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For a short time in the mid-1960s, I was in desperate need of a job and found myself working for a likable though shrewd entrepreneur named Ernie.

Ernie owned a service station franchise on Canada's Queen Elizabeth Highway, where he sold gasoline and repaired cars, some of which belonged to local farmers, and some of which were owned by passing tourists – a distinction worth noting.

My duties included opening the doors at 7 am every morning, so Earnie could sleep until he felt like getting up. I say, “every morning” because I worked Monday to Sunday with no day off, at least until I acquired another job after a few weeks. In the interim, I worked ten hours a day, and earned a dollar an hour.

I was young then, and I found it difficult to get to work on time, but I didn’t want to get fired, so I almost always exceeded the speed limit on my drive to the station. I drove a 1947 dodge in those days, and it must have resented the sunrise dash along the highway because almost every morning, after being parked, it deliberately waited until I began walking away before it back-fired, breaking the early morning silence and scaring the Hell out of me.

Once recovered, I routinely unlocked the office door and made my way into the two-bay garage, where a cloth bag of coins and bills spent the night, nestled inconspicuously on top of the hot water tank. Those coins were always, as the expression goes, “too hot to handle.”

Day after day, come rain-or-shine, I hurried to the pumps each time a thirsty vehicle rolled onto the lot. At the time, every service station offered full-service, filling tanks with gasoline, checking fluid levels, and cleaning headlights and windshields. It was justly rumoured at the time that attendants lingered over the cleaning of windshields; perhaps because the mid-1960’s marked the height of the mini-skirt era.

It wasn’t long before Ernie introduced me to some unanticipated duties, like the time he had me climb a ladder to the top of a forty-foot pylon to change floodlight's burned-out bulb. I’ve never been fond of heights, but again, I didn’t want to get fired, so I complied and became intimately familiar with the term “weak-kneed.” Barely able to suppress my anxiety, I clung to the ladder with my left hand while my trembling legs made it vibrate against the steel pole. When I reached up with my right hand and unclipped the hinged lens of the floodlight, it swung open, and a shower surprised spiders cascaded onto my upturned face. That experience makes the next couple of mishaps seem hardly worth mentioning.

Nevertheless, here they are in no particular order.

One hot summer day, the driver of a transport truck needed his transmission plug tightened before replacing the fluid that had already leaked out. As Ernie watched, I lay down on the creeper and reached for the truck’s drive-shaft to pull myself under the tractor. It turned out, the drive shaft and the exhaust pipe were twins, so I left the skin from the palm of my hand on the latter. The smell of my seared flesh conjured thoughts of a cannibal’s barbecue.

Ernie’s actions made it clear that he was in business to make money. One day, he had me replace a local resident’s water pump and charged the man fifteen dollars labour. A few days later, the driver of a similar car complained that his engine was overheating. I installed a new water pump as before, but this vehicle bore Pennsylvania license plates, so Ernie charged the man forty-five dollars.

Just prior to moving on to my next job, I raised a Ford Fairlane on the hoist to change the oil. As usual, I placed a purpose-built tank beneath the drain to catch the old oil and unscrewed the plug with a wrench, but oil plugs hang on to the last thread, then often let go without warning. I was looking up at what I was doing when the plug fell away, and a stream of hot motor oil caught me with my mouth open – literally. That day I learned, among other things, that hot oil leaves a rather distinct after-taste.

It didn’t seem like much of a job at the time, and while I was happy to move on, it left me with some vivid and greatly treasured memories.