In the late winter/early spring of 1987, I was a landscaper for a few weeks. I got laid off because my boss didn’t get a big contract he was expecting. (That was the stated reason. The actual reason was mostly that I was doughy and lazy.)
Prom night my junior year, I went into Taco Bell on 20 in Madison and told the manager, Jay, I wanted to come to work. We talked for about five minutes, and he said “be here Tuesday at 4:00 and you’ll have a job.” I ran the drive-through about three-quarters of the time, and the steam table most of the rest of the time. Had some good times. Blogged about it here and here.
Three months in, an assistant manager opened a frozen yogurt shop on Hughes Road and poached me to work there, gleefully rubbing the nose of our battle-axe store manager in it. Good times there, too. I remember it mostly for these three things:
- There are several songs I still remember as “yogurt shop songs” for their heavy airplay when I worked there. “Burning Like a Flame” by Dokken, “Heaven is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle, and “Breakout” by Swing Out Sister are three that come immediately to mind.
- I could probably still clean and lubricate the front end of a Taylor soft-serve machine, as I did every Sunday morning. I’d crank the tunes (CDs were new then), smoke a bunch of cigarettes (kids weren’t carded then), and maintain the hell out of those things, baby.
- That was the first time in my life in which I significantly mismanaged multiple legitimate opportunities to have sex.
After Nancy closed the shop, I started working for Madison Books & Computers in October 1988. It was the job I had all the way through college, and a year out of college as well.
And my boss Kitty organized a reunion of MB&C folks tonight.
And it was fun. And weird. And wonderful.
I started MB&C as a child and left it as an adult. Many formative moments happened to me during my tenure there. Lost my virginity. Fell in love. Got engaged. Graduated from college. Got my heart obliterated when I got unengaged. Got my own place.
In that order.
I enjoyed seeing the folks who turned out. No one was unrecognizable. Everyone remembered the simpler time it was. We’ve all got a few more miles on us (except a couple of the ladies who seem to have aged about four months), but we’re all there.
I left that job just over 20 years ago. It pleased me so much that it meant enough to so many other folks to come out tonight.
Loved it, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s do it again sooner.
You might also like:
- The thrum
I was just one side or the other of four years old the first time my dad took me to work with him. H… - Remembering the language of car sales
I used to sell cars. I’ve written of it a time or two, though not in a long while. There were about … - Running for the border in 1987
Exactly 20 years ago, I was knocking down $3.35 an hour at Taco Bell on Madison Boulevard (still jus… - Election Eve Eve
Tonight I was going to try to write one last post unrelated to the election, but there isn’t really … - One more Bell story
One evening at Taco Bell, the shift manager went out on an errand and left Rusty and me alone. We we…
I think it’s great that you HAVE these opportunities to reconnect, and that you take advantage of them. I don’t know that I would. Of course, I likely wouldn’t recognize anyone that I scooped ice cream with at Friendly’s in 1985, either.
Funny you should mention the music, though. Whenever I hear Terence Trent D’Arby’s “Wishing Well” or a Kim Wilde song on the radio, I flash back to the summer I worked at Shoe Works, my sophomore year of college. Had to lie to get the job, but it was soooooooo worth it….
It was fun. I’m glad we made the effort. I think I can name all of my coworkers at the yogurt shop, mostly because they were disproportionately attractive girls and women. 🙂
On that note, while I don’t censor myself much on BoWilliams.com, and I didn’t set out to write an edgy post here, two references to my sex life got into the post. I need to be careful about that.
I saw Bonnie Raitt on something maybe five years ago talking about how she reacted the first time she heard “Thunder Road.” I guess candor is a good thing, and she’s attractive enough I suppose, but it was still a 60-year-old woman talking about her soaked panties, and there was a whiff of desperation on it. I remember thinking “yeah, everyone gets older and fatter and still has sex, but that doesn’t make it something people necessarily want to hear about in casual conversation.”
I’ll try to be more mindful of that myself.
And what lie did you tell?
Nothing quite as salacious as might otherwise be implied by the copy leading up to your question.
The manager of the shoe store didn’t want to hire a college kid home for the summer who was going to leave again in the fall. So I told him I wasn’t going back in the fall, that my scholarship was in jeopardy and I couldn’t afford to. Thus, I needed the job one way or the other. Batted my big brown eyes and all that. He fell for it; I took the job. Worked all summer, dated a guy who worked next door at Radio Shack (and thus can’t listen to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” without a self-satisfied smirk on my face) and returned to Iowa in late August with a repadded bank account and a KILLER shoe wardrobe, including my favorite black patent leather stiletto heels with silver zebra stripes. Which I still own these 20+ years later.
Rawr.