Be Prepared To Stop

"I've always wanted to be a flagger."

"Why?"

"Because they stand around and do nothing while enjoying the outdoors. And I hear they get paid well for it."

"And all you have to do in return is deal with all the irate drivers."

"Oh pish posh, I can handle them!"

This was a conversation I had with my friend a couple years before I actually became a flagger for a summer job. For some reason, I had always dreamed of becoming a flagger. Weird dream, right? It just seemed like an interesting life experience which could potentially give me some fun stories to tell at parties.

When I was first hired, it was boring, but very easy work. I would flag for their drain cleaning crew. Then we would go empty the cyclone filled with lovely sewage. I stayed in the truck when they did that.

I was one of five girls. One girl was a permanent, while me and the other three girls were summer help. One of us four summer helpers, had been doing it every summer for the past three years or so. She was younger than me and barked orders as if we were stupid. We were new, how were we supposed to know what she was talking about when she said, "Leap frog the signs." She should have just demonstrated instead of attempting to draw a pretty little picture.

It was definitely a hands-on learning process. There was no prior training or videos or books or anything to learn off of. Which was nice in a sense, I wasn't bored with low-budget corporate videos. However, when we started getting busy and we weren't quite sure what we were supposed to do, it was a little stressful. They would tell us how to set up the flags, but it took us a couple tries to get it right. But once she actually showed us how to do it, then we got it.

She would tell us to space the signs down a specific distance and when we did that, they still weren't good enough. We were never good enough the entire summer according to her. But my boss' really liked me and that's all I cared about.

Of course there's always that one boss that just gets under everyone's skin. He wasn't the true boss of us, he was a paper pusher. Yet he would come out to the site and try to order us around as if he were the boss of us. I always wondered why my real boss didn't say anything about that.

He was the unanimously mocked one. He would give us orders that were completely wrong and contradicting, especially when we had everything under control. He was the controlling type, to be sure, and it really got under our skin. We were forced to obey his orders at times and then right when we were finished, our other boss would come around and ask us why we did that.

The drivers were the best part. Sometimes we had to make them sit there for 15-20 minutes. When they were finally able to drive again, they would shout things like, "Go F*** up some other road!", "Get off my road!" and my favorite, "This road was perfectly fine before you got here!" I just smiled, nodded, sometimes chuckled and waved.

Besides all of the stress associated with fellow co-workers, drivers and crazy bosses, it was a really fun experience. Something I would love to do again. I was outdoors all day, I was constantly busy, the time flew by, I had fun co-workers (for the most part), it was easy and the best part, it paid really well.