When I was 17, I was saying things like, “I don’t need school. I just want to go into the real world and make money.” My dad was a millwright who worked on machines at Dominion, the old grocery store. I think he thought, You think life’s that easy? Come to work with me, why don’t you?
I worked like eight or nine hours a day, and even though it was during the day, it was always dark because I was deep in the back of a massive 18-wheeler. It was dark and dusty in there. Packed boxes came down a conveyor, very quickly, and they’re all different shapes and sizes. As fast as you possibly can you’d have to decide how to stack them as efficiently as possible.