When people talk about the best years of their lives and all of the good experiences that they had growing up, I don’t know how to relate.
I simply didn’t have any experience like that.
I grew up in a fairly wealthy and privileged area of town. Most of the kids that I attended school with belong to lawyers and doctors. Their families were extremely well-off and they were happy to show it. They always had the newest clothes, on the coolest gadgets, and the fastest cars. On the other hand, I came from a family of blue-collar workers. My dad was a central heating and cooling technician for over 20 years. It was bad enough that he regularly dropped me off for school in the heating and cooling work trucks that he drove around to residential HVAC service appointments each day. It was even worse that he was the personal heating and cooling technician for many of the families in town. A lot of the kids that I went to school with called my dad dirty and disgusting as he tried to fix their forced air furnaces and air conditioning units. They saw him crawling around under their house and he was often covered in grease from the broken HVAC equipment. For my entire high school career, I was referred to as the HVAC kid. Anytime there was an indoor air temperature problem at the school, everyone singled me out and started telling me to call my dad. Well, the joke is on them. Today I’m a professional HVAC repairman making excellent money at my job… and I refuse to service any of the wealthy homes on that side of town.