While digging through the Box of Memories the other day, I found some of my badges.

Badges are pretty simple: identification.  Most people see badges at stores.  Others may see badges on police officers.  Some organizations use them because they really don’t know all their people.  Meetings will use them as a means of identifying nearly complete strangers.

I’ve had a handful of badges over the years, and most of them ended up inside the Box of Memories.  I took some pictures of a few I could share with you on the blog.

I worked at an Ace Hardware in Raleigh for five years.  I had numerous name badges during that time, but the first badge they handed me felt like the size of a billboard.  The picture, as I see it on my screen, it’s too far off from reality in size.  I hated these badges, but wore it because there was nothing else at the time (and I hadn’t moved up to management yet, when I would sneak in some new badges over the years).

And speaking of new badges, this was one that made so much more sense.  It was half the size, and we didn’t have to use a label maker or sacrifice our stock of vinyl letters to put names on it.  Plus, it didn’t get caught on everything around the store.

This was always an interesting one.  At our service counter (where we did BIG business in key cutting and accessories), we had a display of wooden keychains with the abbreviations of local schools and universities.  We also could request specially-made tags for customer who wanted their cutesy name on a wooden stick attached to their car key.  One day, I was talking with the guy who made them and asked him if he’d ever tried doing a name badge.  One of the owners got in on the conversation and thought it was a good idea, and pretty soon we started using our local woodsmith to make simple name badges for us.  They worked much better than previous badges, and were relatively tiny compared to the first ones.  The only thing that bested this name tag was eventually having our Ace Hardware vests embroidered with our names on it.  Now THAT was… well, something.

After leaving Ace Hardware, I went to work for a company in the lumber and hardware business.  I’d taken a promotion in doing so, but at the same time joined up with a more… casual company.  We never once had name tags, but I’d had one made for myself.  I know I have it, but couldn’t find it in time to take pictures.  I took it out to display it with my branded model car collection (another post), and it’s probably sitting on display in my office right now.

In 2001, they opened a Papa Johns in the town I was living in.  That might seem like a small deal for some, but for me that was huge.  Papa Johns was still growing in North Carolina at that time.  It used to be that the nearest location was across from North Carolina State University, which was NOT close to either my house or my parent’s house.  When they put one in Knightdale, NC, I was overjoyed.  So much so that I decided to make some extra money at night delivering pizzas.  I wasn’t the only one with a day job jerking pizzas at night, as there were a few “older” drivers working with me.  Those of us who weren’t still in high school or college were given last names on our badges.  Some coworkers even called me Mr. Palmatier, along with the other “oldies.”  I was 24, but seeing as how I had a day job, house, wife and kid, they put me in the same group.  I enjoyed my time delivering, which was brief.  I could listen to AM talk radio (Clark Howard was on at night), get paid to drive the car, make a few bucks, and go home.  The down side was having a crappy open-ended schedule.  I didn’t want to work past 10PM, because I had to wake up early for work.  I was constantly fighting the manager over schedules.  I was consistently stuck as the only driver after 10, with a manager begging me to stay a little later to cover.  The delivery zone was about 40 miles across and 30 miles up and down, a lot of it in more rural areas.  And the worst of it was having to drive in a bad snow storm in 2002 where I almost ended up not making it back to the restaurant, only to be berated for taking so long.  When I quit, it was by fax.  I didn’t care to go in any more, and I didn’t want to call the manager, only to be talked into one more run.

After moving from North Carolina to Utah, I got a job at the local college (now a university).  I loved this job more than anything else I’ve done over the years.  I was around students, teachers, professionals, planners, marketing managers, deans, computer geeks, graphic designers, and tons of student from 9 to 90 years old.  It was a lot of fun.  I also worked for other departments under the “Continuing Education” school, as needed, and had some makeshift badges from those situations.  In time, someone thought it made sense for all of us to have real badges with the overarching school rather than the individual departments, and so I was given this badge.  I could blog about this job all night long.  I was sad to leave it.  I needed to make more money to buy a house, and more importantly, I had my second kid on the way and had ZERO insurance.  After I left, everything changed.  Maybe it was for the best, as it would have killed me inside to watch things slip away and change.

I won’t be posting a badge from my current job.  I have several.  Most just have my first name.  I have a few with my name and “Manager” underneath it.  I don’t blog about my current employer, so I’ll have to pop open the Box of Memories later on, who knows how long from now.

Instead, let’s cover some non-work badges, too.

Between 1995 and 1998, during my heyday with amateur radio, I was very interested in being involved with the local ham radio club, the Raleigh Amateur Radio Society, or RARS.  I was at the RARS Hamfest (like a radio-related flea market / product show on electronic meth with a dose of geekness for good measure) one year, and decided to get this badge.  The KF4EZX was my original amateur radio call sign, issued by the FCC, in 1995.  The badge you see is actually a mess up - the E in Eric was screwed up by the engraving machine, so the guy made a good one and gave me this extra for the office (or ham shack, as it were).  Not long after getting this badge, I decided I’d had enough of trying to make my way into this organization.  It was a “good ol boys club,” of sorts, and if you weren’t in it 100% you weren’t in it at all.  So I stopped associating myself with RARS and moved on to other groups, or simply kept things open to all people on the radio.

After giving up on RARS, I dived into the world of radio message networks.  Basically, imagine a telegram type of message sent over the radio to anywhere in the world, free of charge.  I had been the net operator one or two nights a week for a while, which was a pretty simple gig - get on the radio at 9PM, use a script to set up a small net of people on the same frequency all at once, see if we had any messages to send out or receive, take care of them if there were any, or shut things down if there wasn’t.  I’d been present for years, acting as a net operator for a year, when the net manager - the person in charge of that one particular net - decided to hang up his microphone.  He asked me to take over, telling me I’d been recommended by a few people to take the job (unpaid, mind you).  That was when I was allowed to get this badge as part of my official capacity as net manager.

The only problem was, people started flaking out on me, and I found myself calling the net almost every night.  Richard had been involved for a time, but couldn’t continue at one point.  I couldn’t get people to send me any reports (as was required), so I got pooh-poohed when I had little to report to my higher ups.  In fact, it was usually my own information, not including anyone else’s.  Doing it five or six days a week, I found myself burned out.  I abandoned it.  It looked bad, but with no one to take over for me, I had little choice.

I’m sure those who took over think I did a terrible job.  I see them online now, all organized and proud of what they’ve done to revitalize the net.  I’m sure it still gets next to nothing in messages, especially ten years later with email and texting taking over the non-ham world.

So that concludes the badges I had to share from the Box of Memories.  It might seem weird of me for keeping them, but if you’ve read me more than a few times, you know that each item I save has a slew of memories attached to it.  By sharing it with you, I’m also recording it for later.  Perhaps, some time from now, I won’t remember these things.  But now, I have them forever etched into the Internet.

And back into the box they go.

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