White Oak

I got a job at White Oak Baptist Conference Center. My title was "whatever". I did everything there--setting up for conferences; audio and video; washing dishes; serving food; running the canteen; and whatever else came up. It was a year-round center, but the summer months were busier. During the rest of the year, I did most of the things by myself, or I had a helper. During the summer, there were about 6 or 7 other kids, mostly college-age, who helped me. It was a very stressful job, but we tried to keep it as light as possible. We invented an 18-hole golf course inside the administration building using bats and whiffle balls. We went out into a cow pasture one night (the center is in the country), and tried to shoot trays wrapped in tin foil into the air to take pictures of them and sell them as UFO's. We used makeshift cannons. Unfortunately, the noise woke up the cows, and we had to leave. One night, we went over to a girl's house who worked there and recreated the movie "The Exorcist" in her house. She was cooking a pig. It was kind of bloody, but harmless fun. I stayed in that job for almost three years, or until just after my 30th birthday. The hours were long, and sometimes tempers were short. I had two meetings going on in the same building. A man wanted to use a microphone in his room, but the sound bled down to a choir practicing 3 rooms away. So, the choir asked me to unplug the speaker's mike. He got mad and complained. It was time for my job to be "phased out".