"Don't end up like me"

From the time I was a little kid, my dad always told me not to end up like him.

See - he worked in a factory. He was able to make about $100k a year for a while, but that came from working 12/7 for a long time. His commute was nearly an hour, as he wanted us to grow up in the country and not the city. So he was basically working 14 hours a day for years. There was a 2 year stretch where he didn't have a single day off. He could have had the holidays, but who'd turn down triple time on Christmas?

And he didn't have to work that hard, obviously, but he did. He wanted to make sure that we had things. He wanted to make sure that he could buy me computers and stuff (in the early 80s) because he figured that that was the future, and he figured that if I had them to play with I'd be good with them for the rest of my life. I guess that turned out to be true.

He always made sure that we had "things" and could do things. I was involved in nearly every activity possible in school and out, and for a while he even took a Karate class with me. My favorite memory of that was him sending a guy to the hospital in a tournament. Until recently, I'm positive that my dad really could have kicked the asses of virtually any other dad out there (barring professional fighters).

His life is the definition of sacrificing for others, and he gave the bulk of it to provide enough money for his family to have what they otherwise could not.

And I guess this brings me to my favorite memory of my father. He sat me down a few years ago and asked if I remembered him telling me not to end up like him. I obviously said yes, since it was a common message that he repeated. He asked if I knew what he meant. Yeah, working in a factory sucks.

"Wrong. Don't get married."