David Crosby and Getting Fired
It only happened to me once, no it was twice. I only deserved it once.
And then David Crosby died.
I have thought about writing about the times that I lost my job or got made redundant and I have a few stories. Some people have only been made redundant once, and it can be incredibly stressful. I was reading an article that I clicked on from Twitter a few days ago. I think it was in the Harvard Business Review. It had advice for people who were made redundant, both on dealing with it emotionally and practically. Then David Crosby died and I thought I should find a way to bring him into the story.
I watched ‘Remember my Name’ on Netflix last year, and looked it up today. The intro to the trailer is quite appropriate. There was a time when we lived like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t know if we would live a long life or really care that much. We cared about living in the now.
So David Crosby got fired from the Byrds in 1967, allegedly because he insisted on his song Triad becoming their next single after ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ in 1964.
But in another Netflix documentary Echo of the Canyon he famously said the reason he was fired was “Because I was an a-hole.” Funny because he always seemed to be a nice guy to me. How could anyone with such a smooth voice and cool songs be anything else? He had those beautiful minor seven chords, and jazzy progressions that were part of the backdrop of my life in my school days.
So there is my tenuous link. I wanted to recognize him because he was a legend. Deja Vu was probably the top album for me. I heard CBNY on the radio when I was living in Holland, and affixed to my borrowed transistor radio like a tethered pup.
Like all my mates who played guitar at school, I could and did play pretty much the whole album. One of the tracks I loved was Teach Your Children Well.
Anyway, I only ever got fired once, no, actually twice. I almost forgot the second time. They were not far apart. One was justified, and the other was not.
The first time, I was still at school and had been wagging and working part-time at VH Farnsworth in Auckland, which was a labor hire pool. We did every sort of work you could imagine and I loved it. I ran with rugby league players as a lifter, on a rubbish truck. I worked as a scaffolders laborer, carrying drywall up the outside of scaffolding, 30-40 feet above the ground, and getting awesome danger money. I cleaned and painted ships’ bilges and antifoul under tug boats and cleaned up broken beer bottles at Lion Breweries in the factory where a machine put the tops on quart bottles of beer.
I was earning $200 a week for a couple of days of work in 1975 and still going to school, well sort of. When I left I trained to become a telecommunications engineer, and with a shift allowance, I was making $65 a week! So much for qualifications!
One evening a group of about 5 of us were in the company van being driven back to our base, where my motorbike was parked The guys all decided to steal our hard hats. It was all or none. I don’t know how I missed it, but somehow I didn’t get the memo that they had changed their minds. The following morning I was in the yard at 6 am to make sure I got work or could get back to school in time if I didn’t. Well, everyone got work that morning, except for me.
I went to the office and asked why they didn’t give me any work. They said, “Because you stole a hard hat. Don’t bother coming back.” I deserved that but was miffed that the others didn’t tell me. It’s not like it was my idea, and I had no need for the hard hat, I was just trying to be one of the guys. I returned it the following day and said I was very sorry, but they weren’t interested.
The only other time I got fired, was at the end of my first tobacco season in Motueka. My boss had spoken to someone at the pub who said he desperately needed apple pickers in his orchard. I signed up, spent an hour getting trained, and got into it.
I met some cool people and found the work fun and easy. They were long days, but I really enjoyed the work, and being strong and fit, I quickly got into a rhythm.
It was towards the end of the season and they were behind. They needed the crop picked urgently. I managed to get myself sick with a really bad case of man-flu after a couple of weeks on the job. I asked my boss on the tobacco farm where I was living in a worker’s hut, to let them know I couldn’t work that day. I didn’t have a phone and he was happy to pass on the word for me.
Well ten minutes later, he knocked on my door with the news that the pick was urgent and if I didn’t turn up within half an hour, I shouldn’t bother turning up at all. I was pretty pissed off about that. I was very sick. I wanted to work. I enjoyed it and this was a contract, there was no such thing as sick pay.
So there you have it. The good news is that I found a much better job in Nelson, where I moved given there was no more work available where I was. But that’s another story. I haven’t been sacked since. I have been headhunted a number of times and made redundant a number of times. Now there are some stories…..