Thank you, statute of limitations
When I was a teen, my dad had a knack for talking small businesses he frequented into hiring me as their newest lowest rung helper. To be clear, I didn't want these jobs, so I developed a knack for staying at them for three days. I don’t know why it was three days but it always was. I went through half a dozen jobs over the course of my freshman high school summer, back when my dad yelled at me for being useless because I wasn’t hitting the pavement looking for work the moment I turned 14.
The various jobs were odd. Once I made meatball subs at an Italian restaurant until 2am as a 15 year old (technically against child labor laws). I worked briefly at a Jiffy Lube cleaning up the place until my third day when I accidentally walked into a car lift, cut a gash into my head, and then used the main bathroom to wash up all the blood in front of customers.
About half of the jobs, I was incompetent at and not interested in learning to do better so I was asked to leave, but the other half I could tell were bad jobs I didn't enjoy doing so I quit at the three day mark.
My first real job that I wanted for myself was one I kept for a couple years during the tail end of high school, working at a bike shop. As a bike kid, this was the dream job that all my bike riding friends did as well. They were mostly in it for the steep shop discounts on parts that we constantly broke at local jumps and ramp parks, and since we all knew how to fix our own bikes, being paid to fix other people's bikes was easy part time work that still gave you time to ride bikes.
I couldn't find an opening at my favorite shops so I ended up at the third shop in my little town, the one I went to least. It was run by an old guy who was obsessed with his computer and his 30-something son that ran the front of the shop, and I came on as a low level mechanic to assemble new bikes, fix things on old bikes, and do light sales in the showroom.
Lessons from labor
I didn't enjoy the old man that owned the place. He gave off creepy vibes and he treated everyone like crap, constantly giving us lectures that he thought were pep talks. If anyone did something wrong at work, there would be an instant all-employee meeting where he'd dress down the person in front of everyone in hopes that none of us would ever make the same mistake again. I could tell even back then as a kid, this wasn't an ideal approach to managing.
The old man also did weird vindictive stuff like force us to cut up all our bike boxes before throwing them out. Typically a busy bike shop builds 10-20 bikes a week and they come in these huge 4x8 foot boxes that are about a foot deep. People would raid the dumpster for the boxes to use them for storage or moving, and honestly, it seemed harmless to let people have them, but we had to take a razor blade and cut them into many pieces before tossing them out, just to waste the boxes (we didn’t even recycle back then).
When I got my first paycheck I saw I was paid below minimum wage, which I didn't think was possible, given the name, MINIMUM. Then I learned 1980s California labor laws said if you were under 18, you could be classified as a probationary worker and get 50 cents less per hour for up to 90 days at any new role, so I made $2.75 instead of $3.25/hr for the first three months.
The one perk I looked forward to was buying new bike parts cheap. Most bike shop employees I rode with said the standard was getting to buy parts at dealer cost, or at worst, a shop might add 10% overhead. So that meant a $100 retail bike part would typically cost an employee $50-60. But the old man set our discount at 10%, which was better than nothing, but not by much.
For a brief few years (mostly high school and early college) I didn't own a personal computer and stayed away from them unless I had to. It was at this bike shop that I got to experience the future of computing from the shop owner.
He read PC magazines all day and was constantly working on a store database package that I suspect he wanted to sell to other shops as commercial software. It was way ahead of its time because we always knew exactly how many Chris King headsets were in the display case because the terminal said so.
But I remember the employee meeting where we got our own tracking code to type in whenever we helped a customer, then I remember later on when the owner showed me his monitor which had the total amount he'd ever paid me in hourly wages against the total sales I'd racked up. I think I was selling parts at about two times more than I ever cost the shop, so I wasn't yelled at, but I didn't feel great seeing my job reduced to a spreadsheet cell.
I used to tell friends I felt like a gallon of milk being sold at a grocery store with an audible scan and beep, as I used a terminal to clock in and out, handle repair payments and record sales using my code.
I got out of school each day around 2:30pm so I only worked from 3pm to 6pm which was when the shop closed, and I tried to be a good worker until the day the old man yelled at me for fixing bikes all the way up to 6pm. I thought the mantra was be the first one to show up and last one to leave as the best way to show you were a dedicated employee, but the old man shouted that I need to wind down my tasks ten minutes before 6pm each day so he could lock up instantly at six o’clock.
Being low on the totem pole, I did whatever they asked me to, so I would vacuum the shop every day and rearrange bikes and check the locks on the outside bikes on the curb and bring them in each night.
One of the worst off-label things I had to do was the night the old man had friends stop by as they were all going out to a dinner and a play and he told me to wash his car, and then also his friend's car. There was something really annoying about being in the hot sun washing cars you don't own while old guys watch through a window, periodically telling you that you're doing something wrong and need to redo it. I remember being happy when they finally drove off.
