Episode 5 : Brighton

AlaskaDub discusses his job at a photocopy place where he became the warehouse manager. He mentions the unscrupulous behavior of the company owner, who instructed him to lie about the company's credit issues. AlaskaDub eventually confronts the owner and quits. The FBI later shuts down the company. AlaskaDub moves into a house in the countryside and talks about his experiences there. He also mentions his Jeep CJ7 and an accident where the Jeep flipped but was still drivable. He then talks about living in a party house and a trailer with friends before moving into a run-down mobile home in Brighton, Missouri. He shares a story about a trip to Arkansas with his friends and describes a deserted town they visited. Welcome back to episode 5 of the AlaskaDub Chronicles. I'm your host, AlaskaDub. Let's see if we can make it out of Springfield, Missouri in this episode. I did want to mention that I happened to find an employment record with accurate dates, and so that's going to help the chronology some. So, I hope this will be a little more accurate. I think we have made it up until about 1988. 87? 88? So, yeah, still 21. 21, having too much fun. Let's see. According to my helpful record here, I was working at a photocopy place. So I do remember this. So, for the metal community, I worked as a driver for this photocopy place that serviced large copiers in places like hospitals, schools, all throughout southwest Missouri. So they had about six repairmen who would go out with a van full of stuff and try to fix these. The plan was to maintain them and do the regular service calls, but it ended up just being one emergency triage after another because I know the personal problems I have with photocopiers. And as I'm attempting to explain, I even have some professional background, so people with no common sense or positive experience with photocopiers can really make a mess of things. Anyhow, I needed a job, and my capacity in this place ended up being the warehouse manager, which was a pretty cool intersection of my sort of OCD organizing compulsion. And you can imagine the minuscule, besides the larger boxes of supplies and large parts, all the tiny individual parts that exist for a single machine, much less multiple machines of multiple brands, multiple sizes, and multiple years. I got pretty adept at deciphering exploded view blueprints of photocopiers. While the service guy, this was all, remember, this was the late 80s, so there wasn't cell phones and internet. He was on the phone trying to describe the part that I needed to order. Anyhow, it was good that I had a background in engineering, as well as my organizing compulsions. So, great group of guys. And so, that was pretty cool. So, what I have been, people I've been referring to so far, were the service end of things. Now, there's a corresponding sales end of things. So, the head of sales was also the head of the company, and there ended up being two branches of this company. So, I'm pretty, overall, I'm a very loyal employee. And it's not like I get incensed and storm out of places often. But this guy was so, I'm referring to the owner of the company, the head of sales, the overall head cheese, big enchilada. He was instructing me to lie because of overextending and credit issues. Our credit, the supplies that we had promised to distribute to our clients weren't coming in to us because we couldn't afford. We lost the credit with the big suppliers. So, while he would be promising six bottles of toner to five different places, we wouldn't get, we would get five bottles total. And that was just a small example of what he would do. So, I'll take, work-wise, I take responsibility for what, you know, I own, what I'm responsible for. If it's screwed up, I might cringe from it, but eventually I will face up to it, then, but I cannot work covering this guy's lies. And in like my Norma Jean moment, I walked into his office and told him basically what I just said, that I can't work under these conditions and this is wrong, it's unscrupulous. And apparently I wasn't the only one who thought so, because, not by any act of mine, but yeah, the FBI came in and locked the doors of both places, took the files out with a hand truck, and I wish I had some satisfying conclusion on what happened to this scumbag. But I'll just have to leave you in suspense, maybe I'll jump on the internet after this episode is done, and I think I probably will, I'd like to find out what happened to that guy. Anyhow, I was glad that I did what I did, took my stand, and that's sort of a proud moment. Living life, the older lady I started seeing with the two daughters, that situation, you know, ran its course and I ended up moving in to a nice house, just in the, Springfield is surrounded by old farms, countryside, just really immediately, a few blocks outside of the urban and suburban setting. So, we had this place out in the country, it was only maybe five minutes away from the heart of Springfield. Funny, funny thing, funny note about this place, the tenants right prior to us, it's amazing how the law is, it was a drug deal sting house. It was, it was previously wired with hidden video cameras, and one bedroom was, it had a closet that took up half the space, and inside, you could tell that's where all the monitors and stuff were, there was raw wires hanging out everywhere, and yeah, it was almost like a, it was like a room within a room, and this place was right on the corner of, like a, a two, of a highway and an access road, I don't think there was a single tree on the property, and, and the house was sort of offset. Anyhow, looking back, it would be like perfect for any sort of outside surveillance, aerial, it was just hilarious that, that three metalhead stoners move into this place. And, you know, as we proceeded, just live our lives, do our jobs, come home, rock out, horror movies, Domino's pizza, a lot of beer, you know, just your typical misspent, you know, misspent youth. Also, about this time, I went from my 280Z to a Jeep CJ7. I wish I could say it was the, but the studliest thing about it is it was brown. And it was, you know, the basic coolness of a Jeep, you know, to take the doors and the roof off. It did have a hard top, and, you know, just like wind whipping through you, or, or, you know, just a four-wheel drive and doing some creeping crawling through the, through a game reserves and stuff. So that was cool, but didn't have a big tire, didn't have a big