Fragments From Floyd

"The Worst Jobs in History" is the name of a six-part PBS series. It allows the viewer (I am told) to watch the show's host reenact mankinds' most unkind use of human labor, from the Dark Ages to modern times. And there have indeed been some stinkers throughout our species' erratic history. By comparison, my own personal worst jobs are roses. And now as I look back over the most memorable of them, it seems most of my most horrid jobs were of the summer variety.

I was lifeguard and canoe manager at a summer camp. I also helped with the horses. Low point: while rounding up a dozen horses that had freaked and broken through the coral fence in a thunderstorm, my horse leaped over the bottom of a forked fallen tree. He went between the forks. I didn't. Emergency room: sternal contusion.

Summer of my senior year in high school I installed fiberglass installation overhead (my neck starts itching just thinking about it) while standing on a tall scaffold at a new hospital under construction near home. This is Alabama, mind you. It is summer. The windows are locked closed. There is no air conditioning. No lemonade. For a buck 75 an hour.

I spent the summer after my freshman year at Auburn on a barge (about the size of our living room here) on the Tennessee River. On the river (tanning and fishing) by day, housed in the neon-blinking Liberty Motel weeknights. Location: Scottsboro, Alabama. I witnessed a tornado pass over my head through the windows of my red VW beetle. Job description

I had been on the summer job less than a week, pawning myself off as a hopeful engineering student (because that is, after all, what this business was about.) While learning the process of structural material testing (in this case, cured concrete cylinders to find their resistance to compression) my arms are plastered in molten brimstone (literally: carbon and sulfur at several hundred degrees) and I came to work on day three with both arms bandaged to the shoulder. (Same job where by week two, they decided for liability purposes, maybe I'd be safer out of town and off shore.)

First job I had after getting married June 1970 and concurrently beginning graduate school was digging ditches in south 'bama in July. Duration: one day. Heat stroke. Get that degree, boy.

Grad Student: thesis research on radiozinc metabolism requires two hundred toads that we collected on a rainy summer night on the new Auburn bypass. One hundred ninety nine gave their lives to science. One stowed away in my raincoat pocket. Found sometime that fall. A frog mummy. Job description

Grad Student: Same semester as the frog collection: Obtained five foot rat snake for herpetology class points. It escaped in our apartment. New wife jumping up and down on the bed screaming, questions wisdom of recent marriage to biology major. Job Description

Fatherhood looms in the near future. First job after Masters degree (Zoology) and move to Birmingham: I sold fire alarms on commission using the fearmongering script: "Mr and Mrs Jones, (pointing to glossy color 8 x 10 in three ring binder kit) this horrid lump of burned flesh could be your little Sally." Duration: two days, and stop payment on the sales kit. Job description

Pregnant wife, no job, new masters degree, a week after barbequeing poor little Sally: I finally find work at the Univ of Ala Medical Center in dental-nutritional research. Work responsibilities included 1) decapitate 40 day old white mice; 2) bake heads in pressure cooker (autoclave); and 3) pick out their teeth for assay. Probably my most "dark ages" work to date. Job description

I think you get the picture. Now, it's your turn. Bet you've had a stinker or two. Get it off your chest. Come on, tell us about it.