This is the last entry I will write for now about the winter of 1994. It was a good mental excercise for me to write this. Actually, I wrote it sometime late last fall. I guess I was in a mood to excercise some old demons. Well, I think I've sufficiently bored you with it, so here is the last part. As it begins, I am desperately searching around Dinkytown, near the U of M in Minneapolis, for an apartment under $250 a month, in the dead of winter.
6. My First “Apartment”
Eventually, I found an apartment. It was a room in a 3-bedroom apartment. Since I was in such a rush, I found the place in the morning, called the owner, and on his verbal agreement moved in the same afternoon. My 2 roommates were both home. They were surprised anyone would be moving in these temperatures.
The apartment didn't actually consist of 3 bedrooms. It was about 700 square feet divided between 4 rooms. My room was created by putting in a thin sheet of drywall in the middle of a larger room. One half was the common room, with the T.V., two dirty leather couches, and a coffee table. My room was the other half. If someone was talking on the telephone in the living room, I could hear through the drywall what the person was saying, and usually, some of what the person he was speaking to was saying, as well. That's how paper-thin the wall was.
The guys I was about to live with couldn't be any different - at least, on the surface. Jeff worked at Kinko's. He had the late shift, and came home sometime around 1. Then he would watch movies, or play them, for the rest of the night. He always had the volume cranked up. I don't know how he slept. The other roommate (I don't remember his name) worked at an electronics store, in addition to being a student at the U. He was from Nigeria, and easy going. Most of the time, he hung out with his friends, and enjoyed watching and sometimes playing basketball – often in the living room. At that time, Glenn Robinson was finishing his senior year at Purdue, and Voshon Lenard was at Minnesota. I knew all about the college athletes, because my roommate was watching them on TV all the time. I sometimes joined him. It was a way to pass the time.
One other thing about these first roommates and that was they didn't like to clean up their food, their plates, or their trash. I don't mean to rant about them, since I'm far from perfect in this category, and besides I don't believe in ranting about people in your past. These roommates later proved to be good guys. However, I am trying to give you an idea how I lived. The apartment often smelled of hamburgers or some greasy food that the other guys had eaten and not cleaned up. I suppose this was kind of good for me. I couldn't afford hamburgers, you see, and seeing and smelling stale, greasy leftovers made me permanently lose my appetite for fast food. I lived on a diet of rahmen noodles, sometimes complimented by broccoli and a hot dog. As a luxury, I might enjoy a bottle of the cheapest beer I could get (at the time, it was a brand called Black Label).
7. Looking for Work
After a couple weeks of hunting around, I still hadn't found even a temporary job. January is not the best time of year to be looking for work in the upper Midwest. Back in 1993, we were still coming out of recession. There wasn't much demand for college students with liberal arts degrees. I know I wasn't alone.
One day I finally did get a call from the temporary staffing company. I should come in to meet the client. The office was in the western suburbs, far from where I lived near the University. So I got in my Pinto, and drove it out of the city. I didn't like to drive this car anymore. I knew it was a safety hazard, for me, and for the other people on the road. Anyways, that day I happen to leave the lights on after I got to the office where I was meeting the staffing person. After a short meeting (I forget what the outcome was, but I wasn't in any great mood when I came out), I came back in the parking lot to see the disheartening sight of barely illuminated headlights someone had left switched on. This was of course my own black Pinto. When a person finally agreed to help me jumpstart the car, we hooked up the cables together. I remember it was a lady, a really nice person. However, neither she nor I knew much about cars, I think. I got in my car and turned on the ignition. Smoke started to appear. There were sparks. I turned off the key and ran back around to look in the hood. The car was dead. Black wire cables were smoking and the distinct smell of burning rubber cable hung in the air. The car was pretty much a wreck. I had the nearest tow agency come and pick it up. They agreed to take it for free. Though I knew it woud be a hardship for me, I felt relieved in a way. My choices were being made for me.
8. General Mills
So now I was, in addition to being jobless, carless. I began to appreciate the availability of public transportation. I used the bus system in Minneapolis a lot that winter. Eventually, I found a temporary job in the west suburbs of the city, working at General Mills. I would have to take one bus from my apartment at the university to downtown. There was a transfer station there for those who had to get to work in the suburbs. You had to wait out in the cold, I remember. Either this was to discourage people from riding the bus, or, more likely, to discourage poor people from hanging around the bus stations. My total commute, including the bus rides (when they were on schedule) was something 1 hour 20 minutes.
The last leg of my daily trip to work at General Mills was from the parking lot to the inside of the building. This was a significant walk, actually. I don't how many people worked at this complex, but it was probably something like 10,000. Remember, this is the company that supplies the world with such products as Cheerios, Trix, Count Chocula, and Lucky Charms. In any case, the parking lot for this office complex in the suburbs west of Minneapolis was accordingly large, for all the employees that worked there. General Mills, in its infinite generosity, had built a kind of wind-sheltered walkway from the parking lot into the corporate offices. Mind you, this was not heated. It was still really cold. You could hear the metal clanging as you walked. Metal makes different sounds when struck at low temperatures. Something like when you banged against the flagpole in middle school. Dong, dong. I remember this sound. And being really happy to get to work, in the warm building. Have you ever wondered why people in the Midwest have the reputation for being hard workers? Because there's nothing else to do there in the winter! I mean, you really are glad when you successfully make the journey from your home, through the snow, the ice, and the cold, to your warm, cozy office. That's if you're lucky and you work in an office.
My job at G' Mills consisted of opening bills from doctors and hospitals to current and former General Mills employees that were covered by company insurance or pension plans. That job was a real eye-opener in terms of how much medical care can cost, both to a patient and to a company that pays pensions. I and several other temps like me would receive the letters, open them, and sort them. Letters without bills went one place, doctor and hospital bills another place, and dentists' bills yet another. It was sort of like in “The Incredibles”, where Mr. Incredible the humble office worker is working in sea of cubicles, assigned the task to deny claims from his clients. Except I didn't even have the power to deny any claims. I was just a lowly mail clerk.
On the bright side, getting to work at a big company with a proud tradition like General Mills gave me a peek into the corporate world. They had their own gift store. You could get giant plush Lucky Charms dolls, or clothes with every brand of cereal emblazoned on the front. I walked by there every morning. I don't remember if I felt jealous of the people who could actually afford those things, or even more estranged by this type of captive commercialism. I think I thought about money a lot. That's I guess what happens when you have to measure every dollar.
Well, I'm coming to the end now. After 3 ½ years at private college, I had started at a pretty low rung. Looking back, I'm kind of glad I got through all that. Those months, and years actually, when I was living from month to month working temp jobs were not particularly good for me. I think it was mostly hard mentally. I mean, I was just 23 or 24, so physically, no problem. But, despite the conditions, I still had moments where I would I laugh, and tell jokes. Eventually, I moved on, to better places and jobs. It was a passing phase, I guess.
Well, thanks for reading. I have a question for you. What it was like when you got your first job? How did you deal with the transition?
