Back In The Days…

Back in the days when I was, oh, say 14 or 15, I worked for my dad to make extra cash. My dad owned his own fire protection company. When he first started the business it was just my dad designing and installing systems by himself using our International Scout II as a work truck. (By the way, the Scout was a freaking awesome vehicle. You could take the top off and pops always had some oversized tires with gnarly treads on it. We even took it on a four week camping trip out west.) Eventually he hired two fitters and bought two vans for them to use. But my dad was a non-union kind of guy and eventually got fed up with one of our neighbors (who was also a fitter) spying on him and reporting back to the union. So he folded up the company and worked solely on the design part of the job. He had his insider contacts and was never short on work.

I used to help him in the designing process. He and I would go out to job sights and measure out the whole building. We got every measurement possible from room dimensions to ceiling hight to wall thickness. We had everything down on paper and then back at the office he would have me sketch the building out using AutoCADD (which is probably an ancient program by now). Back in the day AutoCADD was a pretty complex program and pops was always looking for the fastest computer possible. I remember him paying $3,000 for a 300 Mhz computer when they first came out. Anyway, I would either work at his office or at home drawing these floor plans for $10 an hour. Not bad work for a 15 year old, but then again I was working for my father and would get paid whenever there was money available. It was kind of easy in that I could work whenever I wanted to but then again there were times when he needed something done and I didn’t have much of a choice (kind of like the post college life).

I would say my favorite times were when we were out on a job site measuring. Out on the job site dad and I had a lot of personal interaction unlike the computer work. Typically we would have fun cracking jokes but there were always the other times when we wouldn’t say much to each other. One of the more memorable times was when we were measuring Brookfield Square which is a fairly big mall just outside of Milwaukee. The mall, for whatever reason, was already built but the codes required it to have sprinklers. So there dad and I were, measuring the mall and all its shops while shoppers were milling around. Usually the job sites would be vacant, either new buildings in the process of going up or old buildings being remodeled. Brookfield Square has a really high ceiling. Dad had these fiberglass “sticks” that would extend out and lock into place, the inner stick being an inch wide going all the way to the outermost casing being six inches wide (kind of like those expanding police batons only on a much larger scale). So there I was extending these six foot long extensions up and up till I reached the ceiling. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem and you’d just lean it again the wall to balance it and go up. For some reason I couldn’t do that at the mall. Either the ceiling had a pitch to it or there was something on the wall that wouldn’t let me do it. I extended the sticks up to 40 feet and started to have problems balancing it and I was no where near the ceiling yet. I had another 15 feet to go and I could see the sticks wobbling back and forth at the top while I tried my hardest to keep them stable. I got them up to 50 feet and (go figure) my hands started to sweat like crazy. I was standing there with a 50 foot long pole standing straight up, trying to keep it from falling over while women were pushing their kids around me in strollers. Had they known how much difficulty I was having they wouldn’t have been anywhere near me. I finally got it up to the ceiling, took the measurement, and brought it back down. Once I had it back down dad looked at me and said, “You looked a little nervous there.” “Yeah, that thing’s really hard to handle when you extend it that far up.” “If you put your feet on both sides of the base it helps to stabilize it.” Great, thanks dad, you couldn’t have told me this before I almost wiped out six moms and their kids?

Another memorable moment was when dad was talking to one of the fire inspectors he didn’t like. This guy would give my dad problems left and right for petty little shit. So one day we were at a site and the guy walked up to us. The fire inspector had two hearing aids. As he walked up I could see my dad mouthing words but couldn’t hear a damn thing. The fire inspector held his hand up in a “hold on” kind of fashion and adjusted his hearing aids. Once he was done my dad yelled, “So John, how’s it going?” so loud that it almost made me jump. The fire inspector nearly crapped his pants and dropped all his paperwork in a quick effort to fix his hearing aids. Yeah, now you know where I get my sense of humor from.