My Second Career as a Landscaper

     Many years ago, before I finally connected with my present employer, I found myself between jobs with a family to support. I found a temporary job as a laborer at a local Landscape-Nursery and quickly found myself very involved with Landscape work in this area -- it was March, and the winter had been very long and hard.
     It happened that at that time the Aerospace Industry in this area was going through hard times and had laid off a lot of very highly educated people. Some of them decided to work at the same Nursery where I was working.
     It also happened at that time that the Nursery did a lot of drainage system work for individual homes in the area. For those who have never done this work, this is most likely the dirtiest possible type of work a human being can do. Lacking large equipment, we needed to manually dig trenches through various layers and types of soils and gravels, sloping it properly, refilling with drainage materials, and so forth. Then we replaced the sod and supposedly it looked like we had never been there. We worked mostly in an area that has clay soil, and we could not be clean working in clay soil levels filled with undrained water.
     Now to set the scene. One rainy day, because I had been in the Nursery Business approximately one month, and because I had been on crews which had installed maybe five drainage systems, I was given a small raise and put in charge of a crew of my own. Three guys, laid-off AeroSpace Engineers all, were to work for me! Two of them had Ph.D's, and the third a Master's Degree. Together we were going to install a drainage system at a large private home in the worst-drainage part of this area -- worst-drainage due to the clay soil.
     Aside from the weather, which was terrible, it was a very nice day. These guys were easy and pleasant to work with, and they were there to work. We finished the back yard in good time, had gotten ourselves unbelieveably filthy in the process, and we were pretty well along with the front yard, all of us together in the trench, when a well-dressed young woman with a young boy in tow stopped to watch us for a while. We continued mucking and rooting around in the trench, not presenting a very pretty picture, and the woman with the little boy just continued to stand there and watch.
     After about fifteen minutes we heard the woman say to the little boy: "If you don't study hard in school, this is what you will be doing when you grow up."
     At that point four grown men collapsed in the muddy trench and started roaring with laughter. I'm sure the lady never knew why.