#I'm being so for real I wrote this at like 12 PM with a crazy cold so sorry if this is

[b4tteryaciid]

Ghost with glasses, anybody?

(I got glasses and contacts so I had to force Ghost to aswell.)

Sunday, January 26, 20XX, 6:00 AM

The shitty alarm clock never got old, screaming at an ungodly hour and waking Ghost up. Light was barely seeping in through the window and painting the floor with thin golden rays. He was still exhausted. The team was sent on a long three day mission and got back to base at about 1900 (7 PM). Everyone was pooped and beelined to their respective rooms to sleep.

Ghost groaned dramatically and stretched out like a startfish, banging his knuckles on the wall with a hiss. He rubbed his eyes, smearing around the leftover grease paint he was too lazy to take off and stood up, cracking his hips and knees in the process. He blinked the sleep away and slowly headed for the bathroom. He looked like shit but his face would be covered with a balaclava anyways. He splashed some icy tap water onto his face with a shiver and reached for the small white and green contacts case on the counter.

He slowly unscrewed it with a yawn and poked into the right compartment, scooping up the tiny lense. Huh that's weird. It feels funny. He squinted down at it and his heart dropped. It wad ripped. Goddammit. It his exhaustion the night before he must've ripped it while manhandling it into the case. Fuck. That would mean he would have to wear his glasses. He groaned loudly and slammed his hands on the counter. Swatting the case with the ripped lense away before ambling over to the busted brown cabinet above the toilet.

He poked around to see it he had any other lenses of if he'd have to ask Price to order more. Nope. None. Only a bottle or two of contact solution. He slammed the door shut and weighed his options. He didn't necessarily need his contacts to see. His prescription wasn't that strong, he just couldn't see from far away. It wouldn't kill him or endanger others. Okay, we'll, maybe. He was training recruits that morning so it wasn't like they'd be in an active battle zone. Price would chew him out if he willingly went out with imapred vision though. But it was just training though, could it be that big of a deal?

He opted to text Price and ask instead.

Ghost: My contact ripped. Order me more when you get a minute?

Price: Of course.

Ghost: Thank you.

Ghost: Am I authorized to not wear my glasses? We're training recruits today.

Price: No.

Ghost: Why?

Price: I cannot villingly let a visually impaired soldier around live ammunition.

Go figure. Just what he expected.

Price: It won't kill you to wear them for one day. Medical will have your new contacts in by about 1100 tomorrow.

Ghost huffed and tossed him phone down onto his bed. Whatever. Realization dawned as he realized he wouldn't be able to wear his hardshell mask and would have to wear a soft one. He dragged his feet getting dressed and begrudgingly put on his glasses, mumbling a string of curses as he did so.

---

He was sitting in one of the corner booths in the mess. Eating something squishy and bland, he didn't dare think about what it was. Atleast he had his tea. After a little bit of haggling with Price, he agreed to let Ghost take the day off and train the recruits himself. Ghost was now in dept to Price, or so he claimed, but he knew Price wouldn't act on it. He successfully avoided everyone, except one cook who didn't seem to pay him any mind as she was busy with three other things at once. The day was looking good. No human interaction whatsoever. He would retreat back to his room and read a book or occupy himself with something else.

Famous last words.

The loud giggles and chatter of Soap and Gaz filled his ears. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. He prayed they wouldn't notice him.

"Ghost!"

'Can't have shit can I?' He thought. He sighed reluctantly and looked up, meeting the eyes of the Scott. He was bouncing with energy. How he had a pocket full of sunshine at 9 AM Ghost would never know. They both stopped in ther tracks, Gaz shooting him a puzzled look that slowly morphed into a poorly disguised smirk. Soap had a goofy grin on his face, he opened his mouth to say something before Ghost interrupted.

"Not a word." He growled, pointing the fork at the both of them.

"Nice spectacles Ghost," Soap giggled, sliding into the booth next to him. Soap and Gaz shared a look over the table and burst into hysterics. Soap was crying he was laughing so hard and Gaz was trying his best not to wheeze.

"I'll skin you both," he grumbled with a hint of amusement. They would never let him live this down. They'd never leave him alone. 'This is gonna be a long day', he thought.

[apartyofone]

Another Storyworth post

How did I get my first job?

I've previously answered the question about my first FIRST job with neighbor Emma Dunn. Someday I'll tell the story about how I got my first REAL job out of college but that's for another day.  So how about all those other random life experiences in the workplace?  Through my summers between high school and college, I had a pretty wide variety of jobs: 

I applied for and "got" the sports reporter job at our tiny local weekly paper when I was a sophomore in high school. I think the publisher John Mustard thought it was 'cute' that some kid wanted to try to be a reporter, but I think I surprised him with my dedication. After they got bigger and hired a couple of real sportswriters - graduates from Univ of Oregon - taught me a lot about reporting and interviewing. I even started covering local government meetings in Jacksonville, Oregon.

