Pondering New Place of Employment
Since the rear of the truck was blocked with project lumber the SwampMan had picked up from Home Depot on the way home from work, I had to unload the hay from the side. I was glad that they were big, heavy bales when I bought them on the way to Home Depot but now, having to reach down into the bed, grab the bales, and swing them up over the side, over my head, and continuing the swing and tossing them into the barn, I was a little less enthusiastic. The sudden sharp stabbing pain in my back muscles as I finished one particularly enthusiastic cycle of lift, turn, toss reminded me that lifting, turning, and tossing a heavy weight was really something that one should not do.
It also reminded me that SwampMan has been enthusiastically “helping” me find new jobs. The latest one was a medical delivery person wherein I would drive a truck and deliver medical supplies to the homebound. The job states that it requires the driver to be able to lift and carry a minimum of 80 lbs.
“I thought you said I was too old for that! You had a fit when I was hired on a painting crew and all I would be doing is carrying 5 gallon buckets of paint! You said I was ’too old’ to be carrying sh** like that and scampering up and down ladders. Remember?”
”Well, you’re always tossing around bales of hay and bags of feed like they don’t weigh nothin’, so I figured you’d like this. Then when you get tired of it in the summer, you’d get a teaching job in the fall.”
Aaaah, so there we have it. He figures I’ll get so tired of labor that I’ll be eager to enter the classroom eager to light the fire of knowledge into young minds. *sigh*
The school year is nearly up; I have given him a year to see whether I like it and want to stay. It has been nice having time off; it was the first time I had vacation (at Christmas and shortly during spring break) in–well, I don’t remember the last time I had any time off before that that didn’t involve childbirth. He tells me that life would be wonderful if I were a full-time teacher. We could travel across the states and, indeed, around the world on our vacation.
The only drawback that I can foresee, and it would be a considerable drawback, is the prison sentence I would get when some parent gets up in my face cursing how I’m picking on his/her little 17-year-old pimply precious by actually demanding that he/she act like a civilized human being in class and do some (gasp) schoolwork.