engine, it actually had a four liter. So pretty, pretty, pretty gutless as far as any sort of performance goes. But it, I can't complain, I can't complain about it. So I did end up rolling it. I mentioned before, if I were a cat with those nine lives, me and, me and, me and cars have shaved off three, probably three, maybe four. And so, so that was, that was one of those times, I should not have been driving. And I fell asleep at the wheel, slowly went off the median of a four-wheel drive. And I drove away. The Jeep flipped. I happened to have the, I had the hard top on at that time. It slid, the hard top ripped off, and the Jeep continued to roll back on its, back onto its wheels, and to its credit, the thing drove off out of there. And so, yeah, it kept going after that. It was a, it was hardy in its own, like, inherent Jeep. You know, even, even the little puny ones still have that, still have a little, still have that burly, burly heritage to it. So, by the time that happened, my living arrangements had, had, had changed some. The party house just got too crazy. My roommates, I, I trusted my roommates, but the, the people in our lives, their friends, and acquaintances, the acquaintances were worse, the friends of friends. Anyhow, one weekend when I was away, I, I think, I think it was something as wholesome as my folks, and had a party. My room got broken into, and my, all my tools got stolen. And when I come back, I just get the, the shoulders shrugged. I don't know. I don't know. So, I moved out shortly after that. More back to my roots with some friends from high school. Trailer in a little town. I mean, I think it was a town as far as it had a gas station and market that was between, that was between the lanes of a divided highway. So, yeah, basically this four-lane divided highway kind of took a wide split around a hill, and before it comes, before the four come back together again closely, there's a little crossroads, and in that crossroads is this town of Brighton. And so, I ended up living with two other guys in a run-down mobile home across from a, across from a big farm. I want to say another horse farm, but maybe not. And that was a lot of whiskey and WWF back then, wrestling. And that, you know, Jim Beam and wrestling, we'd clear the furniture and start wrestling each other. And that was, that and a trip down to Arkansas with one of our friends, of course his nickname was Hillbilly, which is saying something to have, for that to be your nickname in the Missouri Ozarks. I'm just saying, you got to be super Hillbilly. And he was. He was awesome. So, one weekend, we go down to, we decided, this is one of those 2 a.m., hey, let's drive down to see my mom in Arkansas. Sounds great. Let's see, at that time, the, this place was so dilapidated, the front door didn't even lock, so I think I remember we propped a sofa up against it from the inside and, I don't know, crawl out of back window or something. So, yeah, we just drive straight down to, down into Arkansas, somewhere in the Boston Mountains. As an area I'd really love to explore again, because I do remember, in the course of our, of the weekend that we spent down there, like, a friend of his had his own, like, deserted town. It was so weird. I would love to learn the history of what that was prior, but it kind of reminded me of what I see now, like, abandoned mining communities, but it had, like, it almost looked like a movie set that had been overgrown, but of a, just like a small main street. You know, building on both sides, like, a block long, but just stuffed out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, back in Pleasant Hill, you could drive, you could link dirt roads all the way from Springfield to where you're just, you're just crossing highways. Maybe doing a little zigzag, but on this trip, I mean, you wouldn't see a paved road. It was the fall, so, you know, unfortunately it wasn't, it wasn't super nasty, but here's some, here's some, some of my Super Hillbilly snapshots. So, we, we pull up right about, right about sunrise, because, you know, we started, like I said, we started about 2, 3 a.m., and this is legit, his, his ma is, is, like, putting, putting the kindling in the, in the wood stove. To, to heat up, to make breakfast. I mean, we, we went easily, like, 50 years in the past in just, in those hours. We had the best homemade powder, baking powder biscuits I probably ever had. I mean, she whooped them out right there. She was making them whether we were there or not. That and some fried squirrel. So, that, that's probably my most Hillbilly breakfast. And then later, we went to go, like, right after that, we're still going. And so, we're slow driving to go see a, see a friend of his. And two deer cross the road, jump across this dirt road, and start going up the hill from where we are. We're not going that fast. Hillbilly slams on the brakes, pulls out his .45 revolver, and ends up shooting the, the young one. And that's what we have for dinner. And he skinned it with a buck knife that I, that I was carrying on me. So, so props, props to him. And, and, you know, that self-sufficient lifestyle, it just, it, it can't, it doesn't ever go away. It doesn't go out of style in, in some regards. So, yeah. So, as you might have gathered, these are sort of lost years. I was needing some direction. I was just drifting from one, one problem to the next. You know, it, so the new direction that I decided, eventually I snapped out of it. And more than likely, like, like most of their victims, I fell for some provocative advertisement that, you know, it was sort of like the army recruiter all over again. And to, to cut to it, if that can be called, I decided to go to, go back to school at the DeVry Institute of Technology as a systems analyst and, and programmer. Again, one of those, man, if I would have followed through, well, I'm jumping too far ahead. I'm jumping too far ahead. That is where, that is where the story will, will pick up. But, suffice to say, the wild days of, at the end of my Springfield, you know, early 20s, Springfield, Missouri, in the late 80s, it just, it wasn't that productive. A lot of fun times. A lot of trouble. But, you know, sometimes you got to learn what you don't want until it points you in the direction of what you do want. So, I was at that point, and I was getting ready to make a move to the big city. So, at this point, I think I'm going to give a pause, and I will talk to you again shortly. Be good.