LynchNW Blog

I’ve had a lot of jobs.  A lot.  In fact, I’d forgotten how many until I sat down to type this out, and the list doesn’t even include them all. 

Working so many different jobs has given me a greater amount of gratitude for the opportunity I have now to do what I’m doing.  It’s also helped me to understand and appreciate that work, no matter how seemingly menial or monotonous, has inherent value.  And as importantly, I’ve found that all work has lessons to teach.  It hit me when writing this that I must be a slow learner - I’ve had a ton of learning opportunities, and I still feel clueless much of the time.

Farm Hand

This was my first job.  Mr. Utecht taught history where I went to high school, and farmed on the side.  We’d show up to one of his fields at 6:00AM, me and my brothers and some guys from the baseball team.  The crew would follow a tractor with a big wooden box hooked to the back as it slowly crept through a cornfield.  The job was about as simple as they come - pick corn and throw it into the box.  Those summers are some of my fondest memories, getting paid a few dollars an hour to work and laugh and sweat in the hot sun with my buddies.

Brick Hacker

Man, this job was a killer.  I was 18, and didn’t know what ‘real’ work was.   The plant was huge and old and dark and dirty and filled with tough-as-nails grown men.  This was a place where you’d get hurt if you didn’t keep up - one guy got his arm cut off during a shift.  The task was simple - take wet bricks off a conveyor belt and stack (‘hack’) them on railroad carts to be kiln dried.  The ‘hack line’ had 6 men on it.  If you couldn’t keep up, it made the other guys’ work that much harder - and they would let you know it.  The choice was either figure it out and get fast, or get hazed and ridiculed by hardscrabble adults who had real lives and bills to pay.  I found that the best way to become an accepted part of a group of working men is to 1.) be competent, 2.) work hard, and 3.) don’t be an idiot.  Do those three things, and that’s the backstage pass that lets you into the circle.

Stable Boy

When I was in college, I worked some odd jobs.  Emphasis on odd.  Perhaps the oddest was as a stable boy at an Arabian horse farm.  Stable boy in this context was a euphemism for poop-scooper.  18 horses, each with their own stall, and each producing what seemed like endless mountains of manure.  It was hot and stanky in the summer, and cold and sloppy in the winter.  I’d take a change of clothes with me each day, since I’d be so dirty and smelly that I couldn’t stand to ride with myself on the drive home.  As a bonus, Arabians are ornery creatures.  I got kicked and bit more times than I can remember - I think if God had designed horses with the ability to expectorate, they would have spit on me.   But it was a job that had to be done, and it was a good feeling to leave the farm with 18 clean stalls - even if the horses didn’t appreciate it.

Steel Warehouseman

Standard Iron was a small mom-and-pop steel and iron business.  I was the yard boy (the older guys called me ‘Kid’) and my job was to help load customers with bar, tube, plate, or whatever other piece of metal they were picking up.  Walking into the yard or the office felt like stepping back in time 60 years.  To say the equipment was not state-of-the-art would be a supreme understatement.  The 10-ton forklift was an ancient monstrosity that sometimes ran, and that looked like it had been chiseled out of one giant piece of rust and then assembled using baling wire.  I remember clearly that the VIN stamp said it had been built in 1948, and I couldn’t believe it was that new.  It tried to kill me multiple times, and I’m still thankful to have all my fingers and toes.  As a bonus, the warehouse had no heat or AC - it was like an oven in the summer, and an ice chest in the winter.   I remember actually crying from cold one frigid December day.  I had never done that before, nor have I since - to me, that will always be the definition of cold.  But I showed up every day.  The other guys who worked there were tough, and I wanted to be the same.  Over time I learned how to grind out the grueling and seemingly endless days, and I think I did become at least a little tougher.

Office Gopher

This job - All Lines Insurance - still has lots of good memories.  I filed papers and answered phones and did some data entry - very low-level stuff.  The insurance agents were some of the most gracious, decent people I’ve ever worked with.  I still remember the two owners - and bosses - who ran the business:  Lyman Haakstad and Brian Stephens.  They couldn’t have been more different, and they also couldn’t have been more kind.  I loved them both the same.  Sadly, they’ve both passed away, but I still think of them from time to time with fondness and gratitude, and I look to those memories when thinking about the sort of boss I want to be.

Delivery Driver

'Hey, Culligan Man!’  I heard that a lot, as you can imagine.  I was a route driver, bringing 5 gallon bottles of H2O throughout Spokane.  5 gallon bottles of water are heavy - 40 pounds - and they feel even heavier when it’s 97 degrees outside.  In the summer it wasn’t uncommon to deliver 200 or even 250 of them on a route.  There were a lot of days that I’d come home, shower, and fall right into bed.   I’m not naturally strong - naturally feeble is probably a more accurate description - but I’m pretty stubborn, and I don’t remember ever not finishing a route.

Construction Laborer

My brother Nate owns a landscape construction business, and I worked a few years for him.  He specializes in high-end residential construction, and some of those jobs can be very complicated - elaborate paver patios, water features, boulder walls, 20-zone sprinkler systems, etc.  When I started with him, I remember feeling very clearly that I was in over my head, and that I’d never figure it out.  But like anything, if you show up and get to work, you’ll eventually gain competence.  I learned from Nate that you do the job right, every time, even if the customer doesn’t know or realize the difference between good and bad work.  And if there is a problem, you fix it, even if it’s to your detriment.  The person you’re working for may not know or appreciate it, but that sometimes makes doing the right thing even more important.

Construction Estimating & Sales

I loved this job, but it was super high pressure.  Action Materials has a sand and gravel pit, and at the time I was there, they had 28 dump truck/pup combos.  It was my job to make sure there was enough work to keep all those rigs rolling.  If a truck was sitting in the yard, that meant the driver (and the company) weren’t making money.  I took the responsibility to keep the trucks moving really seriously, and I hit up every contractor in town multiple times.  Walking into someone’s office when you’re introverted by nature - especially when they’ve said ‘no’ two or three or eight times before - is really, really hard.  But there were other dump truck companies in the area, all looking for the same work that I was, and I found out that the jobs don’t always go to the cheapest bid, or to the most slick-talking salesman, or the coolest guy.  Sometimes the work goes to the guy who does his job and keeps showing up.

So back to the idea of learning from work.  Each job has given me the choice of either taking something away, or learning nothing.  If I’m honest, at the time, too often it was the latter.  But that’s what reflection is for.  The reasons for work are both holy and utilitarian, and my goal now is to find both in what I do.  Matthew B Crawford has boiled it down far better than I’m able: “Let me make myself useful.”