My worst jobs ever: Several in the running

      It's a close call (unlike the 2020 election, despite trump's claims—and did you know that lowercasing the “t” in his name is de rigeur?). And I won't fall for the “law” bait—i.e., it'd be way too easy to cite lawyering as life's worst job. It would be in the running had I not spent my 40 years lawyering as a polluter reiner-inner.

      The candidates are the non-music jobs I had ‘twixt undergrad and grad school. Part of it was about quick and dirty— literally and figuratively—ways of making at least a little money; the other part was about this bougie boy learning what it was like to work with one's hands. Those jobs are in a virtual, and I don’t mean in the web sense, tie for worst.

      First we’ll mention the landscaping job I had in Chapel Hill during an undergrad summer and the one I had outside Albuquerque, NM, in the summer after receiving my undergrad degree. That’s when I first learned how bad I was at manual labor. I mean, I was strong enough to do the heavy lifting, but was not turned on by it.

      My second semester junior undergrad year in Paris busking schtick had such a pull that, after graduating college a year later and working construction on Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street NCNB building—at that time the tallest thing in town (five whole stories!)—to save money for a plane ticket, I returned to the City of Light. Stayed for a year, busking my tush off.

      I returned to Chapel Hill/Carrboro in the summer of ‘74 and scored some music gigs at The Cave and Wildflower Kitchen. And I got a job at the Town Hall bar & deli run by two brothers in the middle of the north side of Franklin Street’s main block. That gig wasn’t bad, but then they closed the deli. They still needed cleaner-uppers, a.k.a. janitors, and I took the job. You want non-fun? Try cleaning up after college town drunks.

      After my hippie girlfriend broke my heart, I fled with a new hipster goilfriend to my original hometown of Phill(th)y, where I found a job for a month or so pitching investments over the phone in a boiler room. ‘Twas in the worst-job-ever running, but that’s when I learned I had enough of a gift for gab to get some folks to part with money. Then headed back to Connecticut, where I’d gone to college, and learned that the impressive Connecticut Citizen Action Group was hiring door-to-door canvassers.

      Presto! I used my gift for gab to raise a bunch of money for the group, which got me promoted to a community organizer position, which reignited the interest in law I’d had before learning how much lawyering was in the defense of the “wrong” positions. That led to law school/planning school at age 31, then, as noted, a career in enviro law.

      Thank goodness the bad jobs were over.