I had one short miserable summer as a dishwasher at the Plymale Kitchen restaurant in Jacksonville. Thank goodness I came down with a horrible skin rash about 6 weeks into the job. That was my one and only restaurant job in my life.

I spent one summer as the "Assistant Produce Manager" - the title I gave myself - for our local grocery store, called Van Wey's Markets. I'd come in during the early afternoon and get my marching orders from the department manager. He was a pretty hard-working guy and good to work with. He taught me how to sort and go through the produce and fruit on the floor, cleaning out the old and rotten stuff. The cooler was packed with boxes of fresh produce delivered almost every day. I'd go up and down the aisles and restock as needed. I'd have to trim out some of the produce  - corn, cabbage, and lettuce - before putting it out for display. It wasn't too bad and there were some slow times as well when I didn't have much to do. On one of my last days, I decided to make life a little more interesting so I wrote notes like "Help, I'm being held hostage at Van Wey's Market" and slipped them between the lettuce leaves.

This stint gave me the idea for a few summers' worths of a side hustle that was a labor of love and profit. My parents' house was situated on some of the most fertile soil in the world, on the west side of the Rogue River Valley. I've already described the rich sandy loam soil, and it was perfect for growing any kind of vegetables. This is where I gained my lifelong love of growing veggies - from seeds to harvest.  I claimed a three-acre patch on the side of our property and started raising heirloom summer corn. You know, the kind with the crazy off-beat kernel colors like red, purple, orange, etc. From my contacts at the local market, I called a local gourmet grocery distributor that did business with San Francisco Bay Area markets. I took a bag of my "fancy" corn and he told me he could sell anything I grew to the gourmet stores and restaurants in California. Once a week I'd load up our old pickup truck with 12-15 bushels of corn. I was making over $1 an ear of corn to this wholesaler - at a time when corn cost about a nickel an ear in the local grower markets. Thank god for those early adaptor foodies! 

I had two part-time jobs one summer. I would spend some weekday mornings at the local daily newspaper office, the Medford Mail Tribune, getting some real-life experience in the office. I remember the editor John Lowry and reporters Don Hunt and others being really friendly and helpful. I'd cover the occasional stock car race when Hunt was on vacation. They even sent me to cover an Oregon Football game down in Fresno - that was a huge thrill! 

The other part-time job? I was a cashier and gas pump operator at a tiny convenience store outside of Central Point. We sold beer, cigarettes............and beer. Oh yeah, I already said beer. It still amazes me how the local Wawas, 711s can even survive without alcohol sales. I worked a 4 pm to 1 am shift over the weekends, and those were pretty exciting hours at times. One night a guy came in after I had closed at 1:15 and wanted some beer. I shouted through the window that we were closed, but he wasn't having any of that. He pulled his car back about 15 feet and decided to ram the building. Really bad idea - because it was constructed of cement block. I called the cops but the car managed to limp away before they arrived. After that episode, the store owner kept a huge softball bat behind the counter for me. He informed me that it was now my "Can Beater".  I said, "huh"?  "Yeah," he said. "It's for Mexi-CANS, Afri-CANS...." Ah, southern Oregon.

I spent two horrible-yet-profitable summers in the local plywood sawmills. I worked at the Boise Cascade plant on an industrial site between Medford and Central Point on Highway 99. I would usually work the Swing (3-11) and sometimes the Graveyard (11-7) shit in the factories. I was a nervous wreck on every shift, trying to keep up with the workers that had put in their time for decades. I'd never know what machine I'd be working on until I reported for my shift. The easiest job were feeding wet veneer - long "sheets" of thin wood sliced to make up the parts of plywood - into the mouth of the 200-foot-long dryers. These shifts were fun - especially when I was paired with another summer worker - a girl from Oregon State University who happened to have been featured in Playboy's Girls of the Pac 8 during the previous spring. And yes, we did go out a couple of times that summer. Together we would lay in a flat row of this sticky, smelly wood to be ingested into this mega machine. If we didn't do our job correctly, the wood would jam up and cause a fire in this long oven. 

The other job that I hated was on the far end of this dryer - pulling out the now dried sheets of veneer - and trying to stack the sheets on a large metal cart. It was an art to the job - using the air to float the sheets into position. Luckily, the old timers were very patient with us "kids" as we filled in for the regulars taking their summer vacations.

At the end of my shifts, I'd drag my tired ass to my parent's house and soak in their oak hot tub for an hour before trying to get some sleep.

So why put myself through the torture? Oregon minimum wage in 1980 was around $3.50 per hour. The lumber mill unions helped me earn $18.00/hour and I often worked the holidays for time-and-and-half bonus dollars! I was able to buy a car and upgrade some other toys for all my labor!