I stayed at Becker’s for a good year and a bit. I had actually ended up working with my best friend, although at the small shop we seldom worked together.  In the spring of ’86, after both Pete and I had passed our driver’s tests, we both moved on to the same new job.

Pete had gone first, and couldn’t stop talking about how great it was.  He was making more money, which was nice, and getting more hours, which was also nice.  His rambling, and rubbing my nose in his good fortune caused me to go apply at…

Gibson Bros. Restaurant – Cook, Counter Clerk, Shift Supervisor, General Manager – Spring 1987 to winter 1989

I started at Gibson’s as a cook.  Now, I don’t know how many of you have cooked in fast food restaurants, but let me tell you…it isn’t fun.  The people are fun, sure.  When you’re 16 years old, and pretty much all of the food that ends up in take away boxes has to be prepared by you, on a busy Saturday or Sunday in the summer it’s a crap job.

Let me tell you about Gibson’s…

The Gibson brothers (Ron and Lyle) had opened this restaurant together when they were in their 20s.  This place had been around (by the time I worked there) for 40 years, and was relatively well known to anyone that had ever passed through our fair town.  When I started working there, the brothers had just sold the place to wild man Mike Douglas.

Now, from everything I learned about Mike, this guy had no business running a restaurant…fast-food or otherwise.  Mike seemed to specialise in selling cars, and had opened a used car lot just outside of town prior to buying Gibson’s.

I suspect, that Mike’s intentions were to sell the property to McDonald’s at the end of the day, but the property the building was on was too small for an operation the size of ‘Micky D’s'…and since the guy who owned the house behind us HATED Mike, so in the end, there was no small fortune to be made by selling the property to the big guys.

Anyway, as I said I started working for Mike in 1987, and the initial job sucked.

Cook – At Gibson’s this meant that you:

• Chopped onions
• Reheated previously fried eggs and omelettes
• Reheated packages smoked meat and roast beef
• Drop frozen hamburgers into the burger cooker
• Put supplies away as they are bought in
• clean all the friggin cookers and appliances
• clean the bathrooms

Being a cook at the drive-in was not like cooking.

Counter Clerk – This was a step-up.  You got to work ‘the front of the house’ which essentially was a tiny strip of walkway between the ‘pass’ and the customer counter. We were a drive-in fast-food place. This meant there were no tables inside…just walk-up to the window, order get your food and take it to your car.

Working the counter meant you got to handle the money, and sometimes (most of the time for me) work the fryer. It also you meant that you had to wash the windows, scrub the floors and because we worked for Mike ‘The Doctor’ Douglas, we sometimes had to run errands for him or his girlfriend Debbie.

Shift Supervisor – This ‘promotion’ meant an extra $1.50 per hour and a set of keys. My extra responsibilities included opening and/or closing the restaurant; counting up the receipts at the end of the night, preparing the bank deposit. During this time I spent more time running errands that I used to, and was sometimes invited for lunch, or out to ‘the doctor’s’ estate in the country for what seemed like no reason at all. It was fun to hang out with Mike though. He was never short of pearls of wisdom for me or my collegues.

Around this time, I started influencing the schedule and staffing decisions, and together with one of the other guys we pretty much ran the show.

General Manager – For the last 6 months or so of my employment, supervisor became General Manager, and I was becoming responsible for more and more of the daily operations of the place. In addition to the above, I became solely responsible for staffing and scheduling; contracting for other work that needed doing; purchasing stock and supplies; making bank deposits and I became an authorised signatory on the company primary account.

After I turned 18, and had been working 70-80 hour weeks for the 6 months previous, and had banked a little cash, so I decided to take a holiday and head to southern ontario for a couple of weeks and see my family.  I also took this opportunity to break my ties with Gibson’s and Mike. I was pretty burned out, and though I didn’t realise it at the time, by the time I came home, i knew I was never going back to the restaurant.

I had a great summer working with the guys at Rideau Lumber, but really…manual labour is not my thing.  School started, 10th grade, and it didn’t take me very long to realize that I needed a new job to keep the girl-friend and I in the style to which we’d become accustomed.

The Becker Milk Company – Clerk – Fall 1985 – Spring 1986 (and then again in the fall of 1989)

This job is not at all glamorous. For those of you not from Ontario, Canada, the Becker Milk Company (or Beckers) is like a 7/11 (US) or Tesco Express (UK). They sell general grocery items, smokes and mix (you can’t sell alcohol in convenience stores in Ontario) in small convenient locations around cities and towns.

What they were famous for, was making jugs of milk. I know this seems a preposterous thing to be famous for in this day and age, especially if you’re from the UK or the US, but in the 70s and 80s in Ontario, Milk came in bags or Cartons not jugs.  Becker’s also charged customers 25 cents as a deposit for the jug to encourage recycling.

