was a great trip, grizzly bear and all. 

      Kathy, which was her way, found work first, making sales calls for a middle-man selling educational text books to schools. Through a friend, I approached a gaffer, a guy who kept the big studio lights and cameras up to speed at a major Denver television station. 

      Alas, I forgot to tell him that I had 10 left thumbs; that my father’s idea of a toolbox was a hammer, a screwdriver and a few nails; that I had (and still have) absolutely no manual dexterity.  

      And so, one night about 9 p.m. I showed up at his house for my job trial. He told me he wanted me to hot solder a few dozen circuits, showed me how to do one, and left to go to bed. 

      “Leave the key under the mat when you’re done,” he said. 

      That was never. 

      At about 6 a.m. he came back into his workshop to take me out of my misery.

I had sat at his workbench all night and managed to successfully complete, to the best of my recollection, four circuits. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’m simply incompetent with my hands. 

      He looked at the circuits and looked at me. 

      “I could have done these in a half hour,” he said. “I’ll pay you for two. You’re fired.” 

      And so began and ended my career as a skilled laborer. 

      Thank goodness for two things in my life.  

      1. The Watergate hearings steered me to journalism school about a year later, soon after I quit my seventh unfulfilling job in the two years after finishing my English degree.

      2. Kathy is an engineer’s daughter and has been making and fixing things in our homes and lives for 53 years.  

      Sometimes she allows me to hold something while she works. I am more than happy to do nothing more. 

      Jerry Lanson is a professor emeritus from Emerson College and coaches students in writing virtually for Harvard Kennedy School.