One Week In. Ready for Spring Break.

It's not that this teaching job is so very taxing. I've worked taxing, exhausting, soul-crushing jobs. Fast food, slow food, retail, and that unforgettable job at Columbia Records (back when they sold LPs, cassette tapes and 8-track tapes!). It was my job to read the numbers that mail-order customers had painstakingly scribbled into tiny squares on a flimsy postcard ripped out of a magazine ad. I would read them, and compare them to an unending computer print-out to make sure that Columbia Records was indeed going to package up an 8-track of Andy Williams' "Greatest Hits" and not Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy." Because that would simply not do.

Let me also mention that during this punishing employment during the summer of 1978, there were no laws against smoking in the workplace. I hated smoke. Had the most sensitive eyes in the state of Indiana and could not stand to be around cigarettes. At least not in an enclosed area. So there I was, eye-strained out the wazoo already from reading the carefully chosen musical selections of one pencil-wielding Cletus from Frightened Sheep, Tennessee, and I had to also endure the unavoidable clouds of smoke settling on me from all directions. When I got home, my mom would say "You smell like you've been rolling in ash trays all day."

My complaints were pooh-poohed by the supervisor, a hateful square-faced woman named Pat. I was, after all, only a summer hire, and the smokers were permanent fixtures at Columbia Records. They hated me. Because I complained about them and because I couldn't help staring at them. You know what a woman's face looks like when she's been smoking for many many decades, right? Yeah. Forget that image. Because this one badly-dyed redhead made those women look like fragile china dolls. Her face had begun to cave in. She was sucking those cigarettes so deeply into the chasm of her mouth that they would all but disappear, all 100 millimeters of them, making her wrinkly face look like a rectum grasping fiercely onto a piece of chalk, perhaps to write desperate messages about the dark goings-on in AssWorld.

During our 15-minute morning coffee break I would bolt from the building and run like a banshee through the fresh, clear air to my own addiction: the Dunkin' Donuts next door. Bavarian cream filled chocolate long john, here I came. Same thing during the afternoon break. I gained ten pounds that summer, which was a good thing, since I was skinny enough that my mother would make banana shakes for me at bedtime, to help me put on some pounds. That problem, by the way, is no longer with me.

I was newly motivated to return to college and face whatever overwhelming assignments my professors could dream up. Nothing would stop me from getting a degree and outrunning that spreading Columbia Records quicksand. I did not wish to live an isolated life deciphering postcards from Cletus and his ilk. I wanted contact with real people, in person, interacting, not all of us shut into our suffocating computer printout tedium.

The story has a happy ending. I teach college now and have all the interaction I can stomach. And I'm deciphering student papers that seem as though they may have been written by the rectum-chalk.

And just because I came in the door after 2 days of class screaming "I hate people. ALL PEOPLE!" doesn't mean I don't love my job. Because I do. It just takes a bit of adjustment the first week. Like when I pass out a student questionnaire that, among other things, asks them to list their favorite books. This time I got a kid who wrote "I hate to read and write. And I always will." I will break him. Watch me.