Anyway, I went into this shop, filled out a job application and before I knew it was working a couple of evening and weekend shifts.  During school holidays and on weekends, I would sometimes have to work midnight shifts (yes we were open 24 hours a day).  My duties included:

1. Operating the cash register (no scanner)
2. Scooping Ice-cream
3. Restocking shelves
4. Receiving stock from suppliers
5. Serving all the drunk and disorderly townies.
6. Cleaning the store.
7. Cleaning the bathroom (yes dear friends, the store allowed customers to use the toilet and it was disgusting).
8. Shipping the recycled pop bottles and milk jugs.
9. Ordering the milk and other stock.

This was an absolutely crap job but it paid something like $4/hour and we got paid in cash every week, and we got our 4% holiday pay included in every pay…for a 15/16 year old, it was a pretty sweet gig.

I also mentioned that I went back and worked there again when I was 18…this was a second job for me, and an easy one as I had already been there and done that for so long.

My second tenure at Becker’s was a little short lived though, since my boss (Tom) was embezzling from the company, we all got laid off when the company took over the store from Tom.

I joke with my kids about how ridiculous my CV would look if I put every job I’ve ever had on it.

Well, I’m going to go for it and post the stuff I’ve done here.

Rideau Lumber – Apprentice Carpet Installer – June-August – 1985

This wasn’t really an apprenticeship, but come on…I was 15, carpet installation is kind of a trade.

The crew showed up at my house during the christmas holidays to install carpet in our newly renovated basement, and I got on really well with both the foreman/team lead/head man (Dave Bradley) and his assistant (Joey Henderson).  These guys were really professional, and friendly and didn’t mind answering all my stupid questions about what they were doing.  I joked that I would come work with them one day.

During march break that year, I went down to the lumber yard/carpet retailer where we had purchased the carpet and their services and asked the owner for a job for the week.  He agreed to hire me for the week as a trial, and paid me $75!

Dave and Joey picked me up at 6am on my first day of work, and needless to say, the trial went well and I signed on for the whole summer.  My wages increased, as I was working full-time for the summer.  Here’s a summary of what my duties entailed.

1. Sweeping – Oh my god, I did a TON of sweeping.  Always my job was sweeping, and Dave NEVER let me away with any shortcuts.  He taught me how to properly sweep a subfloor so you could lay down some adhesive and get cushion floor to stick, or whatever.  I hated sweeping with a passion, but have never forgotten my lesson.
2. Carry stuff/Go get stuff -It’s like these guys stopped thinking about bringing their tools with them after I started. They would just keep sending me for stuff from the van.  One time I even WALKED two miles from the job to town for lunch for us all!
3. Stretch Carpet – Pretty self-explanitory if you’ve ever seen wall-to-wall carpet installed.  This involved carrying, unrolling, cutting to size and pounding with a ‘knee kicker’ the carpet and hooking the edges over the little nail board at the edges.
4. Spread glue – I got really, really good at this.  Any kind of carpet or flooring that doesn’t have an underpad is usually glued down to the floor. I eventually got good enough at spreading this goop on wood, concrete and other surfaces that I did a solo job at the end of the summer adhering some outdoor carpet on someone’s front step.
5. Lay down sub-floor – Usually, if the house could handle it, we would lay down a NEW sub-floor over whatever existed before. The biggest job like that we took on during my summer was putting new flooring in the children’s library in Smiths Falls – Crazy.  Anyway, this bit involved measuring, cutting, nailing or screwing and SWEEPING!
6. Sit on a 5 gallon pail – This isn’t really a job responsibility, but it was where I sat…every blessed day, on a 5 gallon pail of flooring adhesive in the back of the van.  We used a Ford econoline cargo van, and it only had two seats.
7. Drive! – Though I was only 15, Dave finally let me drive the van one day in the late summer.  I had been bugging him mercilessly since my dad was teaching me to drive our car, I wanted to try my hand at the big van.
8. Drink – Yes folks…seems like nearly a job responsibility…every day after work my co-workers and I would gather at Dave’s house for a few pints.

That’s about it.  I installed carpet for the summer of ’85.  Welcome to the work-force Mr Coons!

Not exciting for some, but I think this is pretty cool!
WordPress + android = cool!

I’ve created my first piece of code using ruby.

Used a 20 minute lesson over here: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/

Worked pretty well, including getting the ruby environment up and running on my windows machine.

Now I’m working through the training course here: http://www.buildingwebapps.com/learningrails3

I’ll let you know how it goes.

It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve finally installed the new software.  In the coming days and weeks I’ll transfer over the old content to new pages.  Eventually, you’ll be back up to speed with the ability to subscribe or sign up for my low cost hosting and website management plans.

In the mean-time, check out my relocation blog which chronicles my family’s adventures relocating to the UK.

Cheers,

Dave