[BigV]

Originally Posted by glatt

My grandfather would sometimes tell the story of his first job after college.
He got a degree from Notre Dame in some sort of civil engineering field and graduated just as the Great Depression began.

He returned home to little Honesdale PA, where to get a job, you had to literally have political connections. The local politician (he never relayed the title of this guy in his story) would hand menial labor jobs out to his people. My grandfather was not the right kind of people to have a job handed to him. But he went to the politician's office anyway and waited outside in the hallway. He was told that there were no jobs for him there, but he waited in the hallway anyway. People came in, and left with jobs, while he stood there. The morning passed. Lunch came, and the politician came out of his office and glanced at him as he went off to lunch. Glanced at him again as he returned from lunch. My grandfather stood there for the entire afternoon, and at the end of the day, the politician came out and asked him if he had been standing there all day. Grandfather said yes, he had nowhere else to go since he had no job. So the guy gave him the name of some dude and told him to show up at the job site the next day.

So the next morning, my grandfather shows up at this road building site, and told the contact that the politician had sent him. The road boss wasn't ready for my grandfather, but found an old broken pick and gave it to him and told him to get busy. So my grandfather found a large sapling tree by the side of the road, broke it off, and whittled the end of the trunk to fit the pick head. He swung that thing all day, and by the end of the day his hands were badly blistered and bleeding. He had been off at college and had no calluses, even though he helped on the farm the previous summer. And the sapling tree handle was horribly uncomfortable. But he got the job.

About 10 years later, he had taken the leap to open his own business, and was now a contractor himself. He was never the richest man in the area, but he provided for his family and kept everyone fed with a roof over their head and clothes on their backs.

See Bullet #10.

Good work, grandfather.