Depth perception? Never heard of her.
I remember the worst day at that job. The old man was reading business magazines and saw an article that said a brighter store would lead to higher sales so my job on a long weekend day was to replace every overhead fluorescent bulb with a higher wattage one and scrub out the light fixtures of any dust so it would cast maximum brightness (for maximum sales!).
It was a big shop and I spent a whole day on top of a 8 foot ladder, precariously reaching up to pull down light tubes, grab a pail and sponge and wash out the fixture, then put new bulbs in. The old man helped by standing at the base of the ladder to yell at me. I wasn't getting enough water on my sponge to scrub the still-electrified light fixtures. I was moving too slowly. I needed to get old bulbs out and new ones in faster. No, faster than whatever it was I was doing.
There was one moment that completely broke me. I was born blind in one eye and I don‘t technically have working depth perception, but my brain makes do and I’m mostly ok estimating things based on shadows and light. Occasionally, something will appear in a way I can't see any context and I'm pretty hopeless. One example is if you put a empty glass a couple feet in front of me on a table with nothing behind and ask me to place a straw into the glass without moving my head or body, I will very likely miss the glass entirely with a straw.
That day I realized there was something about 4 foot long tube lights, the all white light fixtures, and trying to get two little electrical prongs on each end to click in just so while also teetering high above a ladder that caused me to constantly miss hooking up the new lights, and the old man was letting me have it. I tried to tell him this was a weird vision thing for me and I wasn't purposely trying to stay on top of a ladder putting lights in for hours.
When I finally got off work that day, I had to pack up all the old bulbs into boxes and gently place them into our store dumpster because if I broke even one, the old man told me he'd get an extra bill on top of his garbage collection.
The retaliation
I remember going to my best friend's house after work, who happened to work for the old man and his son at the same shop a few years before I did. I was sore from head to toe and I told him all about the old man screaming at me to go faster when I couldn't really do the job correctly because of my weird vision problems.
My friend listened to all the details of my day. Then he asked me when I worked again, and I said I was off for a couple of days. He asked if the light bulbs were still in the dumpster and I said yeah, then he said let's grab our bikes and ride down there right now.
I didn't know what my friend was planning but I played along and when we got to the shop it was probably about 11pm. He shared his elaborate plan: we’d take each of the old long fluorescent tubes, slide them through the mail slot on the front door of the shop, then launch them into the air to fall into the shop. That was the whole plan. I appreciated the simplicity of it.
I was a rule-follower from the day I was born and a straight A student, but that day of work truly broke me. I hated the old man and how he treated everyone and especially so with my sore shoulders and getting yelled at for my own disability. My friend always came up with crazy schemes like this that I usually ignored or talked him out of, but this time it sounded justified.
I will never forget the first light tube. Thankfully it fit through the mail slot in the door, and I got about 75% of the bulb through, angled it up to 45º, then I reared back and shoved the end of it through with all my might.
It floated through the air in slow motion, in a perfect, impossibly high arc. Eventually, the trajectory lead to the sales floor, where dozens of new bikes were parked. The moment a light tube made contact with the bikes, it exploded in a burst of white powdery gas and glass shards going in all directions that rivaled the greatest fireworks I'd ever witnessed.
"GIVE ME ANOTHER ONE!" was my immediate response.
I don't think I knew what the word "catharsis" meant at age 17 but I knew I felt great for the first time in months. All the dehumanizing treatment and yelling and frustration that I endured for the past year vaporized as each light tube exploded inside the shop. Eventually I grew tired of launching light bulbs so my friend took over and launched the rest into the shop until we were completely out of tube lights from the dumpster.
We sat and enjoyed our work from outside the shop as the moon's light reflected in glittery glass shards all over the floor. I rode home exhausted, and went to school like normal on Monday morning.
The aftermath
It's funny, but even as a goody two shoes life-long rule follower, I knew what I did was very, very wrong, and I had lots of guilt, mostly about how my coworkers had to clean up my mess. But I also knew to keep my mouth shut for the first time in my life.
I went to work a couple days later on my normal schedule and never brought up "the incident" until a coworker filled me in. I acted surprised and asked about the cleanup but they said it was fine, as they just rolled all the bikes outside and spent a couple hours vacuuming up glass before putting things back in order. I remember the old man's son wondered how someone even knew there were light bulbs in the dumpster that night but the shop was subject to random acts of vandalism several times a year and they chalked it up to that and I never heard it mentioned again.
The funny part is that I continued working at the shop for another year, tolerating the old man’s antics while having a better opinion of his son, since I knew what he went through. I never lashed out again, and only quit when I graduated high school and moved away to start community college.
