Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Job I Never Had

In college, I took a job cleaning boilers in the university heating plant. The guy who hired me said I needed to wear steel-toed boots so my feet wouldn't get crushed by heavy equipment. He told me I needed to wear long sleeved shirts, even though it was about 110 degrees in the boiler, so if a steam pipe burst, it wouldn't burn my skin as badly. He told me he hoped I wasn't claustrophobic so I wouldn't panic in tight spaces.

I lost a lot of sleep about this job. So on the first day, I showed up early and sat on the front step and waited for my new boss. He arrived and I mumbled something about"I have to leave town." He looked at me intensely for a minute and I was sure he knew I was lying.

Then he smiled and shook his head knowingly and said "It' s about a girl, innit?"

I smiled as roguishly as I could manage and agreed with him. And took the hell off down the street.

2 comments:

dogimo said...

The answer to this next question says a lot about you.

Were you wearing steel-toed boots?

Sean Scully said...

Wisely, I had delayed buying the steel toed boots. But I was wearing a really bitchin' denim long sleeve shirt and my brown leather engineer boots, which to this day are sadly lacking in the steel-toe feature.