The other night at the dinner table, our teenage son told us that school is not like when we went to school, and that we just weren’t able to understand the kind of pressures they were under today. I’ve heard this story from almost every kid in the last year of how hard their lives are, how much harder they have to work than we do, and they would change their lives with us in a heartbeat.

Do you want to exchange places? With me? Oh you little fools, you have no idea. If you want to know what life is like as an adult, if you want to know about stress, hard work and how much pain your body is really capable of handling, let me tell you about my life and let’s see if you still want to trade:

I went to school in a time before society became so PC and indulgent that they let kids sleep in class. If ~I~ had fallen asleep, or even tried to, it would have been in the office with me. Talking to the teachers? Better put on the padded jeans because they still practiced corporal punishment when I was in elementary school, and they hit HARD.

Our generation was at the forefront of the drug problem in schools, and it was our generation that laughed at natural things like marijuana and started cooking up some really nasty synthetic stuff. To this day, it still amazes me that I made it almost to the end of high school before I was sucked into that crowd because it was all around me, everywhere.

I spent 2 years in high school pretty much taking life out of me every day. There really is no form of physical or mental humiliation that I haven’t suffered during those two years, and that fact alone is largely responsible for my really long fuse when it comes to containing my anger and extreme disrespect for anyone I feel they you have to dress, act and be like everyone else.

I’ve learned that it takes guts to stand out and be different, and very few people have that.

I started working at 15. (Actually around 13, if you count the yards mowed from time to time.) They didn’t give me a huge allowance. I didn’t expect my parents to pay for every little thing I wanted. They couldn’t afford it, and even if they could, they wouldn’t. My parents wanted me to learn to respect what it took to earn a dollar and feel the satisfaction of spending it well. This is one of the lessons I am most grateful for in my life: I have earned everything I have and I am proud of it.

If I wanted something, I had to work for it and get it myself. I wanted a car and a good guitar, so I cleaned bathrooms and filled store shelves until I paid for them myself. And to this day, I still have the guitar.

Since that first job, I have spent 18 years working non-stop. No summer break, no winter, no spring break. When I wasn’t at school, I was working. When I graduated high school, I landed my first full-time position in a week and a half, digging trenches and big, stinking swampy waterholes, here in Florida, in the hottest part of summer.

That pretty much set the tone for what my working career was like until I hit 30: one long, uninterrupted string of horrible, disgusting jobs. If the job wasn’t physically horrible (like when I came down with chemical-induced pneumonia in New York from inhaling acid fumes all day in an unventilated facility), it was mental torture.

But, I had to work. You don’t work, you don’t eat. I was never more than a week away from losing everything. So if he was sick, he worked. If there was extra time, I took it. Just when I finally started catching up, I got married.

Let me put on record that up to this point, I thought I had conquered it all. Physically, mentally, he had it covered. I felt like life could throw anything at me, and I could handle it because I had already seen the worst.

You have no idea what real life is like until you have kids. Neither.

Suddenly, it’s not just me that I carry with me, but my wife and children. Before, if I found myself in a horrible job, I could just quit.

I discovered in those early years in New York that I can feed myself for an entire week on a $0.88 pack of hot dogs (on sale due to expiration date) and a $0.50 pack of fresh hot dog buns. I didn’t do this for fun; After paying the rent, there were countless weeks where I had less than $20 to live on, and more than half of that I needed for the train and bus so I could get to work. (Did I hear you say “What about a car?” If your grocery budget for the week is about $7, you can’t afford a car. Period.)

But starving (I was 152 drenched back then, and I’m 6′ tall) and doing without me, teaching me that I COULD do without, if I had to. So if the job was bad enough, I could leave. But with a family, you can’t do that. Children are expensive and do not understand the concept of rationing food when there is no more. When you have a bunch of other people depending on you for their survival, suddenly your options change.

When you find yourself working a horrible job with a boss who hates you, and you know, you KNOW he’s just looking for an excuse to fire you, but you need that money, so hang in there, man, hang in there. Hold on, walk away, whatever you have to do, but you do the work because you have a family. There is no going back on that responsibility.

When I couldn’t get overtime, I worked a second job. Anything he could get for money. Yes, I packed groceries at Publix. I worked for the Police Benevolent Society, asking for donations. I sold vinyl siding over the phone. I did what I have to do.

After many years of this, constantly working to keep the lights on and food on the table, I decided to go to college so I could get a better paying job.

Once again, I thought I had seen the worst that life could throw at me. I can juggle, baby, I can juggle. Throw it away, I can handle it. Lesson: never say “It can’t get any worse than this…” It can, and it will.

I found myself working 50 hour weeks (remember, I still needed the overtime just to pay the bills) as a mechanic in a stifling factory with no air conditioning, going to school 1/2 the time (if less than 1/2 time, then you don’t qualify for a student loan. I had to keep that.), doing hours of intense tasks and still doing what I can around the house. I got, if I was lucky, 3-4 hours of sleep.

I did it for 4 and a half years.

Now I’m finally at the point where I’m making decent money, but like everything else, that’s relative. Everything is so much more expensive nowadays, teenagers are ~horribly~ expensive (if you don’t believe it, you’ve never paid for a 14-year-old girl’s shopping trip, or a 16-year-old boy’s car insurance), and Even now, I manage.

Today, I get up at 4 am and work a 10 hour day. I don’t have summer, winter or spring vacation yet. I haven’t had those since I was 16 years old.

I have vacation time, but I almost always use it to do work around the house (as I will with my vacation this month). I’ve had a total of 4 vacations (each only a week long) that I can remember in my entire adult life, where I actually WENT ON VACATION and didn’t work.

I come home, and my wife and I make dinner. We clean up after dinner, pick up trash (teenagers think they’re adults, but really they’re just whiny, demanding 8-year-olds with bigger bodies) around the house, do the accounts, and run errands.

If we’re lucky, we might have an hour to relax and do nothing for anyone else.

Weekends are more work: shopping, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms, and the hundred other chores that make up running a home.

So kids, that’s my story. Maybe that will help you understand why I laugh and say “You have no idea!” when you talk about how hard life is right now. One day you will understand the frustration of trying to explain this to your own teenager who thinks he already understands everything. It’s like trying to explain nuclear fission to a 5-year-old: they just aren’t equipped to understand it yet.

So yeah, I’ll change all this. I’ll be happy to sleep until 6:30, go to school where I can sleep a little longer at my desk without fear of repercussions. I’ll be coming home after spending only 7 1/2 hours at school and playing video games or hanging out with my friends all day until it’s time to go back to sleep. I’ll let you feed me and clean me up and take care of the masses I leave behind. Plus, you’ll take me wherever I want to go, and I don’t even have to pay for it. And the best part is, I don’t even have to thank you for any of it. After all, you owe me.

So yeah… I’ll trade lives with you. Where do I sign???