More than once, I’ve­ been drawn into a conversation among friends and family about who had the worst job. To the extent this is a competition, I always win because when I was 19, I spent a summer working at a port-a-potty place.

It was actually a pretty great job – I wasn’t dealing with used port-a-potties, my job was to hang out in a warehouse all day riveting together new port-a-potties that were shipped to the business. They came flat-packed in boxes and I had to put them together with a rivet gun. (I also had to put vinyl signs on all the port-a-potties that said the name of the company and their slogan, “We’re #1 and #2.”) This was the mid-’90s and I was being paid $12 an hour, which was about two or three times the minimum wage, and you better believe I was happy to have that job.

Of course, the nature of my job all changed my final day working there, when the owner of the company, whom I liked a great deal, came up to me and asked a favor. It’s a long story, but there were about 12 portable toilets that had been sitting on the back of the lot for days. These were fancy portable toilets that had sinks, and the users of the toilets had thrown the paper towels they used to dry their hands into the toilet tanks. It turned out the paper towels were so thick they were clogging the suction hoses normally used to clean out the toilets. Unable to be cleaned, the toilets were just sitting there baking in the August sun for a week or so, and pretty soon you could smell them from the road out front.