Rusty's Blog

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

For the first month or two of the summer after my junior year of high school, I was able to mostly just drift aimlessly. I was no longer trying to play anything resembling serious baseball, but somehow had managed to go without getting a job.

My friends and I would try to find activities that didn’t cost us much money, which involved a lot of mostly driving around since the one thing we could pay for was gas. In my case, I still had the gas card given to me the summer before when there was a legitimate reason to give me one.

I was able to go on that way until I got into some trouble late in the summer, which seemed inevitable in retrospect. Suburban teenagers with cars and free gas and not much else to do is a recipe for something to go terribly wrong. Sure enough it did, and I ended up owing my parents a good chunk of money. That’s a subject for another time. My point in mentioning it is it was time to get another job.

More after the jump…

The Chevy/Dodge dealership

Fortunately, a former pitching instructor of mine had a day job as a salesman at a car dealership in Canton, and was able to get me hired on as a porter. This was a good job for me due to the car dorkdom I mentioned in my history of my time on the Internet post.

Much of my time was spent either washing or parking cars, the latter of which allowed me to put the skills I learned in Ridge Racer to use on real vehicles. If it sounds like a bad idea to let a 16- or 17-year-old kid who has only driven a hypothetical stick shift drive customers’ cars with real manual transmissions around, that’s because it is. I did okay after one or two embarrassing stalls though.

Another thing I got to do as a porter at the Canton dealership was to drive cars around after they’d had basic repairs done to them just to make sure nothing would blow up. People leave all sorts of stuff in their car, but I think the funniest thing I saw was one guy’s mountain of non-alcoholic beer cans in the passenger side of his Dodge Ram pick-up.

Other random memories from the Canton dealership:

• Driving a blue, beat-to-shit 1950s or 1960s Ford pick-up that would barely crank and had no power steering.
• Shooting the shit with a chain-smoking Dodge salesman in the wash bay who told me about the time when he ran a marathon while he was in the Army, and smoked as much then as he did when I talked to him.
• Drinking a can of the Beast we found in the wash bay fridge.
• The boss trying to talk me into signing my paycheck over to him in a way where I didn’t know if he was kidding or not.
• The boss warning me against the pitfalls of getting “Zachitis.” Zach was a second porter who was hired after me who was pretty lazy.
• Learning that hovering around people makes them uncomfortable.

The drive was too much to keep doing when the school year started, so after a little time I parlayed that job as a porter into another job as a porter closer to home.

The Pontiac/GMC/Buick/Hummer dealership

I really liked my first boss at this job. He was a fatherly Dodge guy who treated me, the salespeople, and everyone else with respect. My job, again, was mostly to park and wash cars, but he talked to me the same way he talked to everyone else.

There were two other porters at this dealership, a black dude and a white dude, both in their late 20s or early 30s. I pissed them off when I actually worked hard at my job the first couple of months there because it made them look bad.

I’d learn though after the first manager took another job or was fired and a new manager came on. The new manager was an unpleasant man who didn’t respect us or the sales staff. Morale dipped quickly after he took over, and it was hard to stay motivated.

We’d all do little passive aggressive things to drive him up the wall. In my case, the receptionist (who was in my high school class) would give me money to go out and buy breakfast in the mornings. Over and over again, he’d pull me into his office and tell me not to do this. So I wouldn’t do it for a couple of days, but then I’d do it again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There was a parking lot out back and up a hill which rarely had any vehicles parked there. I’d take the RAM Air Firebirds up there and practice dropping the clutch and leaving massive skid marks. I was just smart enough to only do a little of this at a time so as not to draw too much attention.

By the time the next summer came around, I sometimes would spend a couple of hours per day sitting in the air conditioned custom vans watching a Braves game. Or even just sleeping.

The best days, which didn’t happen too often, were when I got to go on a parts run. These took me all over the metro area. Sitting in an air-conditioned truck listening to music was a welcome break from washing cars in the hot Georgia sun.

I also got to drive a Hummer once, which was fun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:47 pm. It was tagged autobiography, car dealership, car dealerships, high school, job, jobs, jobs i've had, porter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.