If I can dust off the cobwebs from inside my cranium, I can almost remember my first job back when I was 15-years-old. My father orchestrated the whole thing. It was a simple, part-time job on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I think my starting pay was $1.15 per hour. My father drove me to work each weekend at 5:30 (I think) and my task was to take a large aluminum rake and walk the golf course (where he played) and rake all of the sand traps before the members began their rounds. The hardest part of that job was getting up at 5:00 a.m.
During the summer I became a full-time member of the maintenance crew. My main job during those hot months was to water the fairways, tees and greens. I was given a pickup truck to drive and I spent my days driving across fairways and laying out patterns of sprinklers. This was long before automatic watering systems. Back then I had several sprinkler heads tossed onto the flatbed of the truck and I’d drive around to where the receptacles were and place a sprinkler head into each one and give the handle a twist. The water blasted from the heads and it was impossible to stay dry. But on those hot Southern California days, the water always felt good.
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A few times, as I was turning the lever to seat the sprinkler, the head slipped from my grip and it spun around and I was blasted to the ground as the powerful stream hit me in the chest. It hurt a bit, and I was soaked, but that only happened a few times and, as far as I know, nobody saw me sprawled on the fairway like a flounder.
The worst part of that job was one day when I was trying to back the pickup out of the maintenance yard and I raked the left fender along the bed of another truck. I destroyed the headlight on the truck I was driving. My boss was none too happy.
“How the hell did you get a driver’s license?!!”
“I… I don’t have one, sir. I’m only 15 and this is the first car I’ve ever driven…”
Staring into the distance, he blinked his eyes a few times and then shook his head and walked away, disappearing into his office. I stood for a moment, unsure as to what I was supposed to do next. After waiting for him for a couple of minutes, I got into the truck and drove out onto the course.
I really knew nothing about how to drive. On my first day he’d told me to take the truck out and water the fairways. So, I did. The good thing was, with the exception of when I was in the yard, there was really nothing for me to hit. Sure the fairways had many trees, but I stayed far from them. 
I learned about changing gears to drive up a hill only because I tried going up one in 4th gear and I stalled. I let it roll back down the hill and tried it in first. I was at the bottom of the hill when I started and I realized that the truck climbed slowly and steadily up the hill in 1st gear. So I figured that one out and, basically, I was left alone to teach myself to drive! And, all-in-all, the job was pretty simple and with my first two-week paycheck of $211, I thought I was rich. And, as daunting as it was being 15-years-old and told to drive a vehicle without ever having been behind the wheel, it wasn’t the hardest job I ever had.
Another job I had in my teen years was washing dishes at an ice cream shop. In our town there was a small ice cream factory and an adjacent soda-fountain counter/diner. My job was dish washer. And I washed those dishes with great care and intensity. I was fired after a month or two because I was too slow. Somehow I later learned that they expected a dish washer to quickly plunge the glasses and dishes into soapy water, give them a twist or two and then rinse. I actually washed them with a sponge as if my mother was going to inspect each one. I was never really shown how they expected me to do the job, but I remember my friend, Cherie Huckabone—who also worked there and had gotten me the job—saying once that I “washed them too good…” It was no big loss for me when that job was finished. And it wasn’t difficult at all.
Working in aerospace as a computer operator wasn’t difficult. It was just boring. And yes, this was so long ago that there was a job title called Computer Operator. Today a two-year-old can operate an iPhone, but back then it was a specialized skill. Nonetheless, it wasn’t hard.
At one point in my aerospace career (?), there was no computer to operate and I was given a desk in a small, two-man office. And I had nothing to do. For six months. Now that was difficult. I went to the plant every day and I sat there. Or I walked around and kept other people from working.
After aerospace I went into my media career. Nothing there was difficult. Sure I made many mistakes that caused me to be viewed as an idiot, but that has happened pretty much everywhere I’ve gone and in every aspect of my life… though nothing about it was hard.
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Being a reserve police officer was rather daunting. Probably the most physically and mentally challenging of any job I ever had. But I wouldn’t say it was difficult. Dangerous at times and it could be emotionally taxing… and I’ll confess that it left some mental images I wish weren’t locked in my head.. but it was not the most difficult job I ever had.
I was once the host of stand-up comedy night at a local nightclub. That was pretty hard. Standing up in front of a group of drunks and trying to make them laugh is quite difficult. Still, not the toughest. But it was that weekly gig that led me to realize what the most difficult job I ever had was. See, at the time, I was also the weatherman at a local ABC affiliate. Being the weatherman was one of the things the club managers liked about me. They got to have a local TV personality host their weekly comedy show. And, with very few exceptions, each week one or both of the guest comedians would comment that my job as a weatherman in Palm Springs, California, had to be the easiest job in the world.
It wasn’t.
On Comedy Night, when I came up to close the show, I’d explain that being a weatherman in Palm Springs was the single most difficult job I ever had. It was live TV and I had a two-and-a-half minute segment on each broadcast to say, “Hot.” And then I had to fill two-minutes-and-twenty-nine seconds of air…
