Summer jobs

The temperature rises and just about everybody’s level of activity drops like a frozen duck during a migration season ice storm. Although it may not yet be summer officially, the rate at which I lose bodily fluids via perspiration when I walk out my back door tells me it’s summer right now.
It has been my position for many years that summer is not so much a season as a state of mind. If the kids are running across the street in front of my car in the middle of the day instead of being in school, and the humidity and temperature hover in the same double digit area, it’s summer and I don’t care what the calendar says.
As you have, no doubt, detected by now, gentle readers, the dog days are not my favorite part of the year. When it’s cold, you can always put on more clothes. But when it’s hot, there are only so many clothes you can take off without offending either the community standards of decency or the congreagation at the local Baptist Church. And sometimes both of them at once, depending on your local Baptists.
At times like this, I tend to allow my memory to wander back to the halcyon days of my youth, when a number of the summer jobs I had involved working outdoors. Most of them had very low pay levels (compared to what the sons of private business owners got out of their daddies for doing as little as possible all summer) and the working conditions were something akin to those of the low man on the seniority ladder among the guys stoking the fires in the infernal regions, but most of them at least made sense, in that they involved doing things that I could understand actually had to be done by somebody.
One year I had a real dream of a summer job. I pulled orders for grocery stores from a refrigerated warehouse, mostly cases of frozen vegetables. I was the only guy I knew whose summer job made it necessary for him to wear a parka in July. Despite accidentally getting locked in a freezer once and hallucinating about the jolly green giant, I tried to get that job again the next summer. Unfortunately, the son of the guy who owned the company was old enough and responsible enough by then to be trusted with driving a fork lift, so he got the job.
I had to go back to an outdoor job with the Memphis Department of Public Works. At one time or another, you’ve probably been driving down the highway and been caught behind the crews repainting the yellow and white lines on the roadway. I was a part of one of those crews. I didn’t actually do any painting. You had to be in the painters’ union to do that. Mostly I just hauled buckets of paint and other materials on and off of trucks. Sometimes I got to ride in a little seat hanging off the back of a pick-up truck and put orange cones on the freshly painted lines to keep cars from running over the wet paint. It didn’t work. Cars still ran over the wet paint and tracked it all over the street. Some charming folks liked to drive up as close as they could to my precarious position on the back to the truck, and honk their horns, just to see how many years of my life they could scare me out of.
The real fun of that job was when we had to pick the cones up again. The guy driving the truck always tried to drive as fast as he could to see how fast the guy hanging off the back could grab the cones and throw them into the bed of the truck without missing any.
Doesn’t that sound like a fun job to you? I mean, wouldn’t you stand in line to get a job like that? Wet paint on your skin and clothes and in your eyes, your life in danger from crack pot motorists as well as the looney driving the truck you were hanging off the back of. Is it any wonder I preferred taking my chances on getting locked in a freezer?