The shitty job chronic-what-cles: boat monkey

When I was in school learning to be an acupunk, I spent my summers working for a local whitewater rafting company. There were times when this job was super cool. I had a killer sunburn. I had beautiful arms. I wore sunglasses all day long. We drank alot of beer.
I fell madly in love with Oregon because of that job. I also broke maybe 5 trailer hitches. And woe was us on Mondays, when all there was to do was clean up after the weekend. Boats are heavy. Everything is dirty. Also we were usually tired and hung over.
The guy I worked for was an old school rafter. He'd been everywhere. He had a horrible scar on his right leg and walked with a limp. He seemed a little gruff at first but as it turned out, he was just a little Mark Twainy, if you get my drift. He was also scared shitless to be running his own business all of the sudden well into his middle age years, and didn't really know what he was doing. Consequently, I was the only employee that he had around on a regular basis. I was totally inexperienced around whitewater, whitewater boats, and everything else that had to do with his business. I am also not all that tall or strong. Looking back, I'd say hiring me was a bad idea. What he needed was young laddies. Alas. It was me.
This rafting shop was the biggest mess I had ever seen. He had bought the outfitter from someone who had run it out of the same location for 20+years and never threw anything away.
There were old boats in there that had been sitting, rotted on the floor, for ten years or more. There were coffee cans full of screws. There were heaps and heaps of ancient lifejackets waiting for that big river in the sky. There were also myriad other weird things in the shop, including, but not limited to, a gurney, an ancient refrigerated deli case filled with styrofoam, and about a ton of old lumber. The mess was a constant battle. We were forever moving it around in piles, because Obe did not want to spend the money to rent a dumpster and get the shop cleaned out. Besides, he told me one time, if the shop is clean, it means you ain't got anything else to do. It drove me crazy.
One rainy midweek day, I decided to attack a pile of discarded lifejackets. If a lifejacket was screwed up, torn, sunbleached, too old, or otherwise deemed unsafe, we were to slash it with our knife, cut the buckles off, and throw it in a pile with the other decomissioned lifejackets. I was ready to rid the shop of this pile. I started in ransacking the jackets for buckles. I carried armloads of the things out to our parking lot to be hauled away. I swept the floor. I forged on ahead, but the pile was just so...huge. And there seemed to be something under this pile of lifejackets. I reckoned it might have been a UFO, or an ancient pyramid. I could be stumbling upon an archeological wonder! What if there was a sarcophagus, or dinosaur DNA encapsulated in a chunk of an old PFD?? I worked furiously. Obe decided to call it a day and go next door for a beer.
After awhile, I uncovered a motorcycle. I gasped. It was old, but perfectly preserved. I ran next door to tell Obe what I had found.
"Oh," he said calmly. "I was looking for that."