Shortly before my 19th birthday, I began my second co-op work quarter (and its concomitant daily grind). The start time for the engineering staff at American Cyanamid was 7:15am, and my commute was not a short one: every morning I drove 28 miles, starting in New Orleans East and ending up across the Mississippi River, just shy of the St. Charles Parish line. I would shower before going to bed, wake at 6:30am, don a short-sleeve button-up shirt, jeans, and steel-toe loafers, and be out the door in less than ten minutes.
As I drove the interstate to Clearview Parkway and continued to River Road, I listened to NPR's Morning Edition and cross-referenced my progress with the show's regimented programming clock, to gauge whether I was on-target for a timely arrival. The means to cross the river was the Huey P. Long Bridge, a Depression-era structure with vehicle lanes flanking railroad tracks. The bridge has since been modernized, but back then each direction consisted of a pair of shoulderless car lanes only 9-feet wide - it was a point of personal pride that I could zoom across in our family's 1983 Honda Accord without flinching.
My first work task of the day was always to retrieve some dot-matrix printouts from the chilly mainframe computer building (its warning signage: CAUTION, THIS ROOM IS PROTECTED BY HALON FIRE EXTINGUISHER SYSTEM). The printouts contained data about the past 24 hours of acrylonitrile production (the plant operated continuously, producing about a million pounds of the stuff per day). I then photocopied this "Acrylo Morning Report" and distributed it to the engineers (a couple of years into my tenure, on April Fool's Day I changed the title to the "Alonzo Mourning Report" - hiiiiilarious!). Once that task was done, I'd retreat to the building adjoining the engineers' and caffeinate via the two-liter bottle of Coke I kept in a full-size refrigerator next to my desk. A Hubig's pie completed my nutritious breakfast on days when I'd been able to squeeze in a stop at the Time Saver just downriver of the plant entrance.
Early in my co-op tenure, I was often alone in the building and had nothing to do. There were no cellphones to kill time with (and no internet to access, anyway), so my mischief-making found other means, such as the fancy labelmaker (it had a full-sized keyboard!). For example, upon finding an ancient, mostly-consumed jar of jelly in the refrigerator, I amused myself by labeling it "PAINFUL RECTAL ITCH" (it's a reference from an old SNL commercial parody); the mirth was long-lived, as the jar remained in the fridge for my whole co-op tenure. More productively, I was recognized as the expert operator of the Leteron machine, which die-cut vinyl letters for outdoor signage in the plant.
We were allotted only 30 minutes for lunch, so most people either brought food from home or ate in the company cafeteria (which had excellent fried catfish and gumbo on Fridays). The silver lining of the early start time and short lunch was that the work day was over at 3:45pm. On the way home I would stop at Elmwood Fitness Center (it offered a discount for Cyanamid employees) and run laps on the indoor track. Once a week I would play basketball at Gernon Brown gym with a group of older guys, including my Dad's cousin Paul.
For the most part, my social life was the same as it was in high school - I lived at home with my parents and brother and didn't go out at night or on the weekends. On Saturdays I'd watch the preceding week's worth of Late Night With David Letterman and Later With Bob Costas that I'd recorded on VHS.