My first job out of high school was installing fire and burglar alarms.
Hold on. Let me back that up. I wasn't actually installing them. I was doing all the crap-work that went into the installation process so that someone else could actually install it.
I was an apprentice: a fancy word for do-boy.
When we pulled up to a house with a crawl space, my "trainer" would check the underside of the house with his flashlight. If he saw any signs of a leak (or spiders), it was my job to crawl under there to run wire and punch holes so he could connect the wires from the comfort of inside. Ditto for homes with an attic. I've lived in the south my entire life. I'm well versed in heat, humidity and being hot. But there is no hot like the hot of an Alabama attic in August. It's like sitting in an oven. On the surface of the sun. In Hell.
I lost 15 pounds in my first week and I don't even want to think about what kind of toilet/shower/sink goo I washed out of my hair. I was an expert at convincing myself that all those leaky pipes were just water, regardless of how not-like-water it smelled.
I was 17, didn't know any better and I didn't care.
I hit overtime on Wednesday afternoon and my paychecks were fat (for a kid with no real expenses). I was living the dream – for about a month. Spiders and crawlspaces were getting old (and gross). Attics were getting hotter, and the stuff I was told to do was getting more beneath the guy who was supposed to be training me. (One time in a restaurant he had me punch a hole in a cinder block wall for a fire alarm wire right above a griddle while the griddle was on). About six weeks into the job I realized that I hadn't learned a damn thing, and 6 weeks after that I enrolled in college – a place I said I wasn't going.
