It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XI

On October 19, 1985, I was wrapping up my first partial week in the Twin Cities, after moving here on Tuesday the 15th.

It had been a long, long week.

• After spending Wednesday trolling through want ads for both roommates and jobs, I had a couple of bites. Thursday was a big day!
• You should be getting the impression by this point in the series that I was pretty much straight off the turnip truck. At no time was this more evident than my first Thursday in the Twins, the 18th. I had to get from Burnsville, in the far south 'burbs of Minneapolis, to the northeast end of Roseville, a north suburb of Saint Paul. And I had to be there by 8AM. I maneuvered out onto Cedar Avenue, and drove north to 494...

• ...and instantly felt like Jed Clampett going out on the 405 for the first time. People were barrelling along at 70 miles per hour, practically bumper to bumper (by my bucolic rural experience); I hit my target heart rate by the time I got to Portland Avenue, then doubled it...

• ...just in time to run smack into my first traffic jam. Almost literally I was trying to find a place to merge into the center lane, and turned my head to see a river of red brake lights around Diamond Lake Road. I had to slam on my brakes and shimmy into the breakdown lane, probably two feet behind the car in front of me. I broke into a cold sweat.
• I'd left plenty of time to get to Roseville, though - which is a good thing, because my habit of always, always getting lost in the 'burbs, which had started on Tuesday, was already firmly established. Oh, I got to Highway 36 and made the turn toward east Roseville just fine - but I didn't notice until I was even with the lane that "Rice Street" was the same as the highway number I was looking for. I had to cloverleaf around...
• ...and come back to my first "group interview". It was with a financial services company, for an all-commission telephone sales job. Even right off the turnip truck, the job screemed "scam" to me, and the "interviewer" (an early-thirtysomething who fairly screamed "snake oil" - let's call him "Mr. Oily") seemed like a used-car salesman who'd just gotten paroled for fraud. There were 24 of us in the room. At the end of a 45 minute presentation about the company, Mr. Oily asked everyone to write down a number between 1 and 10, with 10 being very interested in the company and 1 being not so much. I hedged on the number. "Everyone who wrote a six or less, you're free to go", he said with an air of almost spiteful finality. About half of the room got up, seemed confused, and walked out the door past Mr. Oily's almost-angry glare. "Now, for the rest of you...", he continued, and talked for another hour about the gig. I figured I'd have written a "3" before, but my curiosity got the better of me - and what little common sense I had at that time of my life drove the number down to a negative 10. I slipped out of the building during a break, feeling vaguely guilty about walking away from a potential job.
• I next drove to an appointment with someone in the "Roommates" column in the Strib. It was for a house on 33rd and Colfax, deep in the heart of what later became Minneapolis' crack alley. On the way there, I noticed that it was just south of "Little Tin Soldier". Now, for those of us who grew up playing Avalon Hill wargames in North Dakota, "Tin Soldier" was legendary; a store that sold games, and actually had tables where you could find other people to play the games with!. Jeeeeeeez. How perfect! I made a mental note to return after I saw the place...
• ...to which I got, right on time. It was a nice place, a four-bedroom house with three other twenty-something guys. I thought it was perfect - but they seemed to grow disinterested when I told 'em I didn't have a job yet. Mental note to self...
• ...and then, off to Tin Soldier, where I killed a happy couple of hours, in hog heaven, awash in military history books, games, miniatures - I felt like a kid in candyland. Friday morning - a day of job hunting and phone calls. I landed another interview for Monday!