I grew up in New Albany, Indiana, just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville has had a pretty strong local music scene in the 80s and 90s and for a while it was home to Initial Records. They put out a few regionally-successful bands, had an amazing mail-order catalog, and put on an annual music festival. At some point while I was going to college at Ball State, my brother, still in high school, started hanging out with a girl who worked for Initial.

During my college years I worked at two different Goodwill stores accepting, sorting, and pricing donations. The first time I worked at Goodwill was in the summer of 2000, before getting hired by the Census, I worked for a month at the store and donation center in Clarksville, Indiana. Clarksville occupies the land between the small towns of New Albany (where I grew up) and Jeffersonville. Both Jeffersonville and New Albany had quaint historic downtowns and origin stories of being river towns. As those towns sprawled outward in the middle of the 20th Century and strip malls were popped…

I work for the government now as an “Innovation Specialist” at 18F, part of the Technology Transformation Service inside the General Services Administration. My first government job was 20 years ago. When I came home from college in the summer of 2000 to work and save some money I applied…

When I came back home to New Albany the summer between my sophomore and junior year it was the first time I’d been back home for any extended period of time since I’d started school. I was feeling defeated and depressed coming home. My sophomore year had been difficult. In…

After a series of short-lived campus dining services jobs I realized that if all of the campus jobs were paying the same, there had to be a better way to make minimum wage. At this point I was a graphic design major and thought it would be cool to get…

Heading into my Freshman year at Ball State, my mom was very concerned about me getting an on-campus job. She insisted that I apply when I visited for orientation over the summer and then arranged for me to arrive on campus a few days ahead of the other freshman so I could start working right away. For either financial concerns or in one last effort to limit my freedom she didn’t want to pay the parking fee that would allow me take my car to school. …

The summer after my senior year of high school a couple of friends and I got jobs at Kroger. Two of us became cashiers and the other ended up working in the Deli. Kroger seemed like a good gig. They were always hiring and because they had recently unionized it was one of the few places a teenager could get that paid more than minimum wage. I typically worked the afternoon and early evening. After work my routine was skateboarding once it got dark, spending the late night drinking bottomless cups of coffee at Denny’s, then sleeping in until noon the next day. …

As part of the class of 1997 I was one of the last to take Drivers Education as high school course. If you passed the class you didn’t have to take a driving test. The class was split between learning the rules of the road from a workbook, watching instructional…

Around the same time that I was mowing the lawn at the pastor’s house, my aunt hired me to do some landscaping work. The previous owners of their house had filled paths in the garden with smooth gravel and my aunt wanted that gravel somewhere else. I spent a week…