(Rumor had it that it was to discourage drug deals and gang activity on the campus, but I never got a clear answer.) At one point, after a student was involved in a serious incident that had been facilitated by the use of a smuggled cell phone, the center director announced that anyone else caught with a cell phone on the campus would face automatic termination.Ī student approached me saying, “Hey, look. For security reasons, Job Corps had a very strict policy against possessing cell phones or pagers. Now, again, this was in the year 2000, and cell phones were not as widespread as they are today. It came to the point where I once ended up going to management and asking them to just give me a bus ticket back home if they weren’t going to move me to another room. I probably shouldn’t need to go into detail about how he made it a hobby to make life absolutely unbearable for me. Complaints about him were usually addressed with a “knock it off” talk and nothing further.Īs my luck had it, this goon ended up being assigned to my dorm room.

His antics would include snatching food out of other students’ hands and eating it, wrestling smaller students around while ignoring their shouts to get off of them, taunting students relentlessly even when no one was responding to him, and in one instance, calling a student’s mother and telling her about a very personal and embarrassing incident that had happened to him.

Aside from sleeping in class, he found amusement in bullying other students who generally could not fight back due to his massive 300-pound size. One of the students there made it more than obvious that he was simply there for the free ride. In 2000, I enrolled in a government-funded residential vocational training program called Job Corps geared toward helping at-risk teens and young adults learn trade skills and find lucrative employment.

Wellbet