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ALL GROWN UP — THE WAGES OF THE GOLDEN YEARS FOUR SEASONS SPOTLIGHT 6 FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | NOVEMBER 2015 By Crotchet E. Oldman My college student grandson, Tim, got a job last summer as a management trainee. I had summer – and after school - jobs too, but they had a lot more to do with me being managed than learning to manage anything. I worked at lunch counters, on my uncle's farm, on people's lawns and in the winter I shoveled snow. I was directed to carry out the garbage, wash the dishes, pick the weeds, hoe the beans and, yes, muck out the barn. Tim is a wonderful young man and when he enters the workforce whoever hires him will be blessed. His resume will sparkle with his management training: "Hands-on experience with customers and fellow employees; oversaw office staff; learned business procedures…" Compare that to what I had to tell to a prospective employer: "Carry garbage with skill; break very few dishes; can tell weeds from grass and beans; wield shovel with finesse…" Unless I could find work on a farm with a chow hall where it snowed a lot, I had nothing to offer. I spent part of three summers training with the Marine Reserves – talk about being managed. I was yelled at, loaded down with heavy stuff that needed to be carried uphill (why didn't we ever start at the top and move down?), stood for hours in the hot sun, was yelled at some more, and fed unpalatable mess hall meals. (My garbage and dish washing experience came in handy on KP – and the barn mucking had some similarities to cleaning up after 800 hungry Marines stormed through the mess hall.) And this expanded my resume: "Ability to give shoes a mirror-like shine; can make a trampoline-taut bunk with square corners; expert marksman — can drop a running man at 600 yards with a single shot…" I now had the resume for a shoe-shine boy, hotel maid or assassin. I gave these opportunities little consideration because of low pay on the first two and serious legal problems with the third. As a teenager I worked summers on my uncle's dairy farm. The hours were long, the work back-breaking and because I was a city kid who knew nothing about farming, I was given jobs that took no skill — like mucking out the barn. Those damn cows had to be milked twice a day, every day at 4 am and 4 pm, come sickness, storm, civil unrest or death in the family. If they are not milked they dry up, become ill or even die, and the bank forecloses the farm. Cows are marvelous at turning fodder into beef and milk, but they are terribly untidy with the byproducts of that process. My uncle had some 50 or 60 cows in his herd, milked in two relays. After the second relay, I got my shovel and went to work surrounded by flies — before going out to hoe the beans. I was a really skinny kid, maybe 120 pounds, so I calculated if each cow produced a pound or two of byproduct at a milking, I moved somewhere between my weight and twice my weight of cow flop every day. Now, how do you work that into a resume? Tim's really on to something. I hope he takes advantage of all the management training he can find: It's great for his resume and there are very few flies. My Summer Job Was A Real Shovel Full

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