"Eddings, David - Regina's Song V2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

into a semiserious student during my last two years at
school, and now I didn't know what to do with myself.
The door factory only filled forty hours a week, and my
dad had our television set permanently locked on the
sports channels. I've always been fairly certain that the
world won't come to an end if the Seattle Seahawks
don't make it into the Super Bowl. I took to reading to fill
up the empty hours, and by the summer of 1990, I'd
plowed my way through a sizable chunk of the Everett
Public Library.
Just for kicks, I took an evening course at the local
community college in the autumn quarter of that year,
and I aced it. I was a little surprised at how easy it'd
been.
I took another course during the winter quarter, and
that one was even easier.
I latched on to a steady girlfriend at the community
college that winter, and we both skipped the spring
quarter. We broke up that summer, though, and I
started taking courses as a sort of hobby. I didn't really
have any kind of academic goal; you might just say I
was majoring in everything.
Wouldn't Everything 101 be an interesting course title?
That went on for a couple years, and by then I'd
racked up a fairly impressive number of credit hours. My
dad didn't say anything about my snooping around the
edges of the world of learning, but he was keeping track
of my progress.
There was another strong odor of collusion about what
happened in late November of 1992. We'd been invited
to the Greenleafs' for Thanksgiving dinner, and after
we'd all eaten too much, my dad and the boss got
involved in a probably well-rehearsed discussion of an
ongoing problem at the door factory. There were only
four saws, and orders were starting to back up because
each saw could only cut so much door stock in eight
hours. This meant that the boss had to pay a lot of
overtime, which was great for the sawyers right at first,
but after it got to be a habit, there was a lot of grumbling
about ten- or twelve-hour days. The solution was fairly
simple. It's called swing shift. One sawyer would have to
work from four in the afternoon until half past midnight.
There'd now be five sawyers instead of four, and the
boss wouldn't have to buy a new saw or pay overtime.
Guess who got elected for swing shift. And guess
who'd now have all kinds of free time during the normal
daytime hours at Everett Community College. And
guess who was coerced into taking a full course load.
And guess who was the only one in the room who didn't
know this was coming. You guessed 'er, Chester.