Welcome to the first blog of my new series, My Top Ten Favorite Summer Memories.  Each story will be accompanied by a lesson that I learned from it and still use to this day.  And not all of the memories are necessarily pleasant ones.  Take this one for instance.  Coming in at #10 on the list is installing insulation in the summer of 1992.

Anyone who has ever installed insulation knows that it’s not the easiest job in the world.  The insulation is heavy.  You get dirty.  You can’t be afraid of heights or confined spaces.  And you have to wear long sleeves on 100-degree days.  The reason for the long sleeves is so that the fiberglass particles from the insulation don’t find their way into the pores of your skin.  No matter how cautious you are, it still happens though.  Then you get to go home and take a piping hot shower to open your pores back up and scrub out the itchy fiberglass.  I remember having dinner with my family after my first day on the job.  It was my turn to say grace and in addition to asking God to bless the food, I also asked if He would find it in His generous nature to allow me to be fired the next day.

Being home from my second year of college, I was the youngest, most inexperienced guy on the crew and was treated accordingly.  And that was fine.  I understand how these things work.  I wasn’t part of their ‘in-crowd’.  I was only going to be there for three months and then I was heading back to school.  My position in the pecking order meant that I was always the first one into a crawl space to check for snakes.  And I found more than I care to remember.  This wouldn’t have been such a big deal except for the fact that my fear of snakes rivals Indiana Jones’.  I would also be the first one to walk across attic beams just to be sure that they would hold our weight.  I only fell through an attic one time that summer.

The crew I worked with consisted of some of the most blue-collar, foul mouthed, inappropriate guys I have ever known.  And I loved every one of them.  We became good friends that summer and they even bought me a case of beer as a ‘back to school’ gift when I left.  Never mind the fact that I was still underage.  The only hazing these guys did that really bothered me at the time was that they would steal my lunch.  This wouldn’t have been that big of a deal except for the fact that my mom would pack me a pretty legit tuna salad sandwich each day.  Yes, I realize I’m 20-years-old in this story and my mom is still packing my lunch.  But hey…if the perks are there, why not take them, right?

After a while, I decided it was time to draw a line in the sand.  No one else was going to have the satisfaction of eating my lunch anymore.  I thought about standing up to these guys, poking them in their chests and telling them that if anyone wanted my lunch, they would have to go through me to get it.  Then I remembered that I don’t like the sight of my own blood and decided to take another approach.  I told my mom to stop packing my lunch.  If I wasn’t going to enjoy a tasty tuna salad sandwich, nobody was!

I skipped lunch everyday from that point on and never gave it another thought until my last week on the job.  Then the whole mystery of the disappearing lunch was revealed to me.  We were paid on a piece-work scale. This meant that we weren’t paid by the hour.  We were paid by the ‘piece.’  In this instance, by how many pieces of insulation we installed each day.  Basically, the more we worked, the more we were paid.  And everyday that I would take a fifteen-minute break to eat my lunch, it cost my crew money.  And for whatever reason, the decision made by my co-workers was not to confront me and tell me to stop.  (Which I would have gladly done.  Hey…I’m a team player.  And they were bigger than me.)  Their decision was to simply throw my lunch away and nip the problem in the bud.

That was one of my earliest lessons in the importance of communication.  A few spoken words or even a short note placed on the windshield of my car would have solved the problem.  Then again, maybe the lack of communication can be traced back to me.  In hindsight, I should have noticed that I was the only one taking a short lunch break during the day.  I never asked anyone else why they weren’t joining me.  The point is, communication is a two way street.  It’s also, in my humble opinion, one of the most important skills anyone can possess.  But, as I learned that summer, it doesn’t matter how good your communication skills are if you don’t use them on a regular basis.  If any one of us that summer would have brought up the elephant in the room earlier and simply expressed how we felt, a lot of tuna salad sandwiches would have been saved.

So there you have it…a summer memory and life lesson that I’ve carried with me to this day.  I hope all the guys I used to work with are doing well and all the summer help gets hazed worse than I ever did.  And if my mom ends up reading this blog and wants to deliver some tuna salad sandwiches for old-time’s sake, well…that would be cool too.