 ... that I had when I was young There were a lot of strange ones ... Security Guard 
One summer while I was in university I couldn't find a job back home in Sudbury, so I found one in Toronto. Not a very good one. I joined a security guard company.No training, no break-in period ... they put me right to work. The pay was dismal, not much above minimum wage, and I was staying in the university residence which I had to pay for, including all my meals, and subway fare to the sites where I 'guarded'. I was also supporting an expensive habit ... reading ... which saw me visiting the BAKKA science fiction bookstore down on Queen Street once a week. Needless to say, I didn't save much money that summer. Some sites I got sent to were very relaxing. I have fond memories of sitting in the cab of a large bulldozer at a construction site, listening to a Montreal Expos baseball game on a tiny transistor radio. To save money, I cooked in my room on an illicit hot plate. Mostly Kraft Dinner (19¢ a box) and hot dogs. Very few people stayed there in the summer, so I had the entire place to myself. Most of the jobs I got assigned involved a lot of walking, never mind the mile walk to and from the subway stop up on Bloor St. One job saw me and one other guard patrolling underground the length of the new unfinished subway tunnels between Sheppard and Finch. I lost a LOT of weight that summer. Another job, which only lasted a day, was to guard the fenced in entrance to an old house in north Toronto. The owner wanted it declared as a historical site, and was squatting in the house, but the bank had other ideas. My job was to keep people out. During the day several people showed up to look at the site. One unobtrusive person was taking photos, which I thought nothing of. However, he turned out to be a photographer for the Toronto Star, and the story appeared on the front page, along with the picture of me above. You can see how skinny I was. My parents saw it too. They immediately called me and asked me if I was eating anything. They were so worried about me that they sent me money for food! I bought extra books that week! Lumber Mill One summer my father found me a job at a sawmill in northern Ontario. It was in an isolated town that could be accessed only by rail, after a lengthy car drive. Calling the place where the mill was located a 'town' was stretching it; in addition to the sawmill, there was a camp kitchen, a bunkhouse, a small store, and one house. I started off inside the mill sorting lumber, but I was terrible at it. In my defense, no one explained what I had to do (how to tell the good lumber from the defective), and I was the only one there who spoke English; everyone else was French-Canadian. After a few days, they found me a new spot. Out in back was a small shack where all of the wood chips from the mill's operation were sent by a conveyor. Inside the shack was a hopper and large hose that was used to spray the wood chips into an empty rail car at the open end of the building. This had to be done manually.  The previous occupier of this prestigious position had been fired for drinking on the job, so they gave it to me. I soon learned why he drank. The small shack contained one bench, next to the large hopper that contained the wood chips piped in from the mill. There was also a long flexible hose that, when turned on, would pump wood chips into the rail car which was open and lined up at the end of the shack. I was on my own out there. No-one ever visited, or checked up on my work. The manager had told me when he first brought me out to the shack that the goal was to maximize the amount of chips I could squeeze into the rail car. Apparently the previous occupier of this job had just laid the hose on the floor pointed in one direction, and then later reversed it to fill the opposite end. In between ... about 20 minutes ... he drank or slept, or both. The result was that the rail car ended up being only about two thirds full, since the hose laying on the floor wouldn't spray chips into the back corners once a pile built up. This was before cell phones, and the mill was too far from anywhere to allow for radio reception. It was too noisy and dusty to read. So I was determined to pass the time by seeing how full I could get the car! By standing at the railcar door and directing the hose left and right, and up and down, I managed to fill the cars right to the roof, from one end to the other. The end-of-month report apparently went from an average of 70% full per car to 98%! Plus there was an added bonus: they only moved in four empty cars per week, so if I didn't waste time, I could usually relax on the last two days with the machine off. I read a lot! Entertainment in the 'town', for me, mostly meant reading on my bunk, or staying out of the way of the drunken fights on the weekends. On Saturday mornings the highlight of my week was when I would walk down the tracks to the small store on the edge of town and buy snacks, magazines, newspapers, and whatever books they had, which mostly meant Zane Grey westerns. The plots were all the same, but there were seemingly hundreds of them, so I read them anyway. |