The hardest work I ever did in my entire life was not hard labor at all. It was working in a retail department store in Columbia, SC called Tapp's.

I worked there one summer. You'd have been proud of me. I borrowed my dad's blazer, which was, quite frankly, too long and a bit too ostentatious. I looked like a "Philadelphia lawyer," according to my floor manager.

To be fair, I was a pretty good men's merchandise salesman, but to be candid, I hated every minute of it. It's the hardest work I ever did in my whole life. You stand there for a 10-hour shift and hope people will come and buy something from you. Since I was paid by the hour, it didn't matter to me "income-wise" whether I sold anything or not.

But I hated to lose. When a prospect came into the store, I saw it as a challenge to sell him something. I envisioned that he had money in his pocket, and it was my job to help him part with it.

One day I had completed a pretty good sale of a couple of suits and a bunch of accompanying items like shirts and ties. I was about to ring it up when the floor manager stepped in to help me out. "Knock yourself out," I thought to myself as he took over the process. I later found out from a co-worker that the manager was on commission and I had just put a big chunk of change in his pocket. Such is life.

I've pumped gas, changed tires, tended bar, worked as a jailer, written for newspapers, car hopped at drive-ins, washed dishes, peddled newspapers, worked in both residential and road construction… you name it, I pretty much did it in my teenage years. But none of those jobs was as hard as standing on your feet for 10 hours hoping someone was going to come into a department store it buy something like a suit. I'd rather milk a cobra than to do that kind of work ever again.

One summer I worked on a road crew for the South Carolina Highway Department and I'm proud to say that I drove quite a few stakes to help build I-20. That was a cushy job. When the bosses found out that I could type, they put me in the office to type reports, which I didn't particularly like.

I really enjoyed working in the field better. We could go fishing in a nearby water hole during our lunch breaks and someone was always horsing around with one prank or another.

A buddy of mine, Milton Corley, and I were in the SCHD van one day when another guy pitched a cherry bomb into the back of the van. Turns out it was just a smoker, but we couldn't bail quickly enough. That was the kind of stuff guys pulled all the time.

It's amazing that I-20 ever got built with morons like me on the work crew. Every time I used to ride over to Augusta, GA from Lexington, SC and I hit a particularly bad dip in the road, I think about that smoke bomb. Makes me wish the guys had paid better attention to detail.

One of the most interesting jobs I had was that of a night jailer. You got meet a lot of bad guys and, unfortunately, you got to bear witness to a lot of heartbreak. When a guy beats his wife or abuses his kid you try in your mind's eye to understand just what makes a guy like that tick. Perhaps he too was abused as a child, or he drank too much, or life just dealt him a crappy hand. After about nine months of that kind of work, I quickly concluded that being a cop wasn't for me.

The job that was the most fun was tending bar. I really enjoyed being a "mixologist," a term my dad coined for the job. Mixing drinks correctly is an art. We made dozens of kinds of drinks from Singapore Slings to Whiskey Sours. My dad invented quite a few. One he named after himself- a "Mike Special," which was all booze- a shot of cherry flavored brandy and a shot of Southern Comfort.

As my children grew up, I would often tell them not to worry about what you're going to be when you grow up. It probably hasn't been invented yet. Have fun and take on any kind of work, but work. I'm proud to say I've never missed a day of work in my life- EVER. Even when I was hospitalized, I sat in the room typing e-mails on my laptop. Have fun… you're just passing through.