The other reason I never needed a job in high school was a total lack of social life. I didn't really have many friends I hung out with outside of school (understatement, closer to not any) so I never needed to pay for extra gasoline, movie admission, meals at restaurants, any social situation requiring you to pay money. The other, perhaps more tragic reason for not needing money, was my complete and utter inability to interest a girl. I went on a grand total of zero dates in high school. That's right, zero. As far as I know, there wasn't a single girl at Palmer High who ever had a thing for me. I suppose chances are good that there was at least somebody, but I've debunked many of the likely candidates in post-high school conversations. There is definitely a statute of limitations on what would have been taboo subject-matter in high school, and in my experience, once enough time has passed people are not only willing, but even eager, to confess to what they felt in the past. You know, say things like, oh I had the biggest crush on so and so. In hindsight everything seems as silly as it actually was, and people have no trouble recalling the past with clarity and honesty. So in recent conversations I have determined the implausibility of my favorite might-have-had- a-secret-crush-on-me candidates. No friends, no dates, just sitting around my parent's house made a job totally irrelevant to me. Why should I get a job? I don't spend any money.

But wait, didn't I leave out a huge reason that high school kids need jobs? Saving money for college! This is one peculiar aspect of my life where I had a ridiculously improbable plan that I executed flawlessly. I never worried about financing college because I was confident that I could waltz in to a college qualifying exam like the SAT or ACT completely cold, with no preparation, pull a 99th percentile score out of my ass, and be totally set for college because somebody would give me enough scholarships to take care of everything with a score that good. Couldn't do it on the SAT because I can't reason my way out of a paper bag, apparently, but the ACT was my test.

The ACT requires rapid-fire memory recall of facts and little bits of information as fast as humanly possible. While the SAT rewards an exceptional vocabulary and well-developed reasoning skills, the ACT rewards speed and accuracy of regurgitating information from your high school studies. This was perfect for me. My tremendous academic success has actually been a disgusting fluke caused by a mysterious ability to retain information—information that my brain shouldn't work to retain because I don't care. I've never particularly liked school and I've never paid good attention in class; since I was probably about 13 I have been totally unable to focus on a teacher because I am constantly fantasizing about the girls in the class. Seriously. The professor is blathering on about something that might be mildly interesting but I can't stop thinking, oh my god that blond chick in the second row is so hot I wish I had TWO dicks. I've also never had a problem with actually working, so doing the homework was just a nuisance that I was all right at, but on test day I kicked ass. This was because even though I wasn't paying attention and didn't give a shit about the material, my brain inexplicably remembered things the professor said. I would regurgitate the information and get a high grade. So the ACT was perfect for me because fast-paced information recall is my biggest strength. Just as I had planned, I went in cold and scored 99th percentile, and sure enough, one university offered me four years of free tuition. So with no real need for money I was completely unconcerned about finding employment until after my freshman year of college.

I still didn't really need money. My parents were nice enough to invest my Alaska socialist checks instead of spending them on new TV's or something, so I had savings substantial enough to mostly pay for four years of room and board. But c'mon, I figured, it couldn't hurt to have a little extra, I need to get out of the house more, and it would be nice to have a job at some point in my life so my resume is more than just my phone number and mailing address.

As a fresh faced, bright eyed youngster who just turned 18 I entered the job market. It was a humbling experience. I learned all about searching for a job. Feeling bad after being brusquely dealt with by rude receptionists, getting completely blown off by most companies, and even one disastrous interview. That is actually still the only formal job interview I have had and I figure there is nowhere to go but up from there. Remember a couple paragraphs previous when I said my peculiar talent is information retention? Well my other peculiar talent is the ability to make catastrophically bad first impressions on authority figures I should be working to ingratiate myself to. The end of the interview was hilarious in hindsight, because the two guys led me down a hallway and out a door that slammed shut behind me with no knob or mechanism for re-entry. It seemed like a very symbolic moment; I had just gotten shut out and the smooth door surface with no handle was a definitive statement you will never work here. I have no idea if that was a premeditated gesture, if they led the prospective candidates back out through the lobby and the hopelessly pathetic candidates out the one way door on the back of the building.

That was by far my harshest experience. As would be expected, most places simply didn't respond. I had actually resigned myself to a summer of worthlessness after about four weeks of total failure when I got my only call back: it was from a local grocery store regarding my application to be a Produce Clerk. I had an informal job interview in the little eating area by the deli and was hired right there.

In retrospect, this job was much better than I thought at the time. My view is somewhat biased, though, because I also had a girlfriend that summer which made everything approximately 100 times better than it would have been had I been my usual, perpetually single self. It was actually kind of cute, because I was the produce boy at one grocery store and I was dating the bread girl from another grocery store across town. So maybe the rose colored glasses that I wear when looking back on that experience are just the product of the only three months of my life where I've had a ladyfriend, but I think it also has to do with what I subsequently learned about the world of work.

As produce boy, I felt like I added value to the world. I felt like I was actually doing something. I was physically and tangibly assisting in the flow of commerce. Every day I worked I spent eight hours on the clock and actually accomplished easily definable and recognizable tasks for the entire duration of my shift, whether I was chopping vegetables, building fruit displays, or downstacking pallets in the cooler. At the end of the day there was always a feeling of accomplishment, even if it was usually insignificant, because my time on the clock had made a visible difference in the world. I did not, however, recognize the novelty of this at the time and I hated that job. I was jubilant when the summer ended and it was time to return to the university.

Another year of college passed. My dreams of being a Civil Engineer turned into nightmares and I switched to Mathematics. My dreams of being a mathematician, however, were replaced by even more fearful nightmares and I switched back to Civil Engineering, unable to think of any better ideas. What I wanted the most at that time was to take advantage of the incredible gift of a free college degree. I loathed the thought of finishing my fourth year of free college with no degree. I had no interests that would make for good degree paths or careers, however—I was mostly interested in hiking, running, rock climbing, playing guitar, boozing, the basic 18 year old male hobbies—and I decided to stick with what would get me a degree in the shortest amount of time, which was Civil Engineering. Besides, there would be plenty of opportunities for employment as a Civil Engineer.

My first experience with trying to find a Civil Engineering job was the spring of my Sophomore year just before I turned 19. My dad knew a guy who worked for the Department of Transportation as an Engineer and suggested I contact him, which I did. He provided me with a list of people and companies to call about summer work. Again, disastrous is probably the best word for the ensuing job search. Most of the people I talked to seemed mildly annoyed, but the full spectrum ranged from polite indifference to outright hostility. Nobody that I actually talked to seemed receptive to hiring me, but I also left a couple messages on answering machines. One person actually called me back after getting the message—a lady from the Department of Transportation Highway Design division who was exceptionally nice and friendly. She offered me a job as an intern at Highway Design on the spot, which was surprising to say the least.

Two things made this job a unique experience for me: I had to commute and it was a job for the government. This soured me both on commuting and working for the government. The job wasn't nearly as bad as I made it out to be at the time, but it also is clearly something I have no intention of pursuing in the future.

The commute itself was somewhat interesting. Commuter traffic is different from regular traffic, especially on the freeway, and I was fortunate enough to live in a place where the freeways do not grind to a halt twice a day. Driving to the outskirts of the city actually went faster than normal because the individual motorists moved more efficiently: all of these people spend way too much time driving and want to reach their destination as quickly and safely as possible. This was much more noticeable in the mornings as there were very few erratic drivers on the freeway at 6:30 in the morning. Everybody moved in tandem, each driver falling into place in the complicated jigsaw puzzle in such a way as for everybody to arrive at work as swiftly as possible.

My job mainly consisted of sitting in a cubicle performing mind-numbingly repetitive tasks. The subject matter was somewhat interesting but I struggled to attain any feeling of accomplishment. I mostly worked on quantifying estimated parameters for a road project that may or may not even get built. I had the computer file with all the design information in Land Desktop and I would go through it and come up with linear feet of curb and gutter, cubic yards of excavation, cubic yards of different kinds of fill, stuff like that. Like I said, it was moderately interesting job but at the end of any given day it was hard to quantify what I had actually done. This job payed much better than working in produce but I felt like I was working much less. Again, I was thrilled when summer ended and it was time to return to college.

Anecdote: my uncle works in road construction and one time I talked to him that summer he complained that the DOT estimates always overshot what his company actually needed by about ten percent. This was amusing because several days previous, my boss had told me to add up the required volume of fill and said that once I had a number he would add ten percent to make the estimate more conservative.

Another year of college passed. This time it was my junior year and I grew increasingly frustrated and overworked. It often seemed like Engineering students were given work to teach them how to work hard. I have no problems with hard work as long as I'm accomplishing something, so being given work for the sake of work to teach me to work drove me crazy. I was unhappy with my classes and my life in general but had no better ideas so kept plugging away. Spring rolled around and once again it was time to look for a job.

All I knew was that I didn't want to commute so I went for the absolute long-shot of cold calling engineering firms in my hometown, a town too small to house but several firms. What happened was similar to the previous summer, as I talked to a friendly lady who basically offered me a job on the spot. Since I had already seen the design end of Civil Engineering working for the state, I figured I should check out the opposite end, which logically would be construction administration for a private firm. So that's what I did. I was hired as a construction inspector for a complete renovation of one of the runways at the airport.

Looking back with the clarity and honesty of hindsight, my job that summer was to protect the Engineering firm in case of a lawsuit. My job as an inspector was to observe and document everything the contractor did, which was somehow even more boring than it sounds. I basically did nothing. I would sit in this stupid little purple City of Palmer GMC Sonoma and watch heavy equipment go back and forth all day, occasionally taking pictures and writing down what they were doing in a notebook. But not only was it the most boring job in the world, it usually seemed like everybody I came in contact with who had anything to do with the project was mad at me. It was weird. Why would anybody be mad at the weak-kneed kid they sent out to the airport job to take pictures? I guess I worked my trademark lack of charm too well and just seemed to piss people off.

What's funny, though, is that this was the best paying job yet! I felt completely worthless because I never did anything and yet I was compensated fabulously well. And I rightly should have been because my records would have saved the Engineering firm in the case of a lawsuit; yet creating documents to protect the firm from a possible, eventual lawsuit was too nebulous of an accomplishment to feel proud of at the end of the day. It was far removed from cutting up samples of fruit for inquisitive customers or refilling displays of fruits and vegetables. With each successive summer job I was doing less actual work and getting paid more money to do it.

Anecdote: The engineering firm shared a building with a lawyer and a hairdresser, and on some busy days the parking lot would be completely full when I came back from the job to file some reports and pictures in the afternoon. So I would park my purple City of Palmer truck across the street at the Palmer Bar. Also, I tried to pitch the idea that the company should buy a yellow cycling jersey, and every Monday morning pass the yellow jersey to the person who billed the most hours to projects during the previous week.

The sense of relief I felt at the end of that summer was overwhelming, but then I realized that I was facing a new problem. Even though I was only an inspector I got a pretty close look at the world of engineering. I was close enough to see the beads of sweat on Engineering's forehead and the grains of stubble from Engineering's five o'clock shadow and I knew that things just weren't going to work out between me and Engineering. I was all ready to file for divorce citing irreconcilable differences but I had a problem. I had just arrived back at University to start my senior year. What do you do in a situation like that? I still hated the thought of wasting an opportunity to obtain a free college degree so I figured I'd just stick it out. Get the degree and then move on.

Yeah, that didn't happen. For reasons that I would rather not discuss in a public forum like this I quit with one semester left. I was too busy during fall semester to spend any time on serious self-reflection but ask anybody who was around me during that time: I was not a happy camper. Christmas break afforded me the opportunity to sit back and contemplate the state of my life. I didn't like what I saw.

I would love to say that this next part is a complete joke that I totally made up, but unfortunately it's true. I was reading the Wikipedia article on Ben Folds and saw that when he was about to graduate from college with a degree in music he went out partying the night before a recital. He broke his hand partying and needless to say failed the recital which was apparently the last credit he needed to graduate. So one credit shy, he threw his drumset in a lake, dropped out, and never looked back. After reading that I thought, “Fuck it, if Ben Folds can quit so close to graduation then I can quit so close to graduation.” I changed my plane ticket to arrive at the University early and took care of some things. I canceled my application to graduate, canceled my engineering scholarship, changed my major to applied mathematics, and changed all my classes.

This made the summer job search interesting again, and by interesting I mean fruitless. It made the summer job search fruitless again. Not many people are looking for a math major to do some summer work. This is the section of this where the past becomes the present. I quit Engineering last winter and am now an unemployed math major. Yeah, sorry. There is no catharsis on this story, no satisfying resolution, just an aimless young man with no career prospects killing time before starting a fifth year of undergraduate college.

That ending is kind of a downer, so let's leave with this instead:
I'm in a rock band this summer called Erect Bizkit. We're like Limp Bizkit except harder. Our running joke is that we're going to play a show wearing cock socks and Mexican wrestling